In the summer of 2003, at a Colorado Rockies event, Denver’s Coors Field was the site of a seemingly lopsided handshake. In hindsight, a torch was being passed. Republican Bill Owens, christened “America’s Best Governor” by National Review just before winning reelection the previous fall with a record 64 percent of the vote, shook hands for the first time with Jared Polis, a 28-year-old Boulder Democrat who had parlayed a dot-com startup exit into a seat on the Colorado Board of Education.
Owens was being discussed as a plausible future GOP presidential nominee. Beyond the governor’s mansion, Colorado Republicans controlled both statehouse chambers, five of seven U.S. House seats, and both U.S. Senate seats. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that Polis, then serving on a part-time, unpaid board, would ever be especially relevant. As a former party executive director reflected on the Owens era, “Nobody seriously thought Colorado was anything but a Republican-leaning state.”
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Two decades later, in a stunning inversion, Jared Polis would win his own 2022 gubernatorial reelection bid with nearly 60 percent of the vote and a record raw vote total. More impressive still, the governor’s mansion was far from the only prize that Democrats had seized. Polis’s victory was the exclamation point on a statewide rout years in the making. As chronicled in the niche political classic The Blueprint, Polis had, alongside committed megadonors dubbed the “Gang of Four,” poured his own fortune into organizing a methodical, multicycle march toward Democratic control of Colorado’s governorship, both statehouse chambers, five of eight U.S. House seats, both U.S. Senate seats, and, starting with Barack Obama in 2008, what would become a string of five straight victories for Democratic presidential nominees.
As its Colorado losses have mounted cycle after cycle, the national GOP can now barely be bothered to recruit candidates or even offer halfhearted endorsements. No Republican has won a high-profile statewide race since 2014. Colorado is considered lost terrain—California’s cousin.
But all is not well with Colorado Democrats, either. Fate’s wheel has turned on Polis. In summer 2026, the national political press declared another torch passing: the Blueprint generation of Democrats was getting devoured by its own left-wing young. A 29-year-old Democratic Socialist, Melat Kiros, won Bernie Sanders’s endorsement on her way to unseating 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in a U.S. House primary. DeGette had first won the seat before Kiros was born. In the primary to replace the term-limited Polis, Attorney General Phil Weiser overcame a massive spending and name-recognition deficit to defeat three-term U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. Even Senator John Hickenlooper, the popular former Denver mayor and two-term governor, underperformed, defeating his left-wing challenger by single digits.
For Polis, insult preceded injury. In May, the Colorado Democratic Party’s central committee formally censured him for commuting the sentence of MAGA-friendly election clerk Tina Peters. Barred from speaking at party events, Polis has turned, ironically, to Fox News to express concern about the rise of “anti-American” socialists in Colorado.
How did this happen? The conventional explanation is “Californication.” Beginning in the 2000s, college-educated professionals priced out of California, Illinois, and New York migrated to the Mountain West, a trend accelerated by the financial crisis and peaking during 2013–18. This liberal-trending demographic, the story goes, dragged Colorado leftward, through a purple phase and then into solid-blue territory. As the balance of power within the Democratic Party tips toward its socialist wing, the state will follow. In this telling, Polis built a machine around the demographic influx, the left flank is now staging a hostile takeover, and the Centennial State’s next governing party will be spelled D-S-A.
It’s a seductive narrative, flattering Beltway biases left and right, which find noisy struggle and lost causes glamorous. The real story is more complicated.
Understanding the story requires recognizing who Colorado’s decisive voters really are. The conventional narrative assumes that those who moved to Colorado during the 2010s were and will remain loyal Democrats—and unreconstructed liberals. That’s exaggerated. Texas was the third-largest source of Colorado’s new residents during that period, and it stands to reason that many of the migrants leaving blue states were fleeing misgovernance and high costs.
The activists who put Melat Kiros and the DSA over the top this past summer are concentrated in metro Denver, which, since 2020, has seen net outmigration to cheaper, more family-friendly collar counties. But while millennials debating New Left Review positions against New York Times editorials over IPAs in LoDo (Lower Downtown) certainly exist, they aren’t the decisive bloc in Colorado elections. That distinction belongs to a much larger, ideologically cross-pressured, suburban-exurban cohort, many of them former Denver or Boulder renters who have since made homes along the sprawling I-25 corridor of the Rocky Mountain Front Range.
