How California Is Turning the Rest of the West Blue
31st August 2013
NPR indulges in some wishful thinking.
Colorado’s politics have become positively Californian lately. There are new restrictions on guns. Pot is legal. The legislative agenda featured an expansion of alternative-energy use requirements for rural consumers. Gay couples can now enter into civil unions.
Notice how ‘Colorado’ has suddenly become ‘the rest of the West’. Gotta love that Blue State math. (I bet he went to government schools….)
Lots of Californians have moved to Denver and its environs, bringing a progressive strain of politics with them and angering more conservative parts of the state — so much so that 10 northeastern counties are planning symbolic but serious votes on secession this fall.
Conservatives have discovered that living on the far side of the Rockies is no longer far enough to get away from the influence of West Coast liberals.
“California migration, to a degree, has altered Colorado politics,” says Mike Krause, vice president of the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Denver. “I see California license plates in my neighborhood and on my commute all the time.”
So California isn’t so much a place as it is a breeding ground for ideological disease that can be transmitted to more rational areas of the country. (The same thing is happening in New Hampshire, which is being infected from Massachusetts and Vermont.)