Present and Accounted For • Arizona delegates started filing into Invesco Field at Mile High early in the afternoon Aug. 28 for Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

DENVER — Buoyed by massive gains throughout the region, national Democrats have their eyes on the Mountain West as their next area of electoral expansion.
In the past decade, the party has fared well in the Northeast and barely treaded water in the South, while the region of the Rocky Mountains and westward has proven an under-the-radar battleground.
 Now, national Democrats say, gains in several local and national offices throughout a series of states have positioned their party well to compete for the region’s electoral votes, as well as to make Republicans defend congressional seats long seen as safely in GOP hands.
 “We’re seeing transitions in this area of the country,” Gov. Janet Napolitano told reporters at a press briefing for the Western Majority Project. “Democrats, particularly a Democratic Party led by Barack Obama, fit very well with the new West.”
Indeed, the change over the past decade has been dramatic. In 1998, Republicans held governors’ mansions in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Today, the GOP only owns Nevada’s chief executive post, and Gov. Jim Gibbons is widely considered one of the most vulnerable candidates up for re-election in 2010, as his approval ratings rank at the bottom of the national pack.
In Colorado alone, since 2004, Democrats have retaken the majority in the state’s congressional delegation and both chambers of the Legislature, picked up the governor’s mansion and a Senate seat, now held by Sen. Ken Salazar (His brother, John, owns one of the House seats previously held by Republicans).
In the past several cycles, Democrats have taken back Senate seats in Colorado and Montana, and this year are favored to win Colorado’s other seat and a seat in New Mexico. In Arizona alone, Democrats won two Republican-held House seats in 2006 and are expected to win a third, the 1st District, in November, giving the party its first majority among the state’s congressional delegation in decades. Atop Democrats’ target list are other House seats in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and even Wyoming and Idaho.
Napolitano, who won two gubernatorial elections in once-Ruby Red Arizona, is a poster child of Democrats’ Western expansion. Appropriating some issues used by many Republicans, Napolitano, Ken Salazar said, “is a tough, crime-fighting, law enforcement no-nonsense kind of person.”
Issues like crime prevention, energy and the economy, Napolitano and Salazar said, is how Democrats have performed well in the Mountain West while avoiding discussions of social issues, on which Republicans generally fare better with voters. The Democratic surge, Napolitano said, comes as the GOP “(hasn’t) been dealing with the issues Westerns are concerned about.”
Even as Republicans have used social issues with success in the past decade, those same wedge issues haven’t affected Democrats in the West. “The people of these respective states want us to transcend the ideology and the politics of division, the politics of slash-and-burn,” Salazar said.
Frederico Pena, former mayor of Denver and former U.S. secretary of transportation, focused his attacks on energy, saying Arizona Sen. John McCain was “more of the same.”
“The same old things that keep failing; more of the same tax breaks for big oil companies making record profits,” he said. “More of the same roadblocks in front of fuel-efficient vehicles. More of the same refusal to support advanced, renewable energy.”
Andrew Myers, a pollster for the Democratic Party, told the audience at a New West forum on Aug. 25 that McCain is not a Westerner.
“He’s out of step,” he said. “If McCain has his way, Colorado would have lost $10 million for 202 renewable energy grants.
Myers said Westerners don’t care about issues like gay marriage or gun ownership. In today’s economy, he said, they care about energy, gas prices, soaring food prices and falling housing prices.
Meyers showed slide after slide during a forum about the “New West” that showed Democrats solidly gaining ground in Western states. He cited Gov. Bill Ritter’s 17-point win in Colorado in 2006, and Napolitano’s win in Arizona as examples.
But Meyers also had some other interesting stats.
Gun owners support Obama, with the exception of people who own more than three guns. Those people, he said, are solidly Republican. Hispanics tend to say they’ll vote for Obama, despite what he calls the “myth” that he can’t get Latino support.
But the biggest issue is that the Republicans are holding onto an old brand, one that’s tired and doesn’t work, he said. And much of that brand is focused on concerns of its Southern coalition – gay marriage, gun rights and abortion issues.
Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer got the crowd’s attention by rebuking McCain’s energy policies. His speech was the turning point of the evening, creating a buzz in the crowd that lasted through Hillary Clinton’s address.
He said America’s wind and solar power would never be controlled by “petro dictators.”
“We face a great new challenge, a world energy crisis that threatens our economy, our security, our climate and our way of life,” he said, adding that McCain’s plan to expand drilling would fail, even “if you drilled in all of Senator McCain’s back yards, even the ones he doesn’t know he has.”
Part of the party’s newfound success in the Mountain West comes from an incredible influx of new residents. Of the 10 fastest-growing states in the Union, five are in the Mountain West, including the top three, Arizona, Nevada and Idaho. A quarter of Arizona voters, for instance, have never cast ballots for McCain in a general election, Napolitano said, and one in four of the state’s residents have moved in since McCain’s last re-election in 2004.
But it’s not just new, more liberal voters moving in from California who have changed the electoral landscape. The explosion of the Hispanic population, and Democratic success among that group, is a huge part of it too. After harsh Republican rhetoric on controlling illegal immigration, a once-promising portion of a new GOP coalition left – perhaps permanently – for the Democratic Party.
“The Hispanic vote, there was some thought that there was going to be a great Republican inroad there,” Napolitano said. “I think on immigration and a whole host of other issues, that inroad is not going to come to pass.”
Napolitano used Arizona as a model for the schism immigration has generated among otherwise solid Republican constituencies, and not only among those of Hispanic descent. “The party itself is very divided between middle and right,” she said, referring to Arizona Republicans who represent business interests and those who take a harder line against illegal immigration.
Democratic growth among Hispanic voters has only just begun, argued Myers, who has conducted surveys for the Western Majority Project. Myers pointed to exit polling data which shows just 12 percent of Arizona voters in 2000 and 2004 were Hispanic, while data from the Census Bureau shows 28 percent of Arizona’s population is Hispanic. &ldq
uo;From a Democratic operative perspective, this means expansion,” he said. “The GOP paid a price” for its position on immigration. Polls from Arizona show Obama leading McCain among Hispanic voters in his home state by a wide 32-point margin.
McCain, though he is the home-state favorite, is paying the price as well. While other candidates have experienced huge winning percentages in their own states, the latest Real Clear Politics average of polls of Arizona voters has McCain leading Barack Obama by a 49 percent to 37 percent margin. That McCain is running under 50 percent in the Grand Canyon State is significant, and according to Democrats, is troubling for Republicans in a state that has voted for only one Democrat in the past 10 elections, giving their electoral votes to Bill Clinton in 1996.
Republicans argue their party remains in good position to keep more than a toehold in the West, and to be sure, Democrats remain at a disadvantage in many states. But the mold has been cast, by incumbents like Napolitano, Salazar and others. If the mold can be replicated in other states and other races, the Mountain West could prove as fertile for Democrats as any other region in the country.
–Dolan Media writers John Hazelhurst, Amy Gillentine, Luige del Puerto and Matt Bunk contributed to this report.≠