EDITORIAL: Jared Polis’ rural disconnect

The Gazette editorial board

Dec 23, 2024

Jared Polis, right, with First Gentleman Marlon Reis

Photo via Polis’ official Facebook page

Jared Polis doesn’t get rural life. It makes as much sense to him as a cowboy hat, and it fits him about as well.

Granted, the same could be said of many politicians. Yet, plenty of them at least can don the trappings of country living convincingly enough to work a crowd. You can see them strutting around in snakeskin boots at county fairs, where they shake hands and take selfies with the people who raise the cattle and crops that feed everyone else.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to blend in with them if you don’t look down on them.

Which may be why Colorado’s governor has trouble even faking it.

Whether he’s munching on meatless hamburgers, cheering on the introduction of wolves that are decimating cattle and sheep herds, or appointing officials to his administration who are openly hostile to ranching — Polis seems tone deaf to the people who work in, and live in, Colorado’s agricultural economy.

It doesn’t help matters any that First Gentleman Marlon Reis is an outspoken animal-rights activist in his own right, best known for his social-media feuds with rural Coloradans.

Against that backdrop, Polis’ latest slap at rural Colorado is more than just another slight.

The ag community is in fact still furious weeks after Polis, in unscripted remarks at a public gathering of county government officials, pinned the soaring cost of controversial wolf introduction on ranchers themselves. Yes, the same ranchers who are losing livestock to the reckless experiment imposed by Proposition 114, which voters narrowly approved in 2020.

In other words, Polis was blaming the victims.

It was in response to a question from a rural county commissioner who dared to ask the governor why the state, facing fiscal straits, doesn’t “take a pause” on the ongoing wolf reintroduction. The commissioner reasoned that the state already had spent some $5 million on acquiring and releasing the first 10 wolves, and only seven survived.

The governor’s comeback was almost peevish.

“This could have cost a lot less if ranchers wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh, don’t get (the wolves) from Wyoming, don’t get them from Idaho,’ we probably could have done it for a quarter of the cost there and there’s still time,” Polis said. “Ranchers, I mean, if their organizations — Middle Park and those guys — say to Wyoming ‘give Colorado wolves’ they probably would. The only reason they’re not is they hear from ranchers that they shouldn’t, so that drives up the cost.”

The governor’s office, contacted afterward by the media for clarification, doubled down in a prepared statement:

"The reality is the state initially attempted to source wolves from Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho but these common-sense requests were denied following special interest, lobbying, and political games by certain organizations.”

Welcome to Jared Polis’ Colorado. The ranchers who helped settle our state — and who still put dinner on our tables — are a “special interest.” Yet, a costly, starry-eyed and ultimately pointless plan to introduce wolves into Colorado’s wilds — bankrolled by national animal-rights activists and sprung on unsuspecting urban-suburban voters — is, as Polis insists, “the law.”

If the governor’s office were the last stop on Polis’ political path, he probably could get away with it. After all, the people who feed us are vastly outnumbered by the rest of Colorado’s electorate.

But given Polis’ widely reputed ambitions toward a higher office, his inability to warm to rural Colorado could haunt him, and cost him, across Middle America. In which case our Boulder-born-and-bred governor may find himself a stranger in a strange land.