Colorado’s Democratic establishment spent years building a one-party machine, and now the machine is making noises like it wants to eat its owners.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!That is the delicious little irony at the heart of this HuffPost piece, which reports that progressive insurgents appear to be gaining momentum in several Colorado Democratic primaries. HuffPost, never exactly mistaken for the house organ of the Reagan Library, frames this as a rising left-wing rebellion against the stale Democratic establishment. Fair enough. Even a liberal rag can trip over the truth in broad daylight.
Colorado Democrats are getting a preview of their own product. For years, the state’s ruling blue class sold Colorado as the national model: progressive enough for the donors, libertarian enough for the brunch crowd, polished enough for MSNBC, and expensive enough to make normal people wonder who exactly the model was built for. Now the younger left is looking at Michael Bennet, Diana DeGette, Jared Polis-world, and the old Denver consensus and saying, “Thanks, we’ll take the keys.”
The Bullet Point Brief
- HuffPost says Colorado’s Democratic primaries are showing real momentum for insurgent progressive candidates, including challenges in the governor’s race, Denver’s 1st Congressional District, and the 8th District north of Denver. Translation: the left built the lab, and now the experiment has escaped containment.
- Michael Bennet, once considered the obvious establishment heavyweight for governor, is apparently in a much tighter race with Attorney General Phil Weiser. Bennet went from “next governor” to “please clap” faster than a consultant can invoice a super PAC.
- Diana DeGette, who has held her Denver seat since 1997, is facing democratic socialist Melat Kiros, backed by Justice Democrats and Bernie Sanders. When you’ve been in Congress since the Clinton administration and your flank is still yelling “not left enough,” maybe the problem is the whole direction of travel.
- The article points to high housing costs, younger voters, transplants, and frustration with the old Colorado Democratic brand as fuel for the rebellion. In other words, Colorado got expensive, crowded, and cranky under blue management, so the proposed cure is apparently to liberal harder.
- In the 8th District, Manny Rutinel, a young outsider backed by groups interested in AI safety and Latino Victory Fund, appears positioned to beat Shannon Bird for the chance to challenge Republican Gabe Evans. The GOP’s argument is simple enough: whoever crawls out of this primary will be bruised, broke, and carrying a policy platform built for Boulder faculty lounges, not working families.
My Bottom Line
Colorado’s Democratic establishment is finally meeting the people it spent years creating. That is not a tragedy. That is a mirror.
The Bennet-DeGette-Polis era sold itself as the reasonable blue alternative. Not socialism, they said. Not California, they said. Just sensible progressivism with mountain views and a craft cocktail. Then came the housing crisis, the cost-of-living squeeze, the endless regulatory appetite, the activist class, the urban decay, and a political culture where every failure is treated as evidence that the state simply has not gone far enough left yet.
That is the part suburban normies had better understand. The new left is not rebelling because Colorado Democrats failed conservatism. They are rebelling because Colorado Democrats failed utopia. The grievance is not that government got too big, too expensive, too intrusive, or too arrogant. The grievance is that the revolution still has a board of directors.
And that is how states slide. Not all at once. Not with a hammer and sickle painted on the Capitol dome. It happens when normal people are busy raising kids, paying mortgages, dodging property taxes, and wondering why groceries feel like a luxury item, while the activist class keeps capturing school boards, city councils, primaries, agencies, and eventually the whole steering wheel.
Colorado Democrats built this machine. Now it wants the keys. The rest of us might want to wake up before it starts asking for the deed to the house.
Source: HuffPost
