Another election has come and gone and Colorado continues to morph into something new. Was glad to see the property compensation and set back initiatives fail.
The complete takeover of the state government by the Dems and Coffman's loss was not surprising to me. The Demographics of Colorado aligned with changes happening nationwide, with a decline in support among educated whites for Trump and Republicans.
According to exit polls, 61 percent of non-college-educated white voters cast their ballots for Republicans while just 45 percent of college-educated white voters did so. Meanwhile 53 percent of college-educated white voters cast their votes for Democrats compared with 37 percent of those without a degree.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/ar...n-gap-explains-american-politics/575113/
One recent ranking had Colorado ranked 2nd behind Massachusetts for educational attainment.
https://wallethub.com/edu/most-educated-states/31075/#methodology
Of course, Colorado voters, as they tend to do, rejected efforts to tax (or to borrow) to support various initiatives.
Thus, its a mixed message from the voters to Dems: We love your ideas, but make sure they don't cost anything!!! Lol.
More substantively, what could have been a huge advantage for Democrats going forward - the ability to gerrymander - was taken away by the same election that put them in full power. It will be interesting to see how the independent redistricting commissions work. One objective is to make as many competitive districts as possible and to take away the power of politicians to "rig" elections to assure their own jobs. I love all of that, in principle, but I voted against the anti-gerrymandering law because to me it makes no sense to me to apply such principles only in some states but not all. As a progressive, my fear is that progressive states will adopt such reasonable "good government" approaches to re-redistricting and red states won't. (Though Missouri also adopted "redistricting reform" yesterday.)
As far the impact of all of this on the topic of this website - development, that will be interesting to see. With TABOR and the voters' clear preference to not pay for things, it might not really have that big of an impact. Exceptions might be in areas of alternative fuels and health care, but even then, hands are tied in many ways.
Are there any other development-impacting issues that the Democrats are likely to take on now that their efforts can't be stopped by a Republican senate? Any time a party gains full power they typically "over reach" which of course plants the seeds for their loss of power in the next cycle.
The coming 2020 census and redistricting will set the course of the next decade, politically. The redistricting will have to take into account the huge uptick in population on the Northern Front range, further skewing the balance of power to urban Colorado.
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For example, anything inside of I-225 is generally more urban, defined more loosely as 'older'. The fact that Old Aurora is older and more urban than 'new' Aurora is a distinction I would make as to where I might post. I would think of anything inside of Wadsworth similarly.
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