A majority of Colorado voters have a negative view of both the Democratic and Republican parties, according to a recent poll that also found they increasingly identify Republicans with the working class and solutions to economic problems.
The poll comes as the national Democratic Party searches for a path forward in the wake of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to now-President Donald Trump in November. The strength of Republicans’ identification with working-class issues is a warning shot for a party that’s lost ground across the country.
In Colorado, where Democrats backslid slightly but largely maintained their recent gains in November, the results — funded and trumpeted by a centrist group — also hammer upon now-familiar divisions between the party’s left and moderate wings over how to consolidate and exercise Democrats’ reliable position atop state government.
“It is true that the Democratic Party in Colorado is not a monolith,” said Kyle Saunders, a political scientist at Colorado State University. “It is not an ideological monolith — it’s a very diverse set of groups in coalition to support the Democratic cause. And while progressives want to pull the party further to the left, the concern over maintaining the Democratic advantage in Colorado is genuine, and I think that’s what this poll is trying to establish.”
“Whether it does so effectively,” he continued, “is up to the reader.”
The poll, conducted by Keating Research, found that 45% of respondents had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, against 51% who viewed the party negatively. Just 37% had a favorable view of the Republican Party, versus 56% who viewed it unfavorably.
The poll was conducted in mid-December on behalf of One Main Street, a centrist Democratic dark-money group that doesn’t reveal most of its donors. Keating surveyed 1,225 Colorado voters, and the margin of error was 3.5 percentage points. Keating is a Colorado-based firm that generally polls Democratic issues.
The vast majority of self-identified Democrats and Republicans in the survey said they supported the party to which they aligned. But unaffiliated voters — who make up a plurality of Colorado voters — had a negative view of both parties, though they were more favorable toward Democrats than Republicans.
Still, a majority of unaffiliated voters — and a majority of voters overall — said Republicans better represented the working class and were better at addressing the economy and inflation than Democrats.
Voters also said the economy and cost of living, housing and immigration were the top issues facing the state; Republican and suburban voters, though, said they were primarily focused on immigration.
As for what motivated voters in the Nov. 5 presidential election, the economy was the top issue, ahead of immigration and a three-way tie of anti-Trump sentiment, candidates’ character and women’s rights.
Though the poll included some questions about Republicans and Trump, the bulk of its results were devoted to the Democratic Party, its November losses and voters’ views on where the party should go from here — an ongoing debate in which One Main Street has a well-established position.
“What we really learned on this poll is it showed that Democrats really need to focus on kitchen-table, bread-and-butter economic issues,” said Andrew Short, the executive director of One Main Street. “That folks are looking for leaders to really come together and find collaborative solutions to the big issues that we’re facing, that they’re sick of the political theatrics and those focused more on their Twitter likes than actually crafting good policy.”
“More work to do,” party chair says
Shad Murib, the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, said Democrats had “more to work to do” on “putting its money where its mouth is” with voters on economic issues.
He pointed to a recent Quinnipiac University poll of American voters that found the national Democratic Party was deeply unpopular — even more so than among Colorado voters.
In that way, the Keating poll was something like good-ish news for Colorado Democrats, Murib said: The party’s brand in the state hasn’t suffered as much as it has nationally, even after six years of firm Democratic control, and November brought mixed results.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo lost her reelection bid to the House of Representatives, meaning Colorado’s eight congressional seats are now evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But Democrats in the statehouse maintained their firm legislative majorities, though they lost their supermajority control in the House in a nail-biter contest in El Paso County.
Still, Murib said he was concerned about Colorado voters’ identification of the Republican Party with the working class. A plurality of the poll’s participants also said Democrats lost in November because the party was out of touch with voters.
“That’s something I’ve been really concerned with and (that) is the canary in the coal mine from the national election,” Murib said of the November results. “The public is seeing Republicans as best representing the working class and the poor, and Democrats as representing elites. That’s why we’re focused intensely on economic abundance for all.”
As much as the poll showed warning signs for the Democratic Party, it — and in particular the questions it posed to voters — also served as another shot in the ongoing fight among the party’s moderate and progressive factions. That fight isn’t new, but it’s become an existential struggle nationally as the party tries to gather itself after November’s losses.
The battle is also increasingly prominent in Colorado as gubernatorial candidates begin to jockey to replace Gov. Jared Polis in two years.
The poll asked voters, for instance, if they thought the Democratic Party should now tack “to the left,” “to the right” or toward “bridging the divide to find workable answers.” The last one is the position that One Main Street supports, and poll respondents overwhelmingly selected that option, too.
It also asked about general policy objectives like “building generational wealth” and creating “high-quality jobs,” versus specific left-wing policy goals, like rent control and “free health care.”
“I think One Main Street has a financial interest in making sure that what they stand for appears to be popular — so, like any other poll, they’re trying to prove their value in the ecosphere,” Murib said.
New legislative caucus underlines fight
One Main Street is no stranger to the struggle for party influence: The group spent millions of dollars last summer to back the more moderate candidates in several Democratic primaries. It also recently helped launch the “Opportunity Caucus” in the legislature, composed of several Democratic members it supported last year.
Since the launch, that caucus has started an accompanying group that allows it to raise money on its own — a move that raised eyebrows among other Democratic legislators.
Short, One Main Street’s executive director, said the poll’s “language was fair and focused on economic opportunity.”
Murib agreed that the Democratic Party needed to focus more on economic issues.
But there are more nuances to the Democratic coalition than were revealed in One Main Street’s poll, Saunders, the CSU political scientist, said. And “economic opportunity” means different things to different members of that coalition.
Case in point: Short said that to address the housing concerns identified in the group’s poll, One Main Street supported policies like construction-defects reform, which would make it more difficult to sue developers over construction problems in a bid to spur more condominium development.
He also pointed to this year’s House Bill 1042, which would nudge state regulators to consider how air quality rules impact the workforces of the industries they regulate, like oil and gas. That measure, which is sponsored by the chair and co-chair of the “Opportunity Caucus,” is supported by the oil and gas industry and opposed by environmental groups.
But Short was more lukewarm on the cost-of-living and housing policies that legislative Democrats have backed as priorities: bills to limit price increases on groceries, to lower hidden fees in housing and to ban the use of rent algorithms that drive up housing costs.
Those policies, Short said, needed to be “carefully reviewed” to ensure they don’t have “unintended consequences.”
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