Broadly speaking, they love the outdoors and favor conservation but feel little compunction about driving trucks and SUVs. They are not dogmatically hostile to government but favor lower taxes and are skeptical of regulatory overreach. They may not hold strict “family values” views, but they value family—they tend to get (and stay) married. They tend to be more secular than their parents but are uncomfortable with progressive moralism. They see themselves as socially conscious and pro-education, while also holding strong views on crime and school choice. Politically, most have become frustrated with both major parties. Increasingly, they are registering as “unaffiliated”—part of an accelerating national trend.
So the corrected narrative is this: with no overwhelming structural advantage in voter registration, Blueprint Democrats like Polis have, since the late 2000s, consistently outmaneuvered Republicans for control of Colorado’s growing, heterodox, and overwhelmingly unaffiliated political center of gravity. That political center should not be confused with centrism—this is a state where Hickenlooper publicly drank fracking fluid to demonstrate its safety and Polis rejected vaccine mandates. Republicans, meantime, have largely lost interest in adapting to compete for unaffiliateds, which helps explain why they have failed to notice that Colorado’s political center of gravity has, over the past decade, actually moved toward them.
Even as the Blueprint generation’s grip on the Democratic Party weakens, the electorate’s underlying rightward shift suggests that progressives will face a tougher hike than they anticipate. There will be no clean transfer of power. The costs of protracted Democratic infighting that pulls the party leftward are therefore underestimated. That could open a window for savvy, disciplined Republicans to pick off seats—and perhaps, in the process, piece together a blueprint of their own.
The Californication narrative doesn’t show up in Colorado’s voter rolls or in the state’s recent policy voting patterns. That myth has obscured a more painful reality: Republicans have simply been outplayed.
Colorado Democrats hold no decisive registration advantage. Unaffiliated voters now make up 51 percent of the electorate, up from 37 percent in 2016, a bloc larger than registered Democrats (25 percent) and Republicans (23 percent) combined. Only Alaska and Massachusetts have higher unaffiliated shares, but their partisan registrations are far more uneven, favoring Republicans roughly two-to-one in Alaska and Democrats three-to-one in Massachusetts.
Crucially, both Colorado parties have lost ground to unaffiliated voters at roughly equal rates. Republican registration peaked in 2012 and Democratic registration in 2020, while the unaffiliated bloc has grown nearly every year for two decades, tracking—indeed, leading—a national trend. Gallup’s latest data put unaffiliated voters nationally at 45 percent, up from 35 percent in 2000. Colorado is six points ahead of that figure and trails millennial and Gen-Z unaffiliated rates by just three and five points, respectively.
Combined with growing dissatisfaction with both parties, a key 2016 voting reform further incentivized nonalignment. Proposition 108, which took effect in 2018, allowed unaffiliated voters to cast a ballot in the party primary of their choice. This massive, unaffiliated bloc thus faces few procedural barriers to shifting loyalties. No perfect political market exists, but Colorado comes close.
Some, especially Republicans, might counter with the received wisdom about unaffiliated voters: most are disguised partisans, not true independents. What looks on paper like a competitive political market is largely a mirage. Bruce Keith et al.’s 1992 The Myth of the Independent Voter remains the landmark study underwriting this view, with recent Pew and Gallup surveys holding that roughly three-quarters of independents are reliable “leaners” with strong tendencies toward one party or the other.
That view may be outmoded. Two more recent studies, capturing reactions to the past decade’s political upheavals, suggest that unaffiliated voters hold genuinely heterodox views. As J. Michael Bitzer and his coauthors put it in a 2022 study of North Carolina, a state with semi-open primaries and unaffiliated registration rates similar to Colorado’s, this bloc is “growing and distinct” and increasingly “unmoored.” Eveline Dowling, Nathan Micatka, and Caroline Tolbert’s 2026 study, drawing on more than 7.5 million Catalist voter-file records, reached a similar conclusion.
