New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker snaps a selfie with Montana Sen. Jon Tester and a supporter March 18, 2017, in Helena at the Montana Democratic Party's annual dinner. | AP Photo Western Democrats spearhead Trump resistance The party's center of gravity may be moving away from the East.

HELENA, Mont. — After eight years of watching Democrats hemorrhage state and local offices, a collection of ambitious Western pols is attempting to muscle into Democratic Party politics and move its center of gravity away from the East Coast.

They’ve seen two decades of presidential nominees who hail from east of the Mississippi River. Now they are intent on taking the lead against the Trump administration policy agenda and setting the terms for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.


“This is where the action is, where the action can be, and where the action has to be,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, one of the White House’s most prominent critics and a leading defender of a health care system under which eight Western states have expanded Medicaid. “Nationally [and] in D.C., the party’s been flummoxed by the combined effects of gerrymandering and the massive accident of democracy named President Donald Trump.”

Inslee, whose stature is rising within the national party as his state repeatedly challenges Trump’s travel bans in court, joins a handful of other West Coast and Mountain West Democrats who are suddenly drawing mention as presidential prospects in 2020. Among them: Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, California Sen. Kamala Harris and Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley.

Their rise appears to herald a shift in a party that has regularly promoted Westerners to positions of power within Congress, but not once nominated one for the presidency from west of the Rockies.

One reason is that the West Coast is one of the few remaining pockets of Democratic strength outside the Northeast. Nearly one-third of Democratic governors are now from Western states, and California and Oregon are two of just six states nationwide in which Democrats have unified control of the governorship and both branches of the state legislature.

“The center of the Democratic Party — the heart and soul — has moved to the West, there’s no question about it. In the arena of younger political leaders, in the arena of fundraising, and in the arena of political organizing,” said former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, one of just five Western Democrats to run for president since 1980. “The Democratic base of younger, minority, entrepreneurial, civil rights-oriented electorate has dramatically shifted West.”

That includes Hispanic voters, who helped power three consecutive Democratic presidential victories in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. Hillary Clinton also romped to victory on the West Coast, holding Trump to less than 40 percent of the vote in Oregon and Washington state, and outpacing him by more than 4 million votes in California.

“It’s just a numbers game. Look at the map of the 2016 election,” added Ben Tulchin, the Bernie Sanders campaign’s San Francisco-based pollster. “That’s where our numbers are going to come from.”

The evolution of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Denver into major fundraising hubs has also altered the traditional balance of power. Now, Western pols boast close relationships with many of Democrats’ most influential funders.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s appearance at a Montana Democratic Party dinner here on Saturday night — three years before he might seek the presidency himself — is a signal that potential 2020 contenders are recognizing the subtle shift away from more traditional party power centers on the East Coast.

“The garden of our democracy needs constant tending,” said Booker, speaking to 1,200 Democrats gathered at the Lewis and Clark County Fairgrounds here.

In thanking his host Sen. Jon Tester — a farmer — the New Jersey senator nodded to Montana’s rural heritage. “The farm that our nation is, to get the fruits and the harvests, you can’t wake up one moment and suddenly have a burst of activism. You have to be tending to our democracy constantly. There is always work to do.”

While Montana is widely thought of as a red state, it has a penchant for electing statewide Democratic leaders like Bullock — handing the governor a singular national perch as he works with a Republican-dominated state legislature on policies like expanding Medicaid, as he did in 2015.

“As the national party looks at what it’s for and what it can do, even if you can figure out the math and figure out a presidential race, if you’ve lost the rest of the country, that’s not a prescription for governing,” Bullock said of the party’s renewed interest in the West and also in his rural-state success.

From Seattle to Los Angeles, the fierceness of the West Coast resistance to Trump has also put Democrats like Inslee in the spotlight. Washington state, alongside Hawaii, has led the charge in the legal challenges to the White House’s ban on travel by individuals from certain Muslim-majority countries, and the governor has capitalized on the moment as he assumes a prominent role atop the Democratic Governors Association.

“We’ve always been the ‘Left Coast’ [when it comes to] ideas. The West Coast has stayed true to basic Democratic values when it comes to working for the middle class,” said Washington Democratic Party Chairwoman Tina Podlodowski. “Look at Washington state moving towards the $15 minimum wage. Look at social issues, from gay marriage to the legalization of marijuana, [and] around things like sanctuary cities.”

Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator and two-time presidential candidate, has long called for the party to look westward. In early 2008, he sent then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean a memo urging greater investment in the West, a copy of which Hart shared with POLITICO.

Gary Hart: "The West provides the Democratic Party’s greatest opportunity and represents its greatest future." | AP Photo

"The national Democratic Party should look Westward. The South will return to the Democratic Party only when economic downturn requires it. Meanwhile, the West provides the Democratic Party’s greatest opportunity and represents its greatest future. National Party leaders must develop a plan to win the West in the early twenty-first century or risk settling into minority status for many years to come," reads the two-page memo, which encouraged new focus on issues including conservation, energy, technology and public lands.

Dean put that year’s convention in Denver, but few of Hart’s recommendations — like talking forcefully about public lands — seeped into the party’s top-line strategy. But Trump’s policies on immigration and international trade — as well as proposed budget cuts that could adversely affect states with large rural populations — could have an outsize effect in the West, creating opportunities that didn’t exist before.

"I’ve been preaching it within Democratic Party circles for 30 or more years," Hart said. "Having lost the South — what was before the ’60s considered the solid Democratic South — Democrats have been preoccupied with getting the South back. And therefore you had Clinton and Gore, and a focus on how do we get Southern voters back, to a degree, at the expense of looking at the West."

Hickenlooper, the Colorado governor, pointed to the sheer number of Westerners who are the subject of 2020 speculation as proof the party is beginning to break its Eastern habits.

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"There is a national frustration with Washington and the dysfunctionality that that kind of old-school partisanship has created, and in a way when you look at Montana or Colorado, we’re about as far away from that kind of dysfunctionality as you’re going to see," he said. "It’s a good sign as the party looks in more directions for ideas."

"It takes a little gusto and verve to take this on," added Inslee, who abandoned a bike ride to grab the ferry to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport when news of Trump’s initial travel ban broke back in January. "We have rocket fuel in our engines now."

