U.S. Senate See Full Big Line

(D) J. Hickenlooper*

(R) Somebody

80%

20%

Governor See Full Big Line
(D) Michael Bennet

(D) Phil Weiser

60%↑

50%↓

Att. General See Full Big Line

(D) M. Dougherty

(D) Jena Griswold

(D) David Seligman

40%

40%

30%

Sec. of State See Full Big Line
(D) A. Gonzalez

(D) J. Danielson

(R) Sheri Davis
50%

40%

30%
State Treasurer See Full Big Line

(D) Brianna Titone

(D) Jeff Bridges

(R) Kevin Grantham

40%

40%

30%

CO-01 (Denver) See Full Big Line

(D) Diana DeGette*

(R) Somebody

90%

2%

CO-02 (Boulder-ish) See Full Big Line

(D) Joe Neguse*

(R) Somebody

90%

2%

CO-03 (West & Southern CO) See Full Big Line

(R) Jeff Hurd*

(R) H. Scheppelman

(D) Alex Kelloff

70%

30%

10%

CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado) See Full Big Line

(R) Lauren Boebert*

(D) Trisha Calvarese

(D) Eileen Laubacher

90%

20%

20%

CO-05 (Colorado Springs) See Full Big Line

(R) Jeff Crank*

(D) Somebody

80%

20%

CO-06 (Aurora) See Full Big Line

(D) Jason Crow*

(R) Somebody

90%

10%

CO-07 (Jefferson County) See Full Big Line

(D) B. Pettersen*

(R) Somebody

90%

10%

CO-08 (Northern Colo.) See Full Big Line

(R) Gabe Evans*

(D) Yadira Caraveo

(D) Manny Rutinel

(D) Shannon Bird

45%↓

30%

30%

30%

State Senate Majority See Full Big Line

DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

80%

20%

State House Majority See Full Big Line

DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

95%

5%

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
May 19, 2025 08:03 AM UTC

Monday Open Thread

  • 28 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”

–George W. Bush

Tweet
Share

Comments

28 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

    1. Why is that bad? Wouldn't you want a party that is reflective of the electorate? The more you post the more irrelevant your articles seem. 

        1. No. If you want to lose weight you create an action plan to diet and exercise. You don't say hey that plan is for losers; if you really wanted to lose weight you wouldn't have a plan, you would do it through trust.

          Hey, what's all these speed limits… don't you trust your neighbors to drive at a speed that is safe for the road? 

          Dumb theory… create a plan. So what's your plan for getting more women involved in party politics?

        2. Well, women get shit done….tend to do less posturing and self -promoting,, more compromise and grinding out the work.  So female legislators got twice as many bills passed. Not every woman, of course….not the Lauren Boeberts and MTGs of the world, who certainly prefer the self-promotion to the bipartisan bill work.

          So I'm all for equity and gender representation. It should be flexible enough to allow a few points either side of 50/50. IIRC, Jeffco Dems just spent way too much time figuring out which side of the quota a trans rep should be on.

          So by the values you purport to represent, i.e. efficiency and pragmatism, you should want more female representation. Hogg, I think said the same in the article I linked to above. He wants to see what the individual is doing, rather than a rigid gender quota.

          The Trump lawyer, of course, just wants to divide and conquer, as well as quash a "DEI agenda". Nothing new there.

            1. No, the exact opposite is true. We get far more women on party committees than we do men. That's why it matters that they are fairly represented in leadership.

    2. The DNC is fairly irrelevant for the time being anyway.

      It’s going to need to go through a lot of navel-gazing between now and whenever it gets its shit together and becomes relevant again. They need to cycle through David Hogg’s intra-party Intifada and see what comes out at the other end.

      1. Navel-gazing, not naval, hopefully. 

        The thing that keeps me far away from the progressive/centrist infighting is that to win control of the House or Senate, you just need numbers, not a nebulous navel-gazing battle over how to define a gigantic and diverse party. Certain types of candidates can win certain districts, but we'd better be honest that some candidates' core values might not play well elsewhere. AOC won her first general election with 78.2% – but the untested and pretty far left NYC candidate might not have won in a down-the-middle swing district in 2018 middle America. Still, chalk one up for the blue team, like her or not she's a gutsy and valuable voice. Also a valuable voice, I'll take a Jason Crow any day, a white male military vet who won a district several times that farther-leftists did not. They both equal one vote on a pretty large majority of issues.

