Walter In Denver

Listening to talk radio and reading the right wing blogs, you;d think that it was entirely because people thought Salazar was stronger against gay rights than Coors, as was Bush compared to Kerry.

I tend to think it's more about the war as well. People have some sense that going against a wartime president is unpatriotic, even though they don't necessarily align with him on social policy.

Unfortunately though, it appears that the Bush win combined with Republican gains in the US congress might be a declaration of open season on homosexuals by the extreme right, and the well-organized gay rights apparatus is going to have to start working overtime again.

I suspect that the state legislature gains are partially due to the democrats 'sue, sue, and sue some more until you take our gerrymander instead of the republican's gerrymander' strategy after the last census. I could be wrong though and I accept the divided state gov't. It will undoubtedly hurt TABOR though, and that's a bad thing.

For me, it was - mostly - aiming for divided government. Of weight also was the Coors position on abortion (that is, never, for anyone, no way).

After some checking it looks like suing to gerrymander only affected federal congressional districts, which may explain some of J. Salazar's totals. This is speculation though, because I couldn't find any old cong. dist. maps to compare in a quick internet search. I guess what it really means is that the districts that were carried well by republicans in '02 were won straight out by democrats in '04 and that is very impressive.

Fortunately the legislature will have to put anything messing with TABOR on the ballot as it is in the Constitution.

Remember the seat that Salazar and Coors were competing over. Ben was not a hard core conservative by any stretch of the imagination and only recently converted to the GOP. Salazar is an experienced politician who ran a decent campaign and has an image very similar to Ben's--that is, iconoclast unafraid to break party ranks, connected to rural interests, and so on.

Coors, on the other hand, was a political neophyte running a somewhat decent campaign. But a beer guy running a campaign as a traditional, family values conservative clashes with every "twins" commercial we would see on TV. There was a disconnect (probably unfairly) between his campaign and his family (business) name. Still, going up against a well-liked Colorado politician, Coors made it a good battle.

Of course, their surrogates ran a nasty campaign against each other. Colorado has never been afraid of vote splitting, and I wasn't surprised in the least when Coors lost.

I don't know that it had much to do with the campaigns that each ran, or their personalities. I looks like there were just more Democrats voting.

As I think about it, that makes Bush's easy win here even more remarkable.

I agree with you, Walter. This was a Democratic year in Colorado. It's just that some Democrats agreed with the idea that you should not change leaders in wartime.

I have to say I'm surprised Badnarik didn't do better.

Walter, you touched on this but I think it bears repeating. Here in Colorado we voted for a Republican president and a Democratic senator. That's remarkable given the current mindset about the red-state/blue-state divide that the media is so gleefully pushing. They're trying to make this FAR too simple. Make the divisions seem so much deeper than they really are.

To be sure, Coors' position on gay marriage and abortion were extreme. And certainly Salazar plays (and mainly *is*) the classic left-centrist. I'm not disputing anything said previously. I just wanted to point out that the growing meme concerning the 'stupid Bible-thumping Rethuglicans' versus the 'ever-intelligent but misunderstood Democrats' is clearly bullshit, when viewed though our local voting patterns.

We voted the best men in, in both cases, party lines be damned. *That's* a story that isn't seeing much press right now, and it (clearly!) bugs me.