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Historically progressive compared to its neighbors in the past few decades, huge influx of money and progressive voters recently, all conservative voters have h
by soared 3y ago
Historically progressive compared to its neighbors in the past few decades, huge influx of money and progressive voters recently, all conservative voters have havens in Colorado Springs and some mountain towns so they don’t heavily mobilize in blue areas. CO gets buckets of tourism money, industry (tech, space, research), and likely secondary affects from having a massive airport. Voted in a governor who started and sold tech startups, is gay, and good at moving through legislation.
Prior to California/etc diaspora it was diaspora from the surround states. Wyoming/Kansas/etc all have more conservative values so the progressive young adults often moved to CO.
(Pure speculation)
- bediger4000 3y agoOld School aerospace company Glenn L. Nartin put in a factory circa 1955, which started drawing non-farm, educated population. I think Colorado's liberal base started then.
- gshubert17 3y agoYes, Martin is now Lockheed-Martin. Other tech companies included IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Level3, EchoStar, DISH, and others.
- ghaff 3y agoWay back when I was in grad school there was a fair bit of "tech" (a lot of it storage hardware) in the greater Denver area and the computer companies definitely pitched the skiing and general outdoor lifestyle as a reason to come work for them there.
- saryant 3y agoThe 36 corridor between Denver and Boulder was home to a ton of storage tech startups in the first dotcom boom. There’s still a street called “Tape Drive”.
- lygaret 3y agoyeah! I used to work at that StorageTek location, before they sold to Sun and then Oracle. Conoco bought the land like 10 years back and demolished the old offices for a "clean energy lab" IIRC , though that never happened and now Tape Drive (and Disk Drive, on the western side of the campus) just deadend into a large empty field. The fact that those offices are gone feels like a weird message about tech, but i don't know what it is.