COLORADO SPRINGS, CO — If you’ve been paying attention at all to American politics and the 2014 midterms, you know that for a political journalist, Colorado is—or, at least, should be—the place to be.
This swing state is host to a tight race for governor, one of very few competitive races for the House of Representatives, and a neck-and-neck US Senate contest that will help determine who controls that chamber. In all of these elections, the Latino vote will actually be meaningful — a rarity in competitive races nationwide. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of interesting policy stories, from fracking regulation to marijuana legalization to immigration and more.
With all those storylines, national pundits and reporters have been flocking here to file drop-in dispatches. As a recent transplant to Colorado myself from a state with a very different landscape, South Carolina, I figured the state would be a dream for local political reporters.
The reality is a little more complex. Everything above is true, but all the challenges of covering high-stakes present-day campaigns are also here in Colorado: big outside money, tighter message control, limited access to the candidates, and a diminished and often desk-bound press corps.
Colorado “is still as good a place as there is to cover politics at the state level,” Eli Stokols, a reporter and anchor at the Denver station KDVR, told me a few weeks ago. But covering a packaged campaign can be discouraging, too. “We can pick apart the veracity of the claims in the ads—and we all sort of do that in our own way—but it doesn’t leave you a lot,” Stokols added (I’ve inserted the links). “What we’ve been utilized for… are, basically, oppo dumps and factchecking.” In either case, the news agenda is largely set by the campaigns’ messaging strategies.
That formula has produced coverage that has been—from my vantage point as a reader and viewer—often not very compelling. Actually, I’d say it’s been pretty boring. That’s in large part because coverage here has often been reactive: following the agendas set by campaigns, from the (limited) issues being discussed to what new TV ads are on the airwaves to the horse race day-afters about fundraising totals and poll numbers. On a typical Friday in early September, the sole front-page political story in the state’s 18 largest newspapers was about a new TV ad in the Senate race. A week later, there was again just one front-page campaign story–about new poll numbers in the governor’s contest. Meanwhile, after more than a month of reading and watching pretty closely, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a Senate candidate’s stock answer on “personhood,” or read about the gaffe the governor made when talking guns to a group of sheriffs, but there are some basic questions about which I feel uninformed.
I don’t want to take this complaint too far. Polls, ads, and fundraising are always going to be part of campaign coverage. Much of the factchecking Stokols mentioned—which has become a cottage industry for some Denver area TV stations—is valuable. And, obviously, the campaigns themselves have a lot to do with the issue agenda being extremely narrow.
Most importantly, despite the constraints, I’ve found greater energy and variety in the most recent reporting. Much of September was kind of a coverage Quaalude. With a little over a month until Election Day, there’s hope that may be changing, and we’ll be seeing more of the enterprise coverage this campaign deserves.
For the rest of this piece, I’ll take a look at coverage of the Colorado governor’s race. In a subsequent piece, I’ll focus on the race for US Senate and some broader themes about how the campaigns are being conducted.
Bloodless coverage of the Hickenlooper-Beauprez matchup
This year’s gubernatorial race pits John Hickenlooper, the Democratic incumbent, against Bob Beauprez, a former Republican congressman and ex-party chairman who was trounced in a 2006 run for governor. Hickenlooper has a well-earned reputation as a quirky, amiable technocrat, not a partisan warrior, but along with the Democrats who control the state Legislature he’s left a strong mark on state policy–and prompted a serious backlash, including an unprecedented recall of two Democratic lawmakers last year by voters angry at new gun control measures.
You might think such a race would have all the ingredients for compelling enterprise reporting, especially with polls showing Hickenlooper in unexpected trouble, and considering that Republicans only need to gain one seat to retake the state Senate. Instead, the campaign, and the coverage of it, has often been flat and muted. “The Hickenlooper-Beauprez thing has been oddly un-engaging,” Alan Prendergrast, of the Denver-based alt-weekly Westword, said when I checked in with him a few weeks ago. “The whole thing doesn’t feel like it’s caught fire.” At times, it’s seemed like the single biggest issue facing the state is the fate of Nathan Dunlap, the convicted killer who’s gotten a temporary reprieve from execution by Hickenlooper, and whom Beauprez promises to delete from the Earth should he win.
Coverage from the state’s largest newspapers has started to become more focused in the past week. On Sunday, The Denver Post published long profiles of both Hickenlooper and Beauprez written by Joey Bunch, the paper’s lead reporter for the gubernatorial race. Taken together, the pieces show two candidates with clear contrasts: basically, a nice guy Tea Party partisan versus a nice guy consensus-builder. They’re well-written, with plenty of biographical detail and enough information for voters to decide which candidate shares their political outlook. The same weekend, the Colorado Springs Gazette offered a useful look at the “stark differences” between the two candidates, including a few bills Beauprez says he would have vetoed.
