Given that I'm a denizen of a rural community in Alaska, I'm still an odd one to be writing about the state of America's urban areas and Democrat/leftist jurisdictions. If you've been reading my work for more than about six minutes, you know I grew up in a rural setting in Iowa and am a content rural dweller myself now. I have little time for cities, despite having lived in them for four decades. I find them unpleasant; crowded, noisy, and, to be honest, they smell bad. I like the clean country air of the Susitna Valley, and if that means I have to put up with the occasional snowfalls measured in feet, that's fine.
With that being true, why am I still worried about America's cities? Because our cities are the beating hearts of our nation. Much of the country's economic activity happens there. Urban areas contain a lot of the country's industry and academia. What's more, our cities used to be the pride of the nation, but that's not so much the case anymore. Case in point, this time, not a city, but an entire state: Colorado.
We lived in Colorado for 30 years. We raised our family in Colorado, in an eastern suburb of Denver. During my years as a jacket-and-tie corporate consultant, I had to be near a major airport because I was so often hopping on a plane to go somewhere new, and Denver International Airport is a major hub, so it worked out well. While my wife and I always had our eye on Alaska, we did and still do find a lot to love about Colorado.
Colorado is, after all, a gorgeous place. It's also somewhat misunderstood; one of the most common questions I used to get from people was them wanting to know what it was like living in the mountains, when we didn't live anywhere near the mountains; Colorado east of Interstate 25 is called "the Eastern Plains" for a reason. But the mountains are there, along with some world-class fishing, the biggest elk herd in the United States, forests, rivers, streams, and white-capped peaks. It's a beautiful place, from the Four Corners to the South Platte at Julesburg, from the Comanche National Grassland to the Dinosaur National Monument. Outside of the Denver/Boulder Axis, it's still a place populated for the most part by pretty reasonable people.
But the Denver/Boulder Axis is where a lot of the influx of people into Colorado landed. That influx began in the 1980s, and continues even now. City Journal's Aaron M. Renn recently had some commentary on what locals then bemoaned as the Californication of Colorado.
Migration from California has helped change Colorado from a libertarian-inflected reddish state into a solid-blue one. And now blue Colorado is starting to turn into California.
The state’s remarkable demographic reversal provides the clearest evidence of this transformation. Recent Census numbers show Colorado losing more than 12,000 residents to other states last year, while its total population growth is anemic. The metro area of Denver, once a city with buzz as hot as Austin or Nashville, is now growing more slowly than Midwestern cities like Indianapolis and Columbus. The state’s labor force has also started shrinking—something the Denver Post notes has “never happened outside a severe recession or economic shock like the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The migration into Colorado has been different than in some other locales. Some, at least, of the migration from California to places like Texas, Tennessee and Florida has been people who are to the right or at least lean to the right, politically, and who no longer found California agreeable. But the influx to Colorado had a much larger proportion of leftists, who came for the cool scenery and, later, the legal pot.
This resulted in the state legislature becoming Democrat-dominated, with all the stupidity that comes with that.
Not so long ago, Colorado was one of America’s booming destinations. During the 1990s, its population grew by over 30 percent, adding more than 1 million residents. Between just 1990 and 1997, Colorado attracted nearly 110,000 migrants from California, about six times the number from any other state. The state also grew in the 2000s and 2010s.
In short, the left has captured the Centennial State, and there's likely no reversing that.
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When I moved to Colorado in 1988, it was still, for the most part, South Wyoming. Now it's East California. Oh, not everywhere; even today, if you go up to Routt County or over to the Uncompahgre area, you'll see more than a few people with revolvers on their hips. Big parts of the Western Slope and the Eastern Plains are still mostly red, politically, but the influx exploded those urban areas, and now the urban areas run the state. Now, a baker can be sued into penury for refusing to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex marriage; gun owners are facing ever-more onerous and stupid restrictions in a state that has a great outdoor tradition and some of the best hunting in the nation, while in the cities, crime rates are ticking upward; both issues that concern legal gun owners. Now, the Denver area has the fourth-highest real estate prices in the country, while the roads are falling apart and traffic is getting worse by the day.
It's probably too late for Colorado. We still visit regularly. My in-laws and two of our four kids still live there. I still go elk and deer hunting most years with loyal sidekick Rat, my hunting partner of 15 years, who remains in Colorado. But the state has fallen, and it may well not come back without some major economic crisis that the left can't talk their way out of.
This is, again, a cautionary tale, and if I harp constantly on the necessity of voting in this year's midterms and, indeed, in every election, then anyone in Colorado should take that to heart. Unless you want more of this, unless you want to see Colorado complete its transformation into California, vote.
