Stephen Fenberg is the executive director of New Era Colorado. LaNette Diaz is the organizing director of Forward Montana. Both organizations are homegrown outfits dedicated to increasing progressive youth involvement in politics.
Excited chatter about progressive gains in the Rocky Mountain West is quite possibly at an all-time high. Democrats across the country are turning to the West for hope for the future and lessons to win. While pundits debate whether the results are a long-term trend or a one-time fluke, the truth is that the West is turning blue because a new generation of voters are getting involved.
These voters—our generation—are repainting the West. And they’re painting it deep blue.
Montana: Young voters turned out in force, comprising 17 percent of the electorate—compared to just 13 percent nationwide—and broke for Senator-elect Jon Tester by 12 percent. In 2004, they made up more than one-fifth of the electorate and supported Brian Schweitzer by 11 percent.
Colorado: Colorado youth went for Kerry over Bush 51 to 47 percent in 2004. Young voters were also the best age group for Senator Ken Salazar, who first won election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. Exit polls are not available for 2006, but we can only guess that Governor-elect Bill Ritter and expanded Democratic majorities in the statehouse benefited from a growing youth vote.
Wyoming: Wyoming is blood red, but if young voters had their way, Democrat Gary Trauner would be representing the state in the U.S. Congress. Young voters went for Trauner by an astounding 16 percent.
Arizona: While losing the election by 15 percent, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jim Pederson won young voters by 15 percent—outperforming his overall results by 30 points among young voters.
New Mexico: Governor Bill Richardson saw his strongest re-elect margins come from young voters.
Idaho: No exit polls in 2006, but all indications are that the state’s surprisingly strong Democratic showing in a governor’s race and U.S. House race—Idaho is even more Republican than Wyoming—came again from a groundswell of youth support.
A generation ago, the sagebrush rebellion tore across the Rocky Mountain West, leaving the Democratic Party in the region dying and gasping for breath. As recently as six years ago, Democrats held none of the region’s governorships. Now, in a solid chain reaching from Mexico to Canada, every Rocky Mountain state has at least one senior official—a governor or senator—from the Democratic Party (the exceptions in the region being Idaho and Utah).
This ascendance has tracked almost identically with the rise of the Millennial Generation as voting age citizens. And it’s not surprising because on issue after issue, young Westerners appear to be more reliably progressive than their predecessors.
In Montana, a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage found its strongest support among young voters. When Arizona became the first state in the union this year to reject a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, it occurred because of the strength of youth opposition. Voters narrowly defeated the measure by 2 percent, but more than 20 percent of young voters opposed it.
The Rocky Mountain West is going to be one of the key battlegrounds in American politics in the foreseeable future. In 2008, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada could very well decide the presidency. A crucial U.S. Senate seat is up for grabs in Colorado. Other important races—from the top-of-the-ticket to the bottom-of-the-ballot—will be determined across the region.
But in order to win these crucial seats and electoral votes, progressives will have to make sure they appeal to their base of young voters and mobilize youth like they never have before. Despite Kerry’s relative strength among Colorado’s youth, he still underperformed compared to the homegrown Ken Salazar.
To reach out to this crowd, smart Democrats would do a few things:
Warm Up the Crowd by Talking Climate Change and Energy: Westerners who see raging forest fires every summer and shorter skiing seasons every winter are attuned to the issue of climate change. Even Republicans in the region have acknowledged the threat of global warming. Want to win the support and votes of young Westerners? Take on the biggest environmental issue of the 21st century and propose a visionary energy policy to tackle it.
Maintain a Little Libertarian Sensibility: It’s not surprising that the first state in the union to reject a same-sex marriage ban would be a Western state. The live-and-let-live impulse in the West is long held and deeply felt. Medicinal marijuana has also polled extremely well in this “red” territory.
Not Just Jobs, Ones That Pay Well: Economic populism has delivered major benefits for Western candidates—hardly shocking given the flyaway success of minimum wage initiatives in these states.
Perhaps most important, though, is getting back down-to-Earth. Successful candidates in the region—from Salazar and Ritter to Schweitzer and Tester—were known as people who had spent their lives working hard and knew the difficulty that sometimes accompanies making it from one paycheck to the next. Find us some more of those candidates and you’ll see young Westerners out in force again—and this time, they just might decide the fate of the entire country.
