Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Last month, Colorado opened its first retail marijuana shops. At the Colorado Springs airport, there are now bins to help departing travellers remember to drop their pot before flying off to less liberated states. The law legalizing marijuana in Colorado was the result of a long grass-roots campaign that culminated, in 2012, in a winning ballot vote, and was one of the most surprising left-libertarian successes in recent years. But pot legalization (Washington State has approved a similar law) is a difficult political harbinger to categorize.

Colorado has a free-range-inspired history, and the new law might be understood as the latest reimagining of frontier freedom. It has not been a mellowing project, however. The campaign was fought amid a series of bruising battles over social and economic issues—gun control, fracking, taxes, school reform, and civil unions for gay couples—that Colorado and its Democratic governor, John Hickenlooper, Jr., have been engaged in during the years of President Obama’s Administration.

The state’s unruliness can be explained in part by the electoral math. Registered voters are almost equally split among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Colorado’s political statutes allow citizens to introduce ballot initiatives, a situation that encourages populist campaigning on unconventional issues. A rising Latino population has enlivened the immigration debate. And an oil and natural-gas drilling boom has exacerbated long-running arguments about land rights and environmentalism. The midterm elections will likely be closely contested and fuelled by heavy spending by outside interests, and the results may help to define President Obama’s electoral legacy. One of his greatest political achievements has been to revive or solidify the Democratic Party’s standing in the West, particularly in Colorado, Washington, Nevada, Oregon, and New Mexico. He was the first Democratic Presidential candidate to prevail in Colorado since 1992, and he did so twice. In addition to the governorship, Democrats now hold both houses of the legislature and both U.S. Senate seats. During the next two years, Democrats across the country—not only the presumptive Presidential favorite, Hillary Clinton, but many candidates for the Senate and the House—will have to decide how best to recast the Party’s ideas and campaign narratives for the post-Obama era, without giving up the political territory that he has conquered. It is not at all obvious how they should go about that. The task has been further complicated by the President’s approval ratings, which have been pulled down by the dismal Obamacare rollout and, especially, by his inability to get anything through Congress. As in 2010, the President’s struggles in Washington may undermine Democrats this year, too.

Some Democrats see promise in a bolder conviction politics—in the unabashedly progressive platform and rhetoric that lifted New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to office in November, and in the pointed critique of inequality offered by Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts. Obama and his allies in the Party leadership, however, are charting a more cautious course—no doubt with an eye on the coming midterms. In last week’s State of the Union address, the President emphasized some populist ideas that poll well with independent voters, such as raising the minimum wage and giving tax breaks to companies that create jobs for Americans. Yet he said nothing about Wall Street pay or union-organizing, and barely mentioned gun control—something that he championed last year, after the elementary-school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, by trying to push Congress to buck the gun lobby and pass modest restrictions. It was a noble attempt, but it failed after a compromise worked out by Senators Joe Manchin and Patrick Toomey couldn’t attract enough votes, and the reality of that failure is that Democrats in the West and the South must now run away from a reform that the President once ardently promoted.

This year, in Colorado, Senator Mark Udall faces a difficult reëlection fight. His race is one of some half a dozen that could determine whether Democrats maintain control of the Senate as the 2016 Presidential primary campaigns begin. Whether Udall—or incumbents in those other races, including Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana, and Mark Pryor, of Arkansas—still regards the President’s support as an asset isn’t certain. After the State of the Union, CNN asked the Senator if he would invite Obama to campaign with him. Udall dodged. “Coloradans are going to reëlect me based on my record, not on the President’s record,” he said.

Governor Hickenlooper has suffered whiplash on gun policy, too. Early last year, he pushed through legislation—similar to the bill that failed in the Senate—after Newtown and the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theatre in Aurora. That legislation requires background checks on buyers in private gun sales, and limits an assault rifle’s magazine to fifteen rounds. These are hardly radical restrictions, but gun-control advocates hailed the legislation as a template for how courageous Democrats in rural and Southern states can defy the National Rifle Association and enact new limits. Nevertheless, the N.R.A. supported recall votes in Colorado that cost two state senators who were allies of Hickenlooper their seats; a third resigned, fearing defeat. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to think about how to do things differently,” the Governor remarked recently about the backlash the legislation created. “I think we were ahead of parts of the state.”

Hickenlooper also faces reëlection in November. His ambivalence about his own gun bill reveals his capacity for political resilience; he is an accessible and winsome candidate. And he, along with Democrats across the country, will be helped by the Republican Party’s remarkably persistent self-destructive tendencies. According to the polls, the candidate most likely to win the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Colorado this year is Tom Tancredo, the former congressman and anti-immigration campaigner who once called Miami “a Third World country,” because of its many Spanish speakers. Hickenlooper defeated Tancredo in 2010.

The Democratic Party is hardly leaderless or adrift. Yet it is the type of experimentation that Hickenlooper conducts in his reëlection bid that will shape the Party’s evolution. In 2008, then Senator Obama accepted the nomination for the Presidency in Denver’s Mile High Stadium. A crowd of eighty-four thousand waved “Change” signs. Washington, as we all know by now, proved substantially intractable. Democrats will be watching Colorado again this year, hoping that it will show them another path to victory. ♦