        Meanwhile, if a small majority in the Senate means "someone" can't get SCOTUS or certain other judges confirmed between 2027-29, damn tootin' I'd take a DINO like Manchin back in a place like West Virginia for one of those 51 votes on a decent percentage of appointments or bills. I have some respect for Hogg trying to cycle out old blood, but suspect he's going to take a lot of lumps along the way and pray he doesn't wind up costing majorities.

        1. I agree with one further item. What voters view the Democratic party as a whole stands for matters. When a Joe Manchin or Ruben Gallego has to run against the party, their getting elected is that much harder.

          Look back to how gay marriage was handled from Clinton through to the end of the Obama administration. The party stance moved forward slowly. For many of us, including me, it was why aren't they doing the right thing and embracing it.

          But by moving slowly at the national level it allowed Democrats in red districts to run competitive races without having to shout that they were against the national party on this. That slow pace gave us wins we otherwise would lose.

          1. I don't know about that. Do CD6 congressional voters really think about what the D party as a whole stands for, or do they vote for a Jason Crow who is (pick from the list) a young-ish decent looking white male former Army Ranger with a law degree, well-spoken and seemingly competent, plus now a multiple-term incumbent? Did Arizona voters in the Senate race not choose a less-polarizing individual candidate in Gallego over Kari Lake, in a state that Trump carried?

            I tend to think there is still a lot of room for "ordinary" voters to consider the person and not the party, especially now that unaffiliated registration is increasing the way it is. Remember, rank-n-file voters are not generally political geeks and hard-core partisans like the weirdos who hang out on Pols. Myself included.

            1. It is a complex environment for voting.  SOME voters will know and care about major national party positions and if a candidate agrees or disagrees with the position.  Others ONLY focus on the partisan identity and know little or nothing about the individual's alignment on an issue.  And there are some who only know the candidate and don't know much about a party's platform and voting patterns. 

              I suspect the DNC's platform positions matters a great deal less than the committee's commitment to send resources to ALL state parties,

              Under the new State Partnership Program (SPP) agreement, each state party will receive a baseline of $17,500 a month, a $5,000 per month increase over the last agreement, and Republican-controlled states will receive an additional investment of $5,000 a month through the DNC’s Red State Fund, putting their total at $22,500 every month. The combined investments total a monthly transfer of more than $1 million from the DNC to state parties – the committee’s largest investment into Democratic state parties in history.

    3. I doubt very much that this complaint about gender equity would have arisen if David Hogg was not planning to support primaries for feckless democrats in non-competitive districts.

      1. I didn't realize until now where the first part of your comment came from, burly, but I have been to way more state and local party meetings than I care to admit, and gender equity requirements or guidelines have been with us for a long time, plus for the most part they're very well accepted. This is more for general perspective and less directed at you.

        1. I hear that, and I think the issue would not have been raised, particularly three months after the fact, if it were not a ploy to remove Hogg. I don't have an issue in particular with the equity requirements, but certainly find the timing of the complaint suspicious. If the DNC really cared about representation they would have dealt with it at the time of the election for the vice-chair positions. Leaning on this rule 3 months after the fact just further clarifies, at least for me, that the DNC is not about prepresentation or change – they are about supporting the status quo that is killing this country and the world.

        2. Absolutely, Dr. Jung. I remember back in the early '90's electing delegates to county, state and national conventions along with the DNC members and gender parity was required then. Now granted, that was before we discovered that there were more than two genders so everything done in the '90's must go out the window.

          To La Pomposa and all the other bean counters with their fetish for representation, please continue with your navel-gazing. LEast you missed it, this is important stuff. Remember, Trump's most effective campaign ad was:  "Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you."

          For what it's worth, as a gay man it does offend my sense of personhood that the DNC rules do not mandate a certain percentage of delegates or committee members be gay men.

  2. Turns out the courts do have some effective tools to enforce compliance.  I could see Marco Rubio or Kristi Noem getting tagged, if not FDFQ himself.  Civil contempt "trumps" contemptous behavior.

    Against a defiant White House, the courts should use this powerful tool

    … the version more likely to command executive attention is instead part of the civil law, and more forward-looking. It is immune from any power to pardon. It doesn’t rely on another branch to execute. And it’s less likely to be repurposed as a martyr’s badge of honor. All this makes civil contempt a more effective tool for extracting future performance.

    What’s probably next is a specific, unmistakably clear court order aimed at a specific, named official — backed by the power of civil contempt. Imagine a $1,000 fine, to be paid personally and without indemnification by the official in question, doubling each day until the United States issues an official request for Abrego García’s return. The executive actor would have the “off” switch in their own pocket.

    One thousand dollars doubling every day adds up to a total of $1 million in 10 days, $1 billion in 20 days and $1 trillion in 30 days. 

    No other branch of government is required for a levy like this to do its work. A court judgment is a legal debt from the moment it is issued, in which exponential compounding credibly threatens to destroy creditworthiness and supports the seizure or retitling of property to be sold in satisfaction of the judgment. If the marshals won’t do it, courts can appoint an executor who will.

  3. Intentionally Forfeiting our Future to China. Noah Smith

    It's not just trains, planes and automobiles, it's also nuclear power, magnets, and batteries.

    [Trump and the Republicans are] intentionally forfeiting the technological future to China. The auto industry is lucrative and important, but even that pales in comparison to the importance of drones. If you can’t build batteries and electric motors in the U.S., you can’t build drones here, either. And if you can’t build drones, you can’t win a modern war.

    Defenders of Trump’s move to kill battery subsidies will ask: If batteries are the best technology, why do they need subsidies? The answer is so simple and so obvious that anyone who even asks the question should feel a deep sense of intellectual shame: Markets do not provide national defense. The battery and motor manufacturing capacity America needs in order to defend itself against China will simply not be sufficient without subsidies, since China is heavily subsidizing its own manufacturing capabilities in this area. Of course, as military ground vehicles go electric, the same will hold true for those as for drones. 

    Would you want China to make all of the world’s plutonium? No? Would you want China to make all of the world’s jet engines and rockets? No? Then you’re a fool to want to let China make all of the world’s batteries and electric motors.

    …

    I don’t want to get too partisan here. After all, it was NIMBY progressives who blocked many of the Biden administration’s attempts to build solar power and transmission lines, and it was progressive contracting requirements that stymied Biden’s attempt to build a network of EV chargers. Some progressives even hate electric cars, because they hate cars in general. This is all very foolish. 

    Among Republicans, however, and especially among followers of Trump, hatred of electrical technology has been raised almost to the level of a cultish religion. This is partly downstream of a tactical error by progressives, who sold their own base on the electric future by painting it as a climate policy instead of as a policy for promoting economic growth and national security. But that shouldn’t let conservatives off the hook here. At the end of the day, Democrats tried (inefficiently) to give electric technology a boost, and Republicans are the ones killing that effort.

    Try talking to a conservative about the importance of EVs, and you’ll typically be confronted with a confused eruption of the most outdated arguments why the technology will never work. “EVs don’t have good range!” (False.) “EVs are slow to charge!” (False.) “Batteries can’t be recycled!” (False.) And so on, ad infinitum. It’s like hearing someone in 1910 tell you that cars will never replace horses, even as that replacement was well underway.

  4. Yes, if 150 years of American history, and thousands of  yearsof world history under patriarchy are any guide, , men have not had any difficulty getting elected or appointed to leadership in disproportionate numbers, without quota.

Leave a Comment

Recent Comments


Posts about

Donald Trump
SEE MORE

Posts about

Rep. Lauren Boebert
SEE MORE

Posts about

Rep. Gabe Evans
SEE MORE

Posts about

Colorado House
SEE MORE

Posts about

Colorado Senate
SEE MORE

144 readers online now

Newsletter

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop with regular updates!

Colorado Pols