If you trust the polls, Americans overwhelmingly support the budget compromise forged by President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner.
If you trust the vote Thursday in the House of Representatives, though, Coloradans apparently hate the deal.
Not only did our House delegation vote 5-2 against the bill, but, in a stunning display of unintended bipartisanship, a majority of members in both parties voted against it.
The Republicans voted against the budget bill 3-1. The Democrats voted against it 2-1. The only Coloradans in the House who voted with the majority — the bill passed the House, 260-167, and the Senate, 81-19 — were Democrat Ed Perlmutter and Republican Mike Coffman.
This is where it stands: Colorado was one of only three states in which the majority of each party voted against the bill. The others were Arizona and South Carolina.
Are we really that much different from other states? Or is it that we elect people who are that different?
We like to think of ourselves as a moderate purple state, in which red and blue candidates are both electable. If Colorado has turned bluish of late, it also has given Republicans a 4-3 edge in the House delegation.
If you look at statewide races, the conventional wisdom is that the winner is the candidate who can claim the middle. It’s the Bill Owens model (a conservative with a human face) or the John Hickenlooper model (a liberal who can keep an account book).
That’s not the way to get elected to the House, though, particularly if you’re in a safe district. Colorado has a Denver liberal in Diana DeGette and a Boulder liberal in Jared Polis, who both voted against the bill because, they said, the budget cuts hit the poor disproportionately.
Colorado has a West Slope conservative in Scott Tipton, an El Paso County conservative in Doug Lamborn and an Eastern plains conservative in Cory Gardner.
As part of the Tea Party-flavored Republican freshman class, Tipton and Gardner were certain to vote against the compromise bill that promised $38 billion in cuts. They waited the extra day to vote for Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget bill that promised to transform (or maybe transmogrify) Medicare and Medicaid.
Lamborn wouldn’t tell The Post why he voted against the budget bill.
Meanwhile, if you want more representative representatives, the place to look is the state legislature. On Friday, the two parties introduced several redistricting maps to draw new congressional boundary lines for the next 10 years.
Republicans complained that Democrats were favoring the Denver metro area, and Democrats complained that Republicans were trying to squeeze the minority votes into Districts 1 and 2.
Both parties give lip service to the idea that competitive districts make for better races and representative candidates. We’re hoping that when the inevitable redistricting battles end, the state legislature votes like it means what it says.
