Opinion | Jared Polis Wants to Win Back the Hippies

It’s such a bother when politicians have to go and complicate your clean narrative about why they’re succeeding.

Last week, I spoke to Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado. Polis’s state was, if not a bright spot for Democrats, a less-dark one. In New York, Democrats lost 11 points off their 2020 margin; in New Jersey, 10 points; in Massachusetts, nine and a half points; in California, nine points (though votes are still being counted); in Illinois, seven points. In Colorado, the difference was two and a half points. What is Polis, who won re-election in 2022 by a 19-point margin, doing right?

One answer — and this, to be honest, was the answer I’d gone looking for — is focusing relentlessly on the cost of living. “You can’t just do one policy and expect, somehow, people will know it,” Polis told me. “But they generally understand the drumbeat of 30, 40 things you’re doing, each of which reduces costs in a different way. And so that’s been our strategy: to flood the zone with this work to reduce costs.”

Polis points with pride to his successful efforts to expand pre-K and kindergarten and get a public insurance option onto the Colorado health exchanges — but also to his rejection of proposals to add benefits that would drive up costs. He’s happy to brag about reducing the tax rate for both businesses and individuals, walking me through every decimal-point reduction he achieved, and the many bills he’s signed to make it easier to build homes.

“When you say something a lot, it means you generally believe it,” Polis said. “So here’s a line I often use: We want the best solutions from the left and the right to save people money.”

But during our conversation, and in the days after, another answer emerged — and for Democrats this one is a little more challenging. Polis is a dissenter from the trends that swept through Democratic governance during the pandemic. He was unusual among Democratic governors for the emphasis he put on both personal responsibility and personal liberty. Colorado opened early, sparking a tourism boom, and Polis tried to rely more on information than compulsion.

“I certainly believe in vaccinations,” he told me. “I get vaccinated myself. I did that publicly last week for the flu and Covid. But if you can’t convince people with the data, then they have the personal freedom not to. ‘Our bodies, our choice’ applies not just to fetuses, but also to decisions around health care, whether it’s getting vaccinated or what foods you consume.”

Then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “I was sad to see R.F.K. leaving our coalition because his voters in Colorado are a big part of my coalition. I mean, I had to threaten to veto vaccine mandates and we were able to avoid them. We have been trying to legalize raw milk in our state for several years and we’re continuing to try because it leans into empowering people to make their own choices.”

I found it surprising that Polis was going out of his way to signal his affection for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but I didn’t think much of it. Colorado is a crunchy place, and it’s easy enough for Polis to lament the loss of allies. But Polis meant it. A few days after we spoke, news broke that Donald Trump planned to nominate Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Liberals were aghast. Polis was the only Democrat I saw, anywhere, who seemed thrilled.

“I’m excited by the news that the President-Elect will appoint @RobertKennedyJr to @HHSGov,” Polis tweeted. “He helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA. I hope he leans into personal choice on vaccines rather than bans (which I think are terrible, just like mandates) but what I’m most optimistic about is taking on big pharma and the corporate ag oligopoly to improve our health.”

Polis’s liberal supporters were outraged, and he eventually clarified what he thought: “Science must remain THE cornerstone of our nation’s health policy” — though he added that if “we follow the science we would also be far more concerned about the impact of pesticides on public health, ag policy on nutrition, and the lack of access to prescription drugs due to high prices.”

The unexpected brouhaha was, at the least, a problem for the piece I’d been planning to write on Polis. But Polis’s embrace of Kennedy may be no less significant to his success than his attention to affordability.

Kennedy, remember, is a former Air America host who Barack Obama considered to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. He has gotten kookier and more conspiratorial since then, but when he ran for president in 2024, he did so, initially, as a Democrat. The crunchy, anti-vaxx, anti-corporate politics he represents used to have a home in the Democratic Party. But the pandemic polarized Americans around trust in scientific and public health institutions, and comfort with public health mandates, and there’s little room left for people with Kennedy’s politics in the Democratic coalition.

Joe Rogan’s real break with liberals came in the fight over vaccine skepticism. Elon Musk’s shift to the right appeared — to me at least — to take hold as he fought against Covid lockdowns and rules. And make no mistake: It wasn’t just the Democrats that developed new litmus tests. Operation Warp Speed was arguably Trump’s single most successful policy as president. It saved an extraordinary number of lives at a remarkably low cost. But the Republican Party turned against vaccines, Trump abandoned his own policy, and he is now appointing the nation’s leading vaccine skeptic to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Covid changed the two coalitions in ways we still haven’t fully absorbed.

Politics is about what you prioritize, and liberals, today, prioritize respect for institutions and expertise. “In this house, we believe in science,” and so on. It’s telling that the announcement that Kennedy might lead H.H.S. has generated far more liberal fury than Trump’s decision to name Mike Huckabee the U.S. ambassador to Israel or charge Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with cutting trillions from the federal budget. There is more overlap between Kennedy and most liberals — who’d have thought Trump would name a pro-choice candidate to lead H.H.S.? — than between liberals and any of Trump’s other nominees. But the relationship to institutions and expertise is very different. And institutions and expertise are what American politics has really polarized over.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to see Kennedy running H.H.S., either. Another pandemic could happen and we will need more vaccines. We are on the verge of what could be a golden age of biotech advances. I’m all for healthier food, but the person running the federal government’s health bureaucracies should be excited by the possibilities of modern medicine. I was hoping, in a second Trump administration, to see the Warp Speed program replicated. The H.H.S. secretary’s powers are limited, but there is plenty of havoc pseudoscience and conspiratorial thinking could cause.

Still, I don’t think it’s an accident that Polis’s more individualistic take on liberalism has held so strong in Colorado. Democrats are ready to face the support they lost to inflation, but they’ve never fully reckoned with the anger and mistrust that still pulses from the pandemic. Maybe they don’t want to. Perhaps they now prefer a coalition without Kennedy, and others like him, in it. But Polis doesn’t.

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