New York Times
By Jack Healy
October 23, 2014
ERIE,
Colo. — To trace the border between the liberal and conservative
corners of the American West, head down East County Line Road, a
two-lane asphalt stripe parting
the plains here in Northern Colorado.
To
the east lies Weld County, a conservative stronghold where 20,000 oil
and gas wells pump day and night, and Republicans are so dominant that
they are running unchallenged
for county assessor, clerk and a commissioner’s seat. Fifteen miles to
the west is Boulder, where a Buddhist-inspired university offers classes
in yoga and the Tibetan language, and nature activists are working to
carve out legal rights for ecosystems and
wild species.
Straddling
those divisions is Erie, a town of 21,500 whose perch along County Line
Road embodies the shifting politics and demographics of a Western swing
state where
Republicans are waging a spirited battle to reclaim power after recent
years of Democratic gains. Two prominent Democrats, Gov. John W.
Hickenlooper and Senator Mark Udall, are in fierce re-election fights,
and both parties are spending millions to claim a
bellwether win.
“Colorado
is subjected to extremes,” said Roy Romer, a former governor. “It’s not
just blue and red. It’s also urban and rural. We have a history to
this.”
To
some, the social and demographic changes that have shaded Colorado blue
in recent elections are welcome. But Colorado’s political leanings have
tilted back and forth
in surprising ways since it became a state in 1876, sometimes marching
in lock step with Republican ranching and mining magnates, and other
times bolting to support populists or so-called Silver Republicans who
detested the once-dominant gold standard.
“This
is not a blue state,” said Ted Trimpa, a lawyer and political
strategist who helped to craft the Democratic rise to power in the
statehouse over the past decade.
“This is very much an independent state, and more and more reflects
where people in the rest of the country are.”
The
contest between Mr. Udall and his Republican challenger, Representative
Cory Gardner, a second-term congressman from far eastern Colorado, has
become one of the most
competitive and expensive Senate races in the country. It is a
must-hold seat if Democrats have a shred of hope of retaining their
Senate majority. For Republicans, it offers a long-sought chance to
reclaim a marquee statewide office and show that they can
once again win in a Western state that is growing more urban, Hispanic
and socially liberal.
The
campaign has touched on energy drilling and the economy, President
Obama’s health care law and the size and role of government, but at its
core has been a battle for
the votes of women and Latinos. In 2010, Democrat Michael Bennet defied
a nationwide Republican surge to win a Senate race here, in large part
because Democrats hammered his Republican opponent on abortion and
contraception. As for Latinos, they now represent
14 percent of Colorado’s electorate and 21 percent of its population,
and while many are reliably Democratic, Republicans have been going door
to door to try to sway them.
Democrats
are pressing their advantages with both groups in campaigning against
Mr. Gardner, casting him as an anti-immigrant conservative who wants to
broadly outlaw
abortion. Mr. Gardner does oppose abortion, but he has tried hard to
soften his conservatism and appeal to the center, saying he wants to
make birth control available over the counter and no longer supports a
“personhood” referendum that would grant legal
rights to embryos.
This
will also be the first major election to test Colorado’s new all-mail
voting system, in which ballots were sent to all registered voters three
weeks before Election
Day, ideally — in the eyes of those who proposed the change —
increasing turnout. The new law, which will also allow people to
register to vote up through Election Day, was approved by the
Democratic-controlled legislature over loud Republican objections.
A Cliffhanger
Analysts
say this may be the closest Senate race in the country, and so
candidates are fanning out across the heavily Democratic neighborhoods
of Denver, the deeply Republican
suburbs of Douglas County and growing bedroom communities like Erie.
Here,
new homes (“From the $300s!" declare billboards) are cropping up on old
pastureland, gazing out at new oil-and-gas well pads. Construction and a
drilling boom have
helped to pull Colorado out of the recession, pushing unemployment down
to 4.7 percent and reviving tax revenue. But economists say that job
growth has not kept up with the state’s explosive population growth.
One
of Erie’s largest employers, a gun-magazine manufacturer named Magpul,
is leaving town out of disgust with new gun-control laws passed last
year by Democrats. As many
as 200 jobs are leaving for Texas and Wyoming. Joe Wilson, a former
mayor and National Rifle Association member, said he was not upset with
Magpul for leaving, but with politicians for tightening gun laws.
“It was nuts in a down economy to have an industry ejected from the state,” he said. “It shocked people.”
Erie’s
partisan hues mirror the rest of the state. About 30 percent of voters
here are Democrats and 32 percent are Republicans, but each party is
outnumbered by independent
voters. Residents say the town’s politics and demographics are changing
fast with the arrival of more people priced out of the Boulder area.
“Everybody’s
a transplant at this point,” said Shawne Beeson, who moved here in
September from the northern Denver suburb of Westminster, beckoned by
good schools and
affordable homes. He opened a computer-repair shop in a shopping plaza.
“I’m
just part of what’s happening,” he said. “I think this place is going
to become a lot more Boulder. As prices shift, they’re all going to come
here.”
As
a die-hard Democrat, Mr. Beeson said, living in a politically diverse
town has required some concessions to civility. He said he listened
politely when he disagreed
with a customer, but admitted that he once snapped at a man who was
fuming about this summer’s influx of young Central American refugees.
“I sort of went off the rails,” he said.
Growth and Diversity
The
last two decades brought growth and diversity in Denver and the towns
that spill eastward from the Front Range of the Rockies and cluster
along Colorado’s two major
interstates. The area is now a polyglot quilt of immigrants from East
Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia. Vietnamese noodle houses
line Federal Boulevard in Denver. Somali and Burmese refugees slaughter
cows at the meatpacking plants outside Fort Morgan.
Twenty-five
years ago, Colorado’s population was about two-thirds the size it is
today, and much whiter and more conservative. In 1991, Focus on the
Family moved its headquarters
to Colorado Springs, becoming a clarion voice of Christian conservatism
in the national and local culture wars.
On
the northeastern plains, near the Nebraska border, Mr. Gardner’s
hometown, Yuma, embodies a white, rural conservatism that is changing
fast. It is a solidly Republican
agricultural and ranching city where hunters arrive every autumn for
pheasant season, and Mr. Gardner’s family still runs a farm-equipment
business.
In
the last 30 years, though, waves of once-migrant workers from Mexico’s
Chihuahua State have settled here, drawn by jobs picking beets and
pumpkins and working in the
dairies and hog-feed lots. Latinos now make up about 40 percent of
Yuma’s population, compared with 4 percent in 1990. Half the
preschoolers and nearly half the elementary-school students in Yuma come
from Spanish-speaking families, said Margo Ebersole, with
the Rural Communities Resource Center.
“The
Latino community has been growing faster by threefold than any other
community in Colorado,” said Jessie Ulibarri, a Democrat and one of a
dozen Hispanic legislators
in the state house. But cultural acceptance has not always matched
demographics. “People look at us and still perceive us to be perpetual
foreigners,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been told by
people that if I stand up for immigrants, I should
go back home.”
Over
the summer, when the push for immigration reform stalled in Washington,
Hispanic activists flocked to Mr. Gardner’s district offices in
northeastern Colorado to pressure
him to vote for a comprehensive package that passed the
Democrat-controlled Senate, supported by Mr. Udall. But Mr. Gardner says
that granting citizenship or its benefits to millions of undocumented
immigrants “will only encourage more illegal immigration.”
Toward
the southern border of the state, where the county names change from
Lincoln and Custer to Huerfano and Costilla, a Republican state
representative named Clarice
Navarro-Ratzlaff said she believed conservative messages about small
government, low taxes and family values could resonate with the state’s
Hispanic population.
As
she drives across her district, Ms. Navarro-Ratzlaff said she sometimes
stopped at homes with “Latinos for Obama” signs in the yard. She tells
her story, of being a
fifth-generation Coloradan who was raised by a single mother. Of how
she worked nights in a pickle plant and is still paying off her college
loans. She talks about how she registered as a Democrat because her
mother told her to, but found a home in the Republican
Party. And in a state where borders and state lines were drawn up
around Hispanic families who had lived here for centuries, Ms. Navarro
said the Republican message on immigration has the potential to
resonate.
“Our
Hispanic culture believes in securing our borders,” she said. “We want
to honor the law-abiding citizens that have followed the appropriate
steps to becoming an American.
Democrats have used this against us, but the fact remains that illegal
is illegal.”
‘Rugged Collaboration’
The
tourists are back in Estes Park, a summertime Brigadoon at the foot of
Rocky Mountain National Park. Last September, all of this was water, mud
and devastation.
As
the worst floods in a generation carved a $2.9 billion trail of
devastation through the state, they washed out roads in Estes Park,
swept homes off their foundations
and wrecked the floors of Julie Pieper’s main-street restaurant, Mama
Rose’s.
On
this diamond-clear summer day, Ms. Pieper was serving up turkey-bacon
wraps and homemade potato chips to about 100 supporters who had come to
see Mr. Udall. A passionate
mountain climber who lives in the mountain town of Eldorado Springs,
Mr. Udall completed a quest this summer to scale Colorado’s 100 highest
peaks. He looked at home weaving through the sun-bronzed crowd, which
included hikers, kayakers and Dr. Thomas F. Hornbein,
a climber whose ascent up the West Ridge of Mount Everest remains one
of the greatest feats of mountaineering.
Mr.
Udall’s pitch to the crowd was “rugged collaboration.” He said the
phrase exemplified how government agencies and nonprofits, residents and
businesses worked together
after the floods. People took in neighbors who had been washed out.
They set up zip lines to cross torrential rivers. In a year, much of the
devastation has been repaired or is well on the way.
“The
response was spectacular,” Ms. Pieper said. “I’ve got friends who are
Republicans who support this crew because of the response.”
Mr.
Udall has attacked Mr. Gardner for his votes during last year’s
government shutdown, which came as flood-stricken towns remained cut off
from the world and scores
of families were still homeless. In Estes Park, he called it
irresponsible and “disqualifying, in my view, to being a United States
senator.”
Mr.
Gardner said he had pushed to find a solution to the shutdown as it
dragged on for two weeks last October, and said he and Mr. Udall had
worked together to get federal
money for recovery here. “We were in helicopters together overseeing
the efforts in the days following the flood,” Mr. Gardner said in an
interview. “It is below the office of the United States Senate to attack
a member of the delegation he knows was a partner.”
The
Udall campaign and other groups have also attacked Mr. Gardner for
co-sponsoring the Life at Conception Act, a bill that would grant full
legal rights to people from
“the moment of fertilization.” It would potentially outlaw abortion at
any stage and — critics contend — some forms of birth control. While Mr.
Gardner said he no longer supported a similar “personhood” measure on
the ballot this November in Colorado, he has
been forced in debates and interviews to explain why he is still
backing the federal bill.
For
Democrats, the focus on abortion is part of a strategy aimed at making
Mr. Gardner appear as anti-woman as possible to voters like Ann Cerny, a
pathologist’s assistant
in Erie. She said her views on spending and government made her a
Republican at her core, but that working with fetal tissue samples every
day in her lab had put women’s health issues front and center this
election.
“As
a woman, I want to make sure women’s health care is O.K.,” she said.
“Personhood, anything with abortion — that’s my job. I have to have
freedom of choice.” Her conclusion:
“I cannot vote Republican.”
But
to Debbie Brown, a former Republican campaign manager who now leads a
statewide women’s group, the attention to reproductive issues is
maddening. In 2010, Ms. Brown
watched Democrats win 56 percent of the women’s vote in the 2010 Senate
race, in part by portraying Republicans as dogmatic enemies of abortion
and birth control. She organized the Colorado Women’s Alliance as a
conservative counterweight to liberals whom
she says are obsessed with reproductive politics.
“What
else you got?” she asked over coffee one rainy morning. “I could care
less about birth control. It’s widely available, and I think that’s
awesome. There’s not a
crisis.”
While
Mr. Gardner’s campaign argues that his positions are being distorted by
the Udall camp, Ms. Brown and her group are trying to change the
definition of what constitutes
an election-year “women’s issue.” What about energy? she asked. What
about jobs, wages and health care? In panels she has assembled, Ms.
Brown said women felt that the laserlike focus on reproductive issues
was a ploy for their votes.
When
money is so tight that your family disconnects the phone line and cable
and wears sweaters to save on heating, worrying about abortion laws
seems like an unaffordable
luxury, said Margo Branscomb, a single mother in the southern Denver
suburb of Centennial.
“Everybody
needs to stay out of the bedroom,” she said. “It should be an
individual’s choice in all respects, whether it’s a wedding or all these
social issues.”
In
Erie, from behind the counter of his gold and silver shop, Levi Hatgi
is watching the changes rippling through Colorado. He works with a Smith
& Wesson handgun strapped
to his hip, but says guns need to be kept out of certain people’s
hands. He says politicians have tilted tax policies to favor big
corporations over small businesses, and he knows small-business owners
who have been hurt by the Affordable Health Care Act.
But he says he feels alienated from Republicans because of their tight
embrace of religion.
It
has been a year since he and his fiancée, Megan Huckaby, moved to Erie,
and Ms. Huckaby has drawn one firm conclusion about its place here in
this battleground: “It’s
right on the line.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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