And on Tuesday night, the candidates met in a debate hosted by the Post; as the paper’s debate story notes, the event actually got a couple important policy points on the record.
None of those stories, though, packed the punch of an early-September Beauprez profile in the online-only, nonprofit Colorado Independent. Written by former Denver Post reporter Susan Greene, the piece drew on Beauprez’s own writings and his comments in right-wing media to argue that the man the Post once dubbed the “more moderate mainstream” choice in the GOP primary had actually spent eight years in private life “pushing ultra-conservative causes.” He’d suggested climate change may be “a complete hoax,” urged Congress to consider impeaching President Obama, expressed concern about “creeping” Sharia law, and criticized the 17th Amendment, which provides for direct election of senators. Some of this material did make it into the Post profile, though in milder form–quotes from Hickenlooper’s allies attacking Beauprez for “extremism” end up less illuminating than Beauprez’s own words.
Beauprez’s ideological convictions deserve more attention, as part of a broader, sense-making look at where he might lead the state, especially if Republicans take the state Senate and—in a move that’s not considered likely—the Assembly. Beauprez “trusts in the oil and gas industry to do the right thing” and presumably would scuttle the fracking-compromise commission Hickenlooper cobbled together—but what would come next, and what’s the range of possible outcomes in the state’s prolonged fracking fight? He’s compared the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to a “bomb”; would he seek to roll back the state’s participation? How, if at all, might his views on climate change—which he’s moderated somewhat—shape state policy? What do credible experts make of his plans for public lands, or access to water? And if Beauprez leads a divided government, where would he have most freedom to set policy?
While Hickenlooper is more of a known commodity, there are also plenty of unanswered—or unasked—questions about how another term would look. The governor has spent the campaign defending his record, but talked very little about his plans going forward–his website lists “accomplishments,” but not future proposals. The press coverage has been retrospective too, which makes sense, but only to a point. Asked at Tuesday’s debate whether he favored raising the state minimum wage—an issue that’s become a priority for Democrats nationwide—Hickenlooper seemed caught off guard. “Yeah, sure, yes,” he said. “That’s the first time we’ve been asked the question.” (The governor may have been referring just to the past month or two; in March, he told Colorado Public Radio he did not favor an increase. When it comes to more recent questions from reporters, meanwhile, Hickenlooper has been asked to review brewpubs and suggest hiking trails.)
As with Beauprez and the GOP, reporters can do more to identify the remaining top policy priorities of state Democrats, if they hold the governor’s mansion and the legislature. One in-state journalist told me on background that a Hickenlooper win could set the stage for future Democratic efforts to reform conflicting mandates that make the state’s budget dysfunctional—potentially eye-glazing stuff, sure, but also the type of insight I haven’t seen in local coverage.
More fundamentally, the lingering question I’ve had throughout the race is just how much Beauprez—and the GOP leaders around him, should the party take one or both houses of the legislature–want to change life in Colorado. Would it be a mild course correction from recent Democratic rule, or a wholesale sea change the likes of which we’ve seen in North Carolina and elsewhere? Beauprez is appealing to people who long for the “state [he] grew up in.” How far back does he want to turn? Reporters can’t answer these questions about the future with certainty, but they should be able to draw some reasonable conclusions.
An article this week helped crystallize in my mind what’s been missing from the coverage, and it came not from a local outlet, but from Yahoo News. West Coast correspondent Andrew Romano spent a week on the trail, logging 700 miles—a luxury not available to in-state journalists—to report the piece, “Two Colorados, Two Visions, One Tight Race.” He started with a question that local coverage has largely reported around: Why has this race, which was supposed to be a Hickenlooper cakewalk, turned into a tossup? And while Romano cited the same gaffes and missteps by the governor that I’ve read about here, he offered a frame I hadn’t seen before: The election could be about New Colorado versus Old. This state has changed a lot, and for some people, it’s changed too much.
The article didn’t really game out future policies or where Beauprez would focus his political power. But it was a compelling read because it framed the election, persuasively, as a contest of visions over what the state should look like. In other words, the big picture—something a reader like me could actually get excited about.
Corey Hutchins is CJR’s correspondent based in Colorado, where he teaches journalism at Colorado College. A former alt-weekly reporter in South Carolina, he was twice named journalist of the year in the weekly division by the SC Press Association. Hutchins writes about politics and media for the Colorado Independent and worked on the State Integrity Investigation at the Center for Public Integrity; he has contributed to Slate, The Nation, the Washington Post, and others. Follow him on Twitter @coreyhutchins or email him at coreyhutchins@gmail.com.