Under this view, any sustained unaffiliated “lean” toward one party is best understood as an authentic response to external political events, not as an inherent disposition. But even accounting for Colorado unaffiliateds’ current partisan leanings, Democrats cannot boast any deep structural advantage. As of this past summer, Democrats and Democratic-leaning unaffiliateds total 42 percent, while Republicans and Republican leaners total 36.5 percent. Another 18.2 percent consistently split their tickets. Even if the aforementioned Keith-Pew-Gallup rule still holds, it fits Colorado poorly: it would predict that only about 12.75 percent—a quarter of the state’s 51 percent unaffiliated bloc—would split tickets.
Another useful comparison: among the ten most populous counties in California and New York, only three have a lower Democratic registration floor than Colorado’s most Democratic Top Ten county, Denver, at 39.4 percent. The data suggest that Colorado Democrats’ current Cook PVI of D+6 has been earned, not gifted by blue-state migration. El Paso, the state’s most populous county, is majority unaffiliated, with Republicans holding a 12-point registration advantage. Yet in recent elections, GOP candidates have failed to match that spread. Republicans cannot even turn out their own voters, much less notice that the unaffiliateds have signaled clear dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ agenda.
Colorado’s recent voting record on core policy questions suggests an intensifying rightward trend over the past decade. Even as Democrats have won offices, their preferred policies—especially progressive ones—have repeatedly been defeated in popular ballot initiatives.
In 2016, as Hillary Clinton carried the state by five points, voters rejected, by nearly an 80–20 margin, a Bernie Sanders–endorsed single-payer system, ColoradoCare, which would have been funded by a 10 percent state payroll tax. In 2018, when Polis won his first term as governor and Democrats flipped the state senate, Amendment 73’s tax increases for education were rejected 55–45, while Proposition 112’s oil-and-gas setbacks failed 57–43. The following year, Proposition CC, which would have let the state retain tax revenue above the cap imposed by Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), failed 54–46.
As the decade began, voters’ rejection of progressive policies shifted from containment to rollback. In 2020 and 2022, Coloradans voted twice to cut state income taxes, by margins of 58–42 and 65–35—the latter on the same ballot that reelected Polis by 19 points and Bennet by 15. Even as Democratic candidates’ margins were cresting, support for income-tax cuts rose seven points in two years. That trend is especially significant, given Colorado’s balanced-budget requirement. Without a realistic prospect of raising both the TABOR cap and tax revenues, any ambitious progressive agenda will be difficult to fund.
In 2024, Kamala Harris ran 3.5 points behind Joe Biden’s 2020 margin and a striking eight points behind Polis’s 2022 margin. Republicans showed signs of life: half of Colorado’s 64 counties shifted toward the GOP, including historically Democratic Pueblo County, which flipped outright. Adams County, an archetypal suburban-exurban swing county, moved three points rightward, helping Republican Gabe Evans narrowly flip the Eighth Congressional District. Four heavily Hispanic counties in the San Luis Valley also shifted between five and ten points toward Republicans.
The conservative shift was visible in ballot initiatives, particularly on crime. Proposition 128, requiring certain violent offenders to serve 85 percent of their sentences before parole eligibility, passed 63–37. Proposition 130, directing $350 million in existing state revenues toward law-enforcement hiring and training, passed 53–47. Amendment 80, which would have enshrined a right to school choice in the state constitution, fell short of the required 55 percent but still drew 48 percent support.
It’s against this more complex backdrop that Colorado’s summer 2026 Democratic primaries should be understood. Consider the contrast between Melat Kiros’s and Phil Weiser’s winning platforms. While mainstream coverage smoothed over their differences to fit a preferred Left–Tea Party narrative, their priorities barely intersected, largely because they appealed to such different Colorado electorates.
Kiros’s campaign was blunter, and thus more nationally legible. Endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, Bernie Sanders, and Justice Democrats, her message could have been deployed almost anywhere: “Establishment Democrats are beholden to the same billionaires who keep our prices high, burn our planet, and profit from a genocide. We can change that. It starts by changing who we send to Congress.” Declaring an end to the “any Democrat will do” era, Kiros emphasized Medicare for All, universal child and elder care, an arms embargo on Israel, and abolishing ICE. “We are winning from coast to coast, from every level of office,” she declared in her victory speech. “We are taking back our party and our country.” It’s an approach optimized for pool parties with left-wing influencer Hasan Piker and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, not for winning governing majorities in Colorado.
The message plays, however, in Colorado’s First Congressional District. Confined to metro Denver, it is a fortress-like D+29 seat that Democrats have held for more than half a century—territory that even Bill Owens at his peak couldn’t conquer. Nor is it a center of gravity for Colorado’s unaffiliated voters, many of whom have left Denver for the Front Range suburbs and exurbs.
Kiros won by exploiting low primary turnout against an aging, three-decade incumbent. As The Economist has outlined, the DSA playbook relies on attacking safe Democratic seats where primary turnout is often depressed, giving activist candidates a relative advantage. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her first primary with roughly 14 percent turnout; Zohran Mamdani won his with under 30 percent. Kiros’s coalition drew about 84,000 votes at roughly 40 percent turnout. By comparison, Colorado’s 2024 general election drew about 1.5 million unaffiliated ballots alone. The narrow DSA coalition seems unlikely to attract enough right-moving unaffiliateds to succeed in many other districts, much less statewide.
Phil Weiser, who had to win statewide, clearly understood this. Despite major disadvantages in name recognition and funding, he pulled off a convincing 57–43 gubernatorial-primary upset over U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. Most national coverage portrayed Weiser as a progressive who won by running to Bennet’s left. That interpretation strains under scrutiny. Weiser did emphasize his record challenging the Trump administration, contrasting it with Bennet’s relative restraint. But his policy platform was largely to Bennet’s right and, in some respects, to Polis’s.
On health care, neither candidate matched Kiros’s Medicare for All. Weiser ran to Bennet’s right here, too, rejecting his Medicaid public option for a more modest expansion of primary-care access. On climate, there was no Green New Deal: Weiser refused to endorse Bennet’s cap-and-invest proposal, saying, “I can’t get on board with something that’s this amorphous and uncertain.” On housing, he attacked Polis’s zoning mandates as too top-down, calling for a local opt-out to “give local governments some room and time to come along.” Polis’s approach, he argued, “just breeds more resentment.” Weiser instead emphasized faster permitting and cutting red tape, while promising to tackle “corporate landlord abuses [and] junk fees.” This looks more like an adaptation of the Blueprint approach than a break from it.
Properly understood, the main similarity between Kiros and Weiser is that both defeated longtime incumbents in a cycle when name recognition proved more liability than asset. Part of the Blueprint generation’s success lay in insulating Colorado politics from national Democratic tumult. That era is ending. Kiros and Weiser have already clashed over whether a 2025 Boulder firebombing should be labeled anti-Semitic, in turn splitting Colorado’s Democratic candidates, with some declining to endorse Kiros. Alongside Polis’s censure, this suggests that no amicable leftward transition is in the offing. Further national attention and money will follow Kiros’s breakthrough, strengthening the Boulder-Denver activist network to put leftward pressure on Weiser, who may find it harder than Polis to restrain progressives in the statehouse. Polis vetoed 12 bills during the 2026 session, including several left-wing measures opposed by law-enforcement or business interests. Colorado Democrats may now expend considerable energy fighting one another—while the state’s unaffiliated center of gravity moves elsewhere.
Recent GOP efforts to exclude unaffiliated voters from Republican primaries by reversing Proposition 108 are understandable, but they distract from the opportunity that the current system presents. All four current Republican U.S. House members have opposed these efforts. They know firsthand that, even in a traditionally Republican district like CO-05, centered on Colorado Springs, the solid GOP floor is only 28 percent. The math in every district, let alone statewide, requires winning substantial numbers of unaffiliated voters. Republicans will produce competitive general-election candidates only if their primaries are structured to confront that reality.
Actively courting unaffiliated voters into GOP primaries would also increase the relative weight of activists in Democratic primaries, potentially pushing Democratic nominees leftward and making them less competitive in November.
This does not mean, however, that Republicans can win simply by replaying Bill Owens’s greatest hits. These are different times, and Democratic infighting is no guarantee of Republican success. But the West has always been where Americans, whatever their history, could begin anew. That Colorado Republicans have spent two decades wandering the wilderness matters little for what they do next. The frontier may be opening again. They need to get quicker on the draw.
