| As the nation and the entire world digest Donald Trump's greatest comeback in American history, there is a lot to digest from Colorado’s elections. Here’s my very quick take.
Legislature
As I expected, Republicans did not make great gains in the legislature, although they did pick up a few seats. If trends hold, the House remains a supermajority for the Democrats while the ratio of R's to D's in the Senate remains the same.
The left still controls all levers of state government.
Ranked Choice Voting
For me the biggest surprise was the sizable defeat of Proposition 131, Ranked Choice Voting. It turned out to be too confusing for voters. Polling showed voters liked the idea when it is explained to them, but that's very different than reading it on a ballot.
The lesson here is Colorado voters prefer incremental change rather than dramatic and disruptive change. Coloradans say they despise the extremes of both parties, but wrapping up two huge election changes (jungle primaries and ranked choice voting) in one initiative was too much for them.
If the proponents had only jungle primaries on the ballot, where candidates from all parties were no party at all, they would be in the same primary election, that might have won. Later as voters acclimated to jungle primaries, then Coloradans could debate different voting systems.
Think of how Colorado became an all mail-in ballot state – it evolved over years. Winning small leads to winning big overtime.
This is why we did our income tax cuts over a couple election cycles. The first cut was small and the next one was considerably larger. We, of course, would have continued if the legislature and governor hadn't passed a law forcing any tax cut ballot question to be written to discourage voters.
Ranked Choice Voting also took it on the chin nationally. Alaska reversed course on their experiment in RCV and it looks like it failed on the ballots of several other states yesterday.
School Choice
The lesson of incrementalism and doing foundational work first is often lost on Colorado conservatives. Case in point is Amendment 80.
As I warned a half year ago when I suggested Amendment 80 was high-risk, low-reward and should be pulled, I feared that when it lost at the ballot box it would only encourage the state legislature to attack charter schools even more.
Since the effort came up 7 percentage points short of passage, we must now prepare ourselves to protect the school choice we at Independence Institute have worked on for 38 years.
The other obvious lesson of Amendment 80 is that throwing political Hail Mary passes rarely works. Initiatives of this scope need to be developed with stakeholder participation, not in a silo. A good stakeholder process would have likely fixed the poor wording of this initiative.
Law and Order
The two initiatives addressing crime passed handily, and that's a good thing. However, we should temper our expectations of their impact as they are implemented.
Propsistion 130 puts $350 million of general fund money toward local police departments. But inexplicably, the proponents failed to put a deadline for that spending. The next legislature will try to kick the can down the road, potentially indefinitely. They will say there is no money in next year's budget to make the full expenditure.
The longer it takes for the Democratically controlled legislature to appropriate the police funding, the more inflation makes that amount smaller.
Likewise, with Proposition 128, which requires violent criminals to serve at least 85% of their sentence behind bars, we should not be surprised if judges start giving shorter sentences to compensate, which is why judges are so important.
Judges
And speaking of judges, again all judges up for retention were retained with around a two-thirds yes vote.
Let me say this again. Not a single judge in the entire state lost their retention election! Not even the one the Blue Book said was not up to standards. Some received over 80% yes votes. This is particularly troubling at the Supreme Court level as those justices were involved in covering up sex scandals inside the courts.
While a small reform law passed at the ballot box, Proposition H, it is mostly for show. The third branch of Colorado’s government continues to act with no real accountability.
TABOR
Our Taxpayer Bill of Right's again took it on the chin last night as Arapahoe and Jefferson counties passed de-TABORing measures, as did RTD, the Regional Transportation District, and other districts.
Our opponents know how to use incrementalism to destroy the greatest tax and spending limitation law in the nation. Chipping away bit by bit, TABOR is a ghost of what it once was.
Happy Outcomes
Voters obviously learned that the experiment reintroducing wolves was not a good one. They voted down the “trophy hunting” initiative. Maybe they're learning that biology doesn't belong on the ballot and should be left to the experts.
In the same vein, they shot down both a slaughterhouse ban and a fur ban in Denver.
Voters also rejected a measure that would take more time away from people who are petitioning their government.
In a candidate election that is nearly as big as Trump's victory, our very own Kathleen Chandler, who runs our Citizen Involvement Project, again got herself overly involved. She was elected to the RTD Board of Directors, my old stomping grounds. I rarely have any sympathy for RTD, but they have no idea what they're in for.
- Jon Caldara, President, Independence Institute | 