Steve Pomerance’s March 22 article in The Post discussed a 2022 poll purporting to show widespread opposition within Colorado to population growth. Pomerance does a disservice to readers by failing to provide important background about this poll.
First, the poll was funded by an organization called NumbersUSA, an immigration restriction policy advocacy organization with well-documented and long-standing ties to white supremacist networks. In 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center named NumbersUSA as one of the three faces of a nativist network funded and coordinated by John Tanton, who has spent his career pushing behind the scenes for a nativist movement and promoting “a European-American majority.”
The New York Times, Anti-Defamation League, Georgetown’s Islamophobia tracking project, and the Center for American Progress offer additional documentation of NumbersUSA’s centrality within anti-immigration and white supremacist networks tied to Tanton.
Second, the authors of the “Disappearing Colorado” report featuring these poll results are Leon Kolankiewicz, Roy Beck, and Eric Ruark. Beck is the founder of NumbersUSA and Kolankiewicz is a leader in various population control organizations like Scientists and Environmentalists for Population Stabilization.
Both men were active contributors to Tanton’s white nationalist magazine The Social Contract, publishing a total of 54 articles since 2000 with titles like “American Workers Victimized by Immigration” and “Immigration, Population Growth, and Environmentalist Hypocrisy on the Border Fence.”
Ruark, the report’s third co-author is the director of research at NumbersUSA and notably took to the organization’s blog in January 2017 to defend Trump’s “Muslim Ban.”
Third, the poll was run by an organization called Rasmussen Reports. Rasmussen is a right-wing polling firm whose partisanship and methodologies have long been noted among public opinion professionals. Rasmussen was identified as one of the least accurate pollsters following the 2010 elections because of “house effects” biasing its results. Rasmussen’s inability to meet polling standards caused ABC News’ 538 to cut Rasmussen from its polling analyses earlier this year.
Fourth, the poll is a “push poll,” which the American Association for Public Opinion Research defines as an unethical form of telemarketing aimed at persuading respondents instead of measuring opinions. An example of the poll’s biased questions include provocative language like, “If recent trends continue, Colorado demographers project that the state’s human population of 5.8 million will grow by another 1.8 million by 2050, joining Colorado Springs, Denver and Fort Collins together into a single ‘mega-city.’”
Finally, Pomerance uses tired scare tactics attributing Colorado’s water crisis to population growth. According to the Colorado Water Center at CSU, municipal and industrial uses make up only 11% of Colorado’s water consumption, the other 89% is for agriculture. 55% of residential water use in the Front Range is for outdoor irrigation. Therefore, something like 6% of Colorado’s consumptive water withdrawals are needed for 5.8 million people to drink, flush, bathe, and wash. A worst-case scenario is indoor residential water demand rising to 8% or 10% of available water, not 50% or 110% like Pomerance would have us believe.
There are real crises involving water use, exurban sprawl, housing affordability, and climate change but population control has never been a solution to any of these. To their credit, the authors of the “Disappearing Colorado” report helpfully link to the EPA’s Smart Growth plan emphasizing mixed land uses, diversified housing choices, and walkable in-fill development. These are all far better options for managing population growth in a dry state than Mr. Pomerance’s recommendations that water rights be used as a pretext to grant property owners a veto over who can live in their community.
It is up to readers and policymakers to decide how much trust they want to put in survey results run by a discredited right-wing polling firm on behalf of nativists blaming environmental problems on newcomers. But rest assured there is no supermajority political support for walling Colorado off from the rest of the world.
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D. is a computational social scientist and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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