At LAT, "Obama conquered the West for Democrats, but now it's back in play":
When President Obama claimed the Democratic nomination en route to the White House, he planted his party flag in this Rocky Mountain capital, vowing to end Washington's dysfunction and find elusive consensus around issues such as immigration, guns and abortion.Hillary isn't going the reassemble the Rockies for the Democrats. They're making a big mistake.
Running as a different breed of Democrat — one more pragmatic and sensitive to the unbridled ethos of the region — Obama captured several Western states that the Republicans had won four years earlier, and came surprisingly close in two others.
Afterward, there was heady talk among Democrats of making the Mountain West a reliable part of their presidential base, safely tucking Colorado and Nevada alongside the blue bastions of California, Oregon and Washington, and turning Republican-leaning Arizona and Montana into a pair of tossup states.
But after the last several contentious years, none of that has happened. If anything, the interior West has grown even more competitive, as Republicans rolled up big midterm victories last year in Colorado and Nevada. They kept single-party control of Arizona's capital and, from all appearances, pushed Montana off the table for Democrats.
The ups and downs of Obama and his party, the Republican comeback after two losing presidential campaigns, and the demographic changes remaking the face of the country have been broadly writ across the Rocky Mountain West, and what happens here could go a long way toward deciding which party wins the White House in 2016.
With no candidate hailing from the region, and no special affinity for likely Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton or any one of the Republican hopefuls, the fight is likely to be close, especially in Colorado, which has lately seen more political upheaval — shifting control of the state Senate, a pair of lawmakers recalled in a fight over guns, a rural secession movement — than just about any state.
Even Obama supporters, including some who helped put him in the White House, say he has fallen short of the goals set forth that August 2008 night in Denver, and of the political aspirations that followed. Washington appears more dysfunctional than ever, immigration, guns and abortion remain political flashpoints and the national party is still viewed in much of the libertarian-leaning West with the same degree of suspicion.
"As a candidate there was more hope for Obama," said Dave Hunter, a veteran Democratic strategist in Montana, which Obama came close to winning in 2008, only to lose badly four years later. "But the reality, once he became president, was that he looked more like a typical Democrat than many people thought he was going to be."
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