Gov. Bill Ritter was smart to veto House Bill 1170, a measure high on the wish list of organized labor. In a state as evenly divided politically as Colorado — and it is almost a mathematical improbability how evenly divided it is — a statewide officeholder can’t afford to kowtow to one of his party’s most zealous constituency groups.
The latest figures from the secretary of state’s office reinforce a trend that has been apparent since at least the 2008 election. A state that was once reliably Republican is now a delicately balanced political toss-up.
Through most of Colorado’s history, voter registration has favored the Republicans. The last time there were more registered Democrats than registered Republicans in Colorado was in November 1992, when Bill Clinton won Colorado’s electoral votes.
Now there are more than a million registered Democrats in the state. It’s difficult to tell exactly when the Democrats passed that significant milestone. The Republicans did it a while ago, sometime in the ’90s.
And there still are more than a million Republicans, and unaffiliated voters, too. Talk about evenly divided: The two parties and the non-party are all within three-tenths of a percentage point of each other. Among all voters, 33.1 percent are Democrats, 33.0 percent are Republicans, and 33.3 percent are unaffiliated.
Whenever they did it, it took the Democrats a long time to hit the million mark. Year after year, the Republican Party’s advantage over the Democrats has been in the six-figure range — four, five or even six percentage points.
But something is turning Colorado voters ever so slightly toward the left. As of April, there were 2,314 more Democrats than Republicans among all registered Colorado voters. That’s not nearly as large as the 12,722-voter advantage for the Democrats in 1992, and neither margin is exactly staggering.
But the Democrats are gaining, ever so slowly.
They’ve picked up about 17,000 voters since January, compared to about 14,000 for Republicans. Among “active” voters, a category the secretary of state started reporting about a decade ago, Republicans still have the advantage — by 10,991, according to the official April tally. But that’s a difference of only four-tenths of a percentage point over the Democrats.
Unaffiliated voters remain the largest voting — or nonvoting — bloc in the state. They outnumber Democrats by 5,216 and Republicans by 7,530 among all registered voters. But they’re not a very lively bunch, apparently; more than 300,000 of them missed the 2006 and 2008 elections and thus are among the 22 percent of all voters considered inactive.
As recently as January, there were more Republicans than Democrats on the list of all voters, including the inactive. But the GOP has lost almost 3,000 from its “active” advantage and ceded more than 8,000 on the larger list of all voters.
That feeble trend should hardly be taken as a green light for the Democrats’ most ardent partisans to force their will upon such a diverse electorate.
Ritter’s been having a tough time walking that political tightrope. Last year, he angered business interests by making it easier for state employees to bargain collectively. Now he’s ticked off labor by vetoing a bill that would have given unions an edge in current grocery contract negotiations. Bad timing, the governor said.
Rep. Ed Casso, D-Thornton, sponsor of HB 1170, accused Ritter of a political cop-out, “hiding the fact that we’re Democrats.” Casso told The Post he had no qualms about the bill, “especially when I have the majority and I thought I had a Democratic governor.”
But if you want to keep that majority, Rep. Casso, you have to do the math. With such an evenly divided electorate, it’s political suicide to ignore the other side.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@ ) is a retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post.
