By NICHOLAS RICCARDI
Associated Press
DENVER (AP)
-- A political generation ago, the West signaled the nation's rightward
swing, from the emergence of Ronald Reagan to the success of
tax-limitation ballot measures in California and Colorado.
Now, however, the fabled expanse of deserts, jagged peaks, and emerald coastlines is trending in a different direction.
The West has become largely Democratic terrain.
Voters
in Washington state in November legalized marijuana and upheld the
legality of gay marriage. New Mexico was once a tightly contested state,
but Republicans ceded it to Democrats in the presidential campaign.
There are, as always, exceptions.
Lightly
populated Idaho and Wyoming remain strongly Republican, as does Utah.
Democrats are struggling in Arizona, where the immigration debate has
given Republicans a lock on statewide offices but may provide Democrats
an opening by firming up their support among the state's growing
Hispanic population.
Still, the overall trend is clear, according to analysts on all sides of the political spectrum.
"It's
just a different world," said Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist in
Los Angeles who has worked widely in the region. "Nevada became the next
California and now Arizona looks like it will become the next Nevada.
... It's just pushing the West further and further from Republicans."
The
shift in a region already imbued with a libertarian spirit is the
result of several factors. One is the growing number of people who are
seeking a better quality of life by moving from more liberal states.
Also, the expanding immigrant population is turned off by increasingly
hard-line Republican immigration proposals.
"Look
at the migration patterns," said Sig Rogich, a Republican consultant in
Las Vegas who worked on Reagan's presidential campaigns. "You're seeing
the aftermath of a new generation of young men and women whose parents
moved westward."
Western states generally have
weak political parties, part of the legacy of their political
maturation during the progressive era at the start of the 20th century.
Most local elections are nonpartisan affairs and voters often have the
right to set policy unilaterally via ballot initiative. Western voters
long have cherished nonpartisan independence, even when they voted a
relatively straight party ticket.
"The West is
the most American part of America," said Dave Kopel of the Independence
Institute, a libertarian think tank in Denver. "It is a place where you
have much more respect for individual choice and you have more ability
to be who you want to be."
During the 1980s
and 1990s, that libertarian streak fed a series of Republican victories
as voters approved tax-limitation initiatives, protested federal
environmental rules and kept statehouses firmly in the GOP's hands. But
nowadays it means something else, Carrick said.
"The
libertarian thing is no longer about property rights or gun rights," he
said. "It's now about letting people live their lives as they choose."
Ironically, Republicans' success may have contributed to that shift.
The
party managed to enshrine staunch anti-tax measures in several states'
constitutions through ballot initiatives, making it very difficult to
raise taxes in California, Colorado and Washington state.
As
a result, Democrats can't easily raise revenue, but they also can't be
attacked for doing so, said Ron Dotzauer, a Seattle-based Democratic
strategist. "They can't be defined as the pro-tax group because they
can't tax," he said.
There are prominent Republicans who demonstrate that the party can still win the region.
Brian
Sandoval in Nevada and Susana Martinez in New Mexico are popular
Republican governors, but their relatively moderate stances often put
them at odds with the national party. Both, for example, just agreed to
the Medicaid expansion under President Barack Obama's health care plan,
something that is anathema to many conservative Republicans.
"People
appreciate a leader who takes more pragmatic approaches," said Nicole
McCleskey, a New Mexico-based GOP pollster who advises Martinez.
McCleskey
argued that Democrats' success in the region is overstated and she
noted that, outside of California, Republicans in 2012 only lost one
Western congressional seat. As an example of how Republicans can
succeed, she cited New Mexico, where the party picked up seats in the
Legislature despite the Obama wave.
But
McCleskey acknowledged that New Mexico Republicans were helped by the
national GOP basically giving up on the presidential race in the state.
GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney did not contest the state,
minimizing the damage of a divisive presidential campaign.
"We
were able to localize a lot of these races and build on the change that
has taken place with a strong Republican governor," she said.
"Republicans fought on state issues and the Democrats tried to fight on
national issues."
Jill Hanauer is a Democratic
strategist who engineered her party's takeover of the Colorado
Legislature in 2004. She agrees with McCleskey that the West cannot be
considered a Democratic lock.
"The reason
Democrats or progressives are winning is that Republicans got fat and
happy," said Hanauer, who is now president of Project New America, a
political data and strategy company in Denver. "The worst thing that can
happen for Democrats is to take it for granted."
In
2002, Ruy Teixeira, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic strategist,
co-wrote "The Emerging Democratic Majority," which predicted that
demographic and social trends would turn parts of the country that were
deep red, such as the interior Mountain West, into Democratic-leaning
states. The book, published shortly after Republicans took back the U.S.
Senate in the 2002 elections, was received skeptically.
Last
year, Teixeira and other researchers published a new book on the
Mountain West as America's new swing region. Now there was little
pushback.
Teixeira said the West's shift has
been dramatic because of the heavy migration to the region. Another
factor is the ballot initiative process, which magnifies political
trends by making it easier to enact dramatic policy changes such as
marijuana legalization.
But he said in an
interview that what's happened to the West is not very different from
what's taking place across the country. Surveys for his book last year
found it only slightly more libertarian on social issues and holding
similar views toward government and taxation as other parts of the
country. That, he said, is bad news for Republicans - their problem is
national, not regional.
"It's not like there's
something in the water in state X that's making them harder for
Republicans," Teixeira said. "It's just the same series of changes that
are working themselves out in all states."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press modified.
