Seeing Red In Colorado

I’m always wary of speaking too soon, but it seems that a lesson is being taught in Colorado right now, and the result will be a strong showing for the GOP. That lesson? Drop “the culture war.”

For years now, Colorado has been drifting further and further into Democratic ranks. Frankly, it’s become a blue state. The reason for this is a combination of an influx of Californians who are morons and vote for the moron party and the fact the GOP excels at turning off voters. How has the GOP done this? By turning into a cult.

Look, when I grew up out here, Colorado was very conservative in the sense that Reagan was conservative. Coloradans believed in small government, limited regulation and a right to be left alone. But at the same time, they favored strong defense and law and order. In terms of values, they liked traditional values but with a live and let live flavor which meant you didn’t impose them on others. Essentially, we wanted to be left alone so long as we didn’t bother other people or cause problems. We wanted to be safe, but free. We trusted business, but we also trusted a small, focused government to regulate them. And we didn’t want to control our neighbors. This was the atmosphere in Colorado.

In the 1990s, things began to change. For whatever reason, we suddenly got an influx of Religious Right groups, like Focus on the Family who still have headquarters here. These people quickly took over the GOP and changed it. Suddenly, the live and let live attitude was replaced with a paranoia that wanted the government to make sure nothing untoward was happening in the neighbor’s bedroom. Economics vanished from the Colorado GOP agenda. People fled the party in droves. Even in Colorado Springs, which sits in the most conservative county in the country, Democrats suddenly became competitive for city council because people couldn’t stomach the obsession with gays and abortion and forcing prayer on public schools. They were worried instead about little things like roads and taxes.

In addition to this problem, the GOP also managed to pick up some fringers like Tom Tancredo whose only issue was his visceral hatred of Mexicans... and Republicans who disagreed with him.

The result was a GOP that became irrelevant and was becoming less relevant every year.

Suddenly, however, it looks like the GOP will win a Senate seat again as Cory Gardner appears ready to defeat Democratic marshmallow Mark Udall. The Denver Post even endorsed Gardener this last weekend. The GOP looks set to win the governorship too. And it looks like they will hold onto a House seat the Democrats had targeted; the Democrats announced this weekend they are cancelling $1 million in ads to help former state House speaker Mark Romanov try to defeat incumbent Republican Mike Coffman. That is a sure sign they think the race can no longer be won.

So what happened? Well, each of these Republicans has abandoned the whole insane culture war stuff. Both Coffman and Gardner have endorsed allowing over-the-counter sales of birth control, i.e. “the pill.” The reasons for this are twofold. First, as a policy matter, easier access to birth control has demonstrated that it will lead to a lower rate of unwanted pregnancies, which means fewer abortions. So this really can be seen as a way to reduce abortions. Secondly, this immunizes the GOP candidate from attacks that he wants to ban birth control. In fact, the reason the Post endorsed Gardner was that Udall has been blasting him with only one issue: CORY GARDNER WANTS TO BAN BIRTH CONTROL!!, and the Post called this dishonest. And with Gardner not talking about abortion at all, his campaign has resonated.

Similarly, Coffman has embraced the idea of allowing the pill to be sold over the counter (this is a GOP idea which is spreading fast even as it brings out calls of “RINO” as Bobby Jindal discovered when he became the first to try it) and he’s renounced his former support of the “personhood” amendment, which would ban abortion and do some very bad things.

Our gubernatorial candidate, Bob Beauprez, has run as a moderate while pounding away on Democratic Governor Hickenlooper’s signing of extremist anti-gun rights bills and some anti-capital punishment stuff. Hickenlooper is generally a moderate, but he stuck his neck out on those issues and now he’s paying for it. And Beauprez can capitalize on this because he’s focused on that rather than ridding the state of gays and abortion doctors.

This is an amazing turn around for the moribund Colorado GOP. And the message is clear: the public will support GOP candidates when they come across as normal and not fringey. And fringey doesn’t even mean moderate, it just means not being obsessed and showing priorities that align with those of the public. Indeed, neither Gardner nor Coffman is pro-abortion. They just don’t talk about the issue. And they don’t lump it in with birth control as Rick Santorum does, and they don’t foam at the mouth about how evil it is and they don’t cry about it in debates.

So the moral is that you can have religious conservative values or libertarian conservative values or whatever conservative values, just so long as you don’t foam at the mouth about them and so long as you don’t oppose things the public will never surrender (like a right to birth control). Win the public on the public’s terms and save the fringy stuff for later once you’ve won the public’s trust to see more of your agenda put into place.

That is what has saved Colorado from being a totally blue state this cycle. That can help the GOP fix a lot of its problems nationwide.

Thoughts?