Intermountain West loosens its embrace of Democrats

WASHINGTON — When Barack Obama accepted his party's presidential nomination 18 months ago in a floodlighted football stadium in Denver, he pinned the hopes of a new Democratic ascendancy on the Intermountain West.

Helped along by demographic shifts in the region, Democrats looked as if they had done everything right over several election cycles, catching a wave of new voters and showcasing a bevy of bright-light politicians who included Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter.

"Western Democrats have enjoyed stunning successes over the last three elections," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared at a conference in Denver last August. "The road to the West Wing goes through the American West."

Now, the region is emerging as a test of the staying power of those forces. Although Democrats are facing difficult prospects across the electoral map, nowhere has their light dimmed as quickly as in the Rocky Mountains and Southwest. President Obama arrives in Colorado today with approval ratings in the state lower than his national average. Early polls suggest Reid's re-election bid may be the biggest loss for the party since the unseating of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004. Ritter, lagging badly in polls and saying he needed to dedicate more time to his family, isn't running for a second term.

"Colorado led on one end, and now it looks like it will be leading on the other," said Jennifer Duffy, who tracks Senate races across the country for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

She pointed out that both top-line races in the state — for governor and U.S. Senate — are at best toss-ups.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a beneficiary of Obama's fundraising stop today, trails Republicans in most statewide polls. Reid, for whom Obama will appear Friday at a Nevada fundraiser, also lags behind his top Republican opponents in surveys there.

The permanence of the Western strategy for the Democrats "may have been a myth," Duffy said.

Analysts point out that the region's long-term demographic trends that buoyed the party recently still work in Democrats' favor. The Latino population is swelling, and those voters typically swing blue by a nearly 2-1 ratio. And the rapid population growth of states such as Arizona, Nevada and Colorado has been driven by newcomers who are better-educated, environmentally conscious and less tied to traditional party structures.

But rather than transforming the region into a Democratic stronghold, the quick disaffection with Democrats in Washington suggests that key states in the Intermountain West may emerge as more of a bellwether — like Ohio — where parties fight for fickle independent voters tooth and nail and the political mood can swing violently.

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3 states tell wider story

Just after Republican George W. Bush's first election as president in 2000, the region was a GOP citadel.

In the swath of states that includes Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, Republicans held every governor's seat and 13 of the 16 Senate seats. Three-quarters of House seats were in Republican hands.

Slippage began two years later, when Democrats won governors' seats in New Mexico, Arizona and Wyoming, but picked up steam in 2004. That year in Colorado, Ken Salazar won a U.S. Senate seat for the Democrats and his brother, John, won a traditionally Republican House seat. Both houses of the state legislature swung blue.

The party has had a string of successes in the region since then and now controls more than half the region's seats in the U.S. House and seven of its 16 Senate seats.

But proof of the Democratic ascendancy in the region came in the 2008 presidential race, when a black lawyer from Chicago won New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, the last two states by margins above his national average.

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