You know that feeling when you wake up in a stranger’s bed and have no idea who’s lying next to you?
OK, that’s never happened to me either. But it’s a fair analogy for how many Colorado voters will feel this morning as they struggle to remember Tuesday night’s election results: What the hell did we just do?
Actually, it’s a fair analogy for Colorado politics generally.
After two decades of a boozy progressive orgy, the economic hangover is beginning. Voters just haven’t connected their choices at the ballot box to the unaffordability, financial pain and crappy roads those choices helped produce.
And Wednesday morning, we discovered Colorado has ordered another round. We’re still voting like drunkards.
In the years ahead, we will sober up. Either that or we’ll go the way of every addict who can’t kick the habit.
If you’re a progressive, you had a rather good evening. The U.S. House of Representatives fell into Democratic hands, as did the Senate.
Colorado is sending a very tired John Hickenlooper back to Washington, along with not one but two young ideological socialists, Melat Kiros and Manny Rutinel.
There’s a little poetry in that.
We’ll be sending Washington an aging Democrat from a long-ago era when Democrats still tolerated capitalism, along with two confiscators barely older than teenagers who are eager to dismantle the system that gave them lives of remarkable privilege.
The Democratic Party of old, sharing a plane with the Democratic Party of new.
The young’uns will be salivating at the thought of pushing their elders out of power. The elders will see it coming but remain too terrified of the confiscators to fight for their party’s soul.
Apparently, they watched what happened to the Republican Party and learned nothing.
The socialist flood into our state legislature is more distressing because there will be no one to slow it down.
Not our new socialist-adjacent governor, Phil Weiser. Not our wildly progressive courts, packed with decades of Democratic appointees.
And it gets worse. As of this morning, Democrats hold supermajorities in both the Colorado House and Senate.
Colorado failed at the one pro-economy, pro-business aspiration in Colorado in 2026: denying one party absolute power.
How bad will this coming legislative session be for those of us who value free markets and affordability?
Democrats swept every statewide office: governor, attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer. Even the remarkably incompetent Jena Griswold won by double digits.
As we survey the carnage, we also see all but four of the more than 120 judges up for retention won by a comfortable margin, once again demonstrating the near uselessness of our so-called “Missouri” system of judicial accountability.
This election was crowded with 13 citizen-driven ballot initiatives, only two of which came from the left: a graduated income tax, Amendment 87 and yet another TABOR override, Proposition 137, both of which are currently too close to call.
I wish I could say the same about the TABOR-gutting Proposition NN, which passed by 55%, and which the legislature referred to the ballot.
Why pay to put anything on the ballot when your legislature will do your bidding for free?
A whopping 11 initiatives came from the right.
Three reached the ballot through pure activist elbow grease — a 100% volunteer signature-gathering effort and an absolutely incredible feat. They would impose life in prison for child sex trafficking, keep boys out of girls’ sports and ban sex-change operations on kids. As of this morning, they’re all on track to win.
The remaining eight citizen initiatives come from Advance Colorado and an adjacent organization, West Group. Wednesday morning, their funders will calculate the return on investment.
And Ballot issue 7A, the “CoCo” choo-choo train sales tax is rolling down the track towards possibly passing. Let’s just hope it runs off the track. It’s the little engine that can’t, won’t and shouldn’t have been let out of the rail yard.
Colorado woke up this morning poorer, bluer and still wondering who ordered another round.
Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
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