The Democrats' New Western Stars

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In some ways the rise of the Democratic Party in the Rockies is a revival. The dominant chord of Western politics has usually been a taciturn Marlboro Man conservatism, but a history of rollicking working-class populism has been a persistent theme. The West was the birthplace of the Wobblies (International Workers of the World) in the late 19th century and the scene of some of the great unionizing battles of the early industrial age. The state capitol in Montana is filled with statues of famous Democrats. More recently, the Rocky Mountain states were equal partners with the South in the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council. The region was filled with creative, moderate Democratic Governors in the 1980s--people like Dick Lamm and Roy Romer in Colorado and Bruce Babbitt in Arizona. Colorado had two well-known Democratic Senators, Gary Hart and Tim Wirth, in the 1980s. There were legendary Democrats from the region like Arizona's Mo Udall and Colorado's Patricia Schroeder serving in Congress. In 1992 Bill Clinton won Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Montana--albeit with a hefty assist from Ross Perot, who peeled votes away from George H.W. Bush in fiscally conservative, socially libertarian Mountain states like Montana, where Perot received 26.2% of the vote, his best statewide result.

Then, in the 1990s, the Democratic wave crashed and Republicans regained control of the region. Part of it was disappointment with Clinton, whose presidency seemed a coastal combination of Ivy League intellectualizing and Hollywood glitz. Clinton's decidedly humid empathy, his lack of personal discipline, didn't seem very Western, either. The primacy of the national Democratic Party--the party that was weak on national defense but strong on racial preferences, gun control and trade unions--proved a significant drag on Rocky Mountain Democrats running for local office. And so did the excesses of the more extreme environmental groups. "The Democrats came to be identified with a top-down, centralized approach to open-space issues," says Dan Kemmis of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West. "There was the impression that they were just flat opposed to timber harvesting or oil and gas extraction. So you had the oil and timber workers--the party's working-class populist base--fleeing to the Republicans."

But the Republican Party in the Rockies has wasted its mandate in much the same manner as the congressional Republicans have in Washington--by catering to conservative religious and anti-immigration radicals, and by getting a little too cozy with the oil, gas and timber interests. "Issues like gay marriage and abortion are not on the cutting edge out here," says Kevin DeMenna, a Republican consultant in Arizona. "Building infrastructure, figuring out how to manage growth--those are cutting-edge issues. And Democrats like Janet Napolitano have just been a lot more pragmatic than the Republicans."