Voters in the Mountain Regions Often Hard to Figure

-- by Michael Booth, The Denver Post [1]

Cañon City— Standing in the shadow of their brand-new solar electric panels, Pete and Paul Austin launch a brotherly argument whose political implications soar on a late-summer breeze toward the Colorado border and out to the boundaries of the Mountain West.

Paul would drill more oil wells on Colorado's wild lands. Pete would rather step on a cactus.

Pete says oil shale and uranium are dirty industries that would suck down too much precious Colorado water. Paul says all technology is needed and welcome.

But Pete and Paul will shake hands on at least one issue: If Barack Obama and John McCain could push a renewal of solar tax credits through the U.S. Senate, life would look as good as any blue-sky day at Royal Gorge.

The detailed, heartfelt debates in the Austin family underline all the rich, emphatic contradictions of Western voters.

A Denver Post poll of six mountain states reveals gushers of opportunity and dry holes of doubt for any candidate hoping to read the geography of the Western mind.

• We want to drill for oil in our own backyard, but we'll also gladly pay premiums for cleaner energy sources.

• We want a border fence to slow illegal immigration from Mexico, but we also favor assimilation rather than deportation of those already here.

• Half of us don't believe climate change is a proven fact, yet a sizable majority believe taking action against global warming is worth the cost.

• Voters in six states trust Democrat Obama to protect the environment but prefer Republican McCain on a host of other issues, from immigration to national security to the economy.

• As Democrats gather in Denver for the opening of Monday's national convention, Mountain West voters overwhelmingly cite the economy as the most important national issue. Regionally, though, two of the top three issues — immigration and water policy — are sticky topics the national candidates rarely address.

Looking at practical solutions

Candidates who want to win in swing states such as Colorado and New Mexico will have to spend quality time reading the contours of those issue maps, according to everyday voters and regional policy experts. There are fewer and fewer party-ticket voters in Colorado and the West, and the rugged Rocky Mountains have a way of pushing the electorate toward plain-spoken, practical solutions.

In Colorado, where the poll shows Obama enjoying his greatest strength in the Mountain West, voters may be responding to what political observers call Obama's cerebral approach to issues. Colorado leads the six-state region in college degrees, with 34 percent of adults possessing at least a bachelor's, compared with a low of 21 percent in Nevada.

"There's a backlash to 10 years of partisan hoop-jumping," said Jay Fawcett of the Western Strategies Center think tank in Colorado Springs. "You can call it pioneer pragmatism, then and now. The settlers did what worked, because if they didn't, the feedback was usually immediate and traumatic. We're seeing a resurgence of that in the Western states, led by the governors."

University of Colorado professor Patricia Limerick and Marcia Goldstein have written about the pattern over 150 years of Western frontier settlement and come to the same conclusion.

"Westerners have long driven party managers crazy with their messages. I think it's the hope of the nation, really, the refusal of the invitation to waste our time with squabbling," Limerick said. "There are a lot of people who are 'out of category' in a lot of heartening ways."

McCain's best hope might be the flip side of that pragmatism, the fear among voters of letting any one party have too tight a grip on the reins of government.

"Personally, I believe the best situation for government is a deadlock," said Catherine Bullock, a McCain supporter in Colorado Springs. "So they can't pass anything, and they have to leave us alone."

Support flows for drilling

The tour of Western issues, provided by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, shows some clear trends. As a region, voters supported drilling on public lands by 69 percent to 21 percent.

"I know the future is not in oil, but even if it takes 10 years for drilling to make a difference, we'll still have the same energy problems then," said Steve Zetterquist of Manassa. "Alternative energy will not come across quickly, either."

Feelings on illegal immigration run equally strong, but also at crosscurrents. A large portion of regional voters — 43 percent — feel immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American nations have had a more negative than positive effect on life in the West. Constructing a tight border fence and penalizing employers who hire illegal workers wins a whopping 71 percent support in the six states.

Concerns are strongest in Arizona, according to the Post poll. But proximity to the border doesn't always translate to predictable feelings: Utah and Wyoming report some of the most negative feelings about Mexican and Latin American immigration's impact on the West, yet they have the smallest portions of Latino residents.

"I don't think people are into pandering to illegals," said Dan Hayes, the author and financier of the ballot measure Denver voters recently passed aimed at impounding the cars of illegal immigrants and other unlicensed drivers. "Illegal immigration is a heavy burden for taxpayers, and for our roads and streets, which are already packed."

In favor of legal status

Yet the greater part of voters in all of the states but Wyoming feel illegal immigrants currently working in the U.S. should be given a chance to apply for legal status, rather than be deported as people such as Hayes advocate. In Colorado, legal status wins out over deportation by 59 percent to 32 percent.

"We need a long-term, sensible solution for the whole country," said Paul Scott, a retired physician and attorney from Indian Hills. "We need compromise between the extremes."

Ernie and Virginia Myers of Center would welcome that compromise — and the chance to once again plant more than $1 million in lettuce. Their produce operation in the San Luis Valley skipped a valuable lettuce crop this year because three years of immigration crackdowns have left them short of migrant farmworkers.

The Myerses consider themselves economic conservatives, worrying about taxes and the price of fuel and excessive government regulation. But they also need pickers, and legal valley residents won't apply for the backbreaking work. And they deplore the results of immigration raids that spread fear in the valley and leave broken families literally on the Myerses' doorstep.

"You can't just remove 12 million people from this country," Virginia Myers said. "So you need to have a way where they can come forward and be legally absorbed into the workforce. If there was a candidate who was really strong on immigration, they'd have my vote. But I don't think they could get elected with it."

Voters shouldn't hold their breath waiting for an immigration solution by November, cautioned Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker. Obama, like many Democrats, favors compromise, while McCain co-sponsored a Senate immigration compromise before more conservative Republicans forced him back.

"It's a hairsplitting difference between the two candidates," and neither is likely to bring it up for fear of "playing with political dynamite," Coker said.

Colo.'s split on drilling closer

Environmentally conscious Colorado has the closest voter split on more extensive oil drilling. Asked whether drilling or environmental protection should have the highest priority, 41 percent of Coloradans said drilling, while 40 percent favored land protection. Regionwide, the split was 47 percent to 35 percent in favor of drilling.

The Austins of Cañon City reflect that sharp divide. Pete Austin sells and installs solar panels and wind towers for a living, and he recently completed two solar projects for brother Paul. One system provides 100 percent of the electricity and heat for Paul's ranch outside of town, and the other slashes monthly bills by a third at Paul's auto-repair business.

Paul wants to run the greenest auto shop in Colorado and hopes to start converting gasoline cars to electric. But he knows oil is still king and thinks Colorado needs the jobs from drilling to help erase the foreclosure signs he sees cropping up when he drives through Denver's suburbs.

"Let's do it," he said. "We've got to make the land produce something."

Pete snaps back that drilling — or oil shale, or uranium for nuclear power — just prolongs America's addiction to dirty energy sources. And the Post poll shows strong support for renewable energy in all Western states: 64 percent of voters are willing to pay higher prices for energy created from renewable or cleaner sources.

Clean-energy advocates want Congress to move on a bill that would renew valuable tax credits for businesses and consumers who install solar or wind systems. The tax credits are lucrative enough to allow some businesses to recoup their costs in a year or two. Senate Republicans are blocking the renewal until Democrats compromise to allow more drilling; Obama supports the renewal of the credits, while McCain has not taken a public position.

Pushing for more drilling as the main solution to high gas prices is "a red herring," according to Parker voter Karl Newyear. He said he is leaning toward Obama in part because he believes the Illinois senator is more enthusiastic about alternative energy. "I wouldn't pay twice as much for energy provided by wind, but I do recognize there are some higher costs involved," Newyear said.

Water likely not in the mix

Political observers say voters shouldn't expect to hear much from presidential candidates about Western water, even though 15 percent of voters in the six-state region put water policy as their top issue. Apportioning Colorado water to California, or among Western Slope towns and Front Range cities, is simply too complex for debate sound bites, said Mason-Dixon's Coker.

Look on the bright side of that lack of bickering, said CU's Limerick. National "posturing and rhetoric" hasn't produced solutions for problems such as immigration, she said. "Maybe it's a blessing that it's not the principal issue for them to kick back and forth."

The poll results may offer a final warning for all local and national candidates: how quickly other issues fall in importance when the U.S. economy sours.

In every state polled, the economy and jobs by far topped the national-issues list. Coloradans put it at the top 43 percent of the time, compared with 13 percent for the war in Iraq, which ranked third behind gas prices.

Some of the Western states are suffering greatly from plummeting home prices and rising foreclosures: Records show one in 43 Nevada households has received some form of foreclosure warning, and one in 70 in Arizona. Colorado is not quite that bad, with one in 129 households under some threat of foreclosure, while Wyoming sits much easier at one in 1,504 households.

Health-care concerns, often a favorite topic in media stories and in town-hall forums, were foremost for only about 4 percent of voters in the six-state region. Here again, national candidates would have a hard time crafting a regional strategy, for health insurance and income range widely among the states.

In New Mexico, with the lowest household income at $40,629, nearly 23 percent of people are not covered by health insurance. In Wyoming, which has benefitted from the oil and minerals boom and has household income of $47,423, only 14.6 percent of the people lack insurance.

Voters questioned on local issues mentioned recent hot buttons such as "growth and sprawl" only 6 percent of the time in Colorado.

Tom Hoffman has seen that diversion of interest as he and Friends of the Foothills fight to keep northwest suburban growth east of Colorado 93. Many residents want to limit the height of office towers and preserve views of the mountains that brought people to Denver in the first place, Hoffman said. But local political leaders panic when tax collections slow and eagerly make deals with developers who promote sprawl, he said.

"The economy comes first, and people will jump at these simplistic solutions that don't pan out," he said.