As we warily entertain the idea of political life in 2017, we in Colorado must ask ourselves two basic questions: What just happened? What is going to happen now?
To answer either, we need to take a close look at the role Colorado played in the country’s weirdest political year since at least 1968. The year of The Donald proved, if nothing else, that everything most of us thought we knew was wrong.
As Trump shocked everyone by winning the presidency, Colorado was both predictable and entirely unpredictable. The predictable: Trump lost in Colorado. He had to lose Colorado, even against the not-particularly popular Hillary Clinton. Colorado is too educated, too urban, too demographically difficult for Trump to have won. While Trump won narrowly in many of the swing states, and thus the Electoral College, Colorado stayed consistently blue.
The unpredictable: How about the Colorado delegation’s mini-walkout at the Republican Convention? How about the Ted Cruz delegate sweep? How about the Trump charge that Colorado’s caucuses were rigged? How about the Twitter feud between Trump and U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner? How about the Darryl Glenn endorsement, un-endorsement and re-endorsement?
On the Dem side, how about the Hamilton Electors’ attempt at revolution (and the bizarre attempt by Secretary of State Wayne Williams to get one “faithless elector” indicted)? How about Morgan Carroll getting clobbered by Mike Coffman two years after Coffman clobbered Andrew Romanoff? (I have no idea how Coffman became invincible, but the question now is whether he’s ready to give that invincibility a try in the 2018 governor’s race.) How about John Hickenlooper’s shocking near-veep experience?
The biggest loser of 2016 could be Gardner, who incautiously made an enemy of Trump, assuming, as we all did, that Trump could never win the presidency. There was Gardner-as-Rubio-surrogate calling Trump a buffoon. There was Gardner walking out on the GOP convention. There was Gardner wondering how Trump could handle Putin if he couldn’t even figure out the Colorado convention (a point still worth considering). And then there was Gardner, having refused to vote for Trump, having to figure out how to get on Trump’s good side before Trump exacts revenge.
Another loser was Hickenlooper, who has spent his entire political career pretending not to be a politician and particularly pretending not to be a Democratic politician. But in 2016, he went from effective nonpartisan to laughably ineffective attack dog on Trump. It was painful to see his tweets, but, hey, they got him that surprise veep interview. He was never going to get the vice-presidential nod because environmentalists would have walked out on Clinton, but he was there, and pretty certain to have gotten a Cabinet post if he’d wanted one (and it seems he did). Instead, he helped deliver Colorado to Clinton, and for his reward he gets another two seasons of a split Colorado Legislature, with Republicans having held on to their one-vote state Senate majority.
OK, Darryl Glenn. He warned the GOP what they were in for, calling himself an unapologetic Christian, constitutional conservative, pro- life, Second-Amendment-loving veteran who thought the biggest problem in Washington was that Republicans were too quick to cave. That’s a losing résumé in Colorado, and everyone knew that except the Republican primary voters. The miracle is that Glenn came within six points of Bennet, which showed just how vulnerable Bennet actually was.
Of course, the Senate race was a GOP disaster even before Glenn won. The Republican establishment couldn’t find a viable candidate to run against Bennet. The quality of some recent GOP candidates has been a problem, but the party hope is that by the end of 2017, they’ll have viable candidates for the open governor’s seat in 2018.
It’s too early to tell how 2016 will have turned out for Ken Salazar. He was Clinton’s choice to head up her transition team, and might have ended up as her attorney general or something if Clinton hadn’t forgotten to win. Instead, he is the leading Dem candidate in the 2018 governor’s race, if he runs. Salazar will have to decide whether the magic still holds for a moderate Democrat in a state party that has definitely moved left.
What we do know is that the unexpected is possible in 2017 – after all, it follows 2016, when we learned that even the impossible was possible.
Mike Littwin is a longtime Colorado journalist and a columnist for The Colorado Independent.
This column can be found at http://www.coloradoindependent.com.
