January 28, 2010 09:06 PM UTC

Sorry, But You Don't Really Matter in a Statewide Election

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• by: Colorado Pols

Sorry to our Western Slope pals, but we had to comment on this bit of nonsense from something called The Snowmass Sun, titled “Can Hick Win the Western Slope?”

When Colorado Democratic Party Chairwoman Pat Waak came to Glenwood Springs last week, she came bearing a message from John Hickenlooper: “Tell everyone in Glenwood Springs hi and sorry I can’t be there.”

That’s nice, but it’s not enough. If Hickenlooper is going to win Colorado, he has to win places like this, and that means he’s going to have to show up.

Waak knows that. Hickenlooper does, too. He may be wildly popular in Denver, and pretty darn popular outside of Denver, too, but to win as governor of Colorado he has to win the whole state, and that means winning the Western Slope.

His likely Republican foe, Scott McInnis, is an old hat on the Western Slope, and he mastered the art of winning it. As a congressman, he was an unbeatable force. Democrats rarely pitted anyone against him, and when they did, they lost.

McInnis has often argued that winning any state election comes down to winning the Western Slope, and there’s some logic to that. Figure liberal Boulder and conservative Denver counter each other out. The conservative ‘burbs counter liberal Denver. That mostly leaves the Western Slope to battle it out for the winner.

That’s why this part of the state has become a big battleground, especially in recent elections. [Pols emphasis]

The Western Slope is a “big battleground?”

Um, yeah.

We’ve said it again and again here on Colorado Pols: Population shifts over the last 10 years have completely changed the electorate in Colorado. When Colorado had fewer residents, the electorate was more spread out across the state. But today, well more than 80% of Colorado voters live along the Front Range between Ft. Collins and Pueblo. We have no doubt that both John Hickenlooper and Scott McInnis know this, even if the Snowmass whatever does not.

Both candidates will come to the Western Slope and will campaign there, but the numbers just don’t lie. The first major example of the population shift in Colorado and its effect on elections came in the 2004 Senate race, when Democrat Ken Salazar beat Republican Pete Coors because of Denver voters. In Denver alone, Salazar outpolled Coors by more than 100,000 votes (169,580 to 60,387). That same year, a total of 62,341 people cast a ballot in all of Mesa County, which includes Grand Junction, the largest city on the Western Slope. In other words, Salazar got more than twice as many votes in Denver as there are voters in all of Mesa County, the most populous county on the Western Slope.

Those numbers have only increased in the years since. In 2008, Barack Obama beat John McCain in Denver by a 204,882 to 62,567 margin (a difference of 142,315 votes). In Mesa County, Obama lost to McCain 44,578 to 24,008 (a 20,570 vote margin). McCain would have needed to win Mesa County six more times just to erase the advantage Obama gained in Denver alone.

So will Hickenlooper or McInnis win the Western Slope? It doesn’t matter, because if they don’t win along the Front Range, and in the Denver Metro area specifically, then what they do on the Western Slope is irrelevant.