Colorado at a Glance State Profile - Gov. Owens (R) - Sen. Campbell (R) - Sen. Allard (R) Presidential Politics Congressional Districting - 01 - DeGette (D) - 02 - Udall (D) - 03 - McInnis (R) - 04 - Musgrave (R) - 05 - Hefley (R) - 06 - Tancredo (R) - 07 - Beauprez (R) Almanac 2004 Home - States & Districts - Elected Officials - Committees - Election Cycles - Guide To Usage Almanac 2002 Almanac 2000 Almanac 1998 For district profiles and additional information on the elected officials of Colorado, please use the pull-down menu above.

At the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Colorado is also at the front edge of economic, cultural and political change. Colorado is an island of 4.3 million people surrounded by the sea of the Great Plains and the ramparts of the Rockies. With vistas of vast emptiness, it is mostly an urban state: More than half its people live in metropolitan Denver and four-fifths in the urban strip paralleling the Front Range, where the Rockies rise suddenly from the mile-high plateau. And its very ruggedness is inviting more settlement: As the eastern plains continue to lose population, the valley-crevices between the mountains are being filled with second-home condominiums and ranchettes. It's a beautiful environment, but it can be a dangerous one, as some homeowners found when huge forest fires swept across the state in summer 2002.

Colorado started off with a boom, and its recent history has been punctuated by booms--and then by pauses of slow growth. The first boom came with the discovery of gold and silver in the crevasses of the Rockies. Evidence of this mining boom still can be seen in the opera houses and storefronts of Cripple Creek and Central City, Aspen and Telluride, built when Denver was just a village on the creek that is the South Platte River. Then Denver grew, as a meatpacking, banking and manufacturing center, and also as the state capital and regional headquarters of the federal government. After that came the boom of the high-energy-price 1970s, when the Denver skyline sprouted new buildings overlooking the Capitol's golden dome and entrepreneurs built ever more ski resorts and year-round mountain condominiums.

Colorado's economy sagged during the low-energy-price 1980s but, based more on telecommunications than energy, boomed again in the 1990s. The visible signs of this boom are still all around--in the skyscrapers of downtown Denver, bearing at various times, the names of Qwest and TCI and other telecommunications and high-tech companies; in the retro Coors Field baseball park set amid Denver's LoDo, where warehouses have been renovated into restaurants and clubs; in the startling architecture of the new Denver International Airport far out in the plains; in the sprawling Denver Tech Center south of the city; in the fast-growing tracts of subdivisions and office parks in Douglas County south of Denver, the second fastest-growing American county in the 1990s. Colorado's economy grew by more than 6% annually during most of the 1990s and by 8.8% in 1999-2000. The state attracted well-educated newcomers from around the country, with many from California; it ranked number one in high-tech workers per capita and third in venture capital financing per capita. Then, in 2001, the Colorado economy went into recession, as the telecommunications, high-tech and tourism industries crashed and Colorado-based Qwest encountered severe problems. In 2000, before shedding several thousand jobs, Qwest was the state's largest employer. Today, Wal-Mart ranks number one with just short of 20,000 employees in Colorado.

Still, Colorado has great strengths. In per capita income, it still ranks seventh among the states--far higher than 19th, as it did coming out of the recession of the early 1990s. And it ranks second in the nation in percentage of college graduates. The physical environment--the mountains, the nearby wilderness--has done much to attract high-skill people here, but even more important has been the presence of critical mass of entrepreneurial spirit and technological competence. These newcomers tend to be tech-savvy, family-oriented cultural conservatives: In the 1990s, public school enrollment rose 14%, while private school enrollment was up 33% and the number of home-schooled children tripled.

Colorado's waves of growth have changed its politics. The pre-1970s Colorado was politically just a bit more Republican than the nation as a whole, with cautious Democrats alternating in office with conventionally conservative Republicans. But in the 1970s, a wave of liberal newcomers swept the state's politics by calling for slow growth and reached the national stage--slow-growth Governor Dick Lamm, Senator Gary Hart, Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, Congressman Tim Wirth. Now all of them, though in the prime of life, are out of politics. Democrats held the governorship for 24 years--Lamm from 1974 to 1986, then Roy Romer until 1998--but Republicans captured the legislature. The new migrants of the 1990s have not been liberals looking for an environment to preserve but conservatives looking for an environment in which to prosper. If the spirit of the 1970s newcomers was embodied in Boulder, with its pedestrian mall, outdoor sports shops and vegetarian restaurants, dominated politically by environmentalist liberals, the spirit of the 1990s newcomers is embodied in Colorado Springs, the home of the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson and Focus on the Family, and dominated politically by religious and family-oriented conservatives--a contrast to environment-conscious and secular Boulder. Just as Boulder's spirit seemed to migrate down the old U.S. 36 to Denver in the 1970s, so Colorado Springs's spirit seemed to surge up the wide Interstate 25, through Douglas County.

The conservatives started to move ahead politically in the early 1990s. They won two big victories by referendum. In 1990, Colorado became one of the first states to pass term limits; in 1992, it passed a measure requiring a popular vote to raise taxes--much to Romer's frustration. Another, later struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, barred localities from passing gay rights laws. In 1992, Democrats were still competitive in Colorado: Congressman Ben Nighthorse Campbell from the Western Slope was elected to the U.S. Senate and Bill Clinton carried the state, even as Ross Perot won 23%, one of his highest percentages. But after that Republicans surged. They won Campbell's House seat in 1992. In 1995, Campbell switched parties, giving Colorado two Republican senators for the first time since 1972. In 1996, Colorado was one of three states (the others were Montana and Georgia) to switch from Bill Clinton to Bob Dole, and Republican Wayne Allard was elected to the Senate. In 1998, Bill Owens became the first Republican elected governor since 1970, and Republicans controlled both houses of the legislature. In 2000, Colorado seemed conservative enough that it was not targeted by either presidential campaign. It voted 51%-42% for George W. Bush; the central city of Denver (62%-31% for Al Gore) and Boulder County (50%-36% Gore) were outvoted by Colorado Springs's El Paso County (64%-31% Bush) and Douglas County (65%-31% Bush).

In 2002, Republicans did even better. They put new emphasis on their ground game, registering Republican newcomers and producing a flood of absentee Republican votes--so many that the VNS exit poll did not reflect the results. Owens was reelected 63%-34% and Allard won 51%-46%--the same margin against the same candidate as in 1996. Republicans retained the state House, regained a majority in the state Senate and picked up Colorado's new 7th Congressional District, designed to be competitive for both parties, by 121 votes. The only odd result was the defeat of Amendment 31, which would have limited Spanish-language "bilingual" education to one year. Similar initiatives have passed in California in 1998, Arizona in 2000 and Massachusetts in 2002. But in Colorado, a local heiress spent $3 million on a campaign against 31, running ads that raised fears that schools would be flooded with Latino children--a case of liberals using appeals to bigotry to protect the economic interests of unionized Spanish language instructors and the apparat of bilingual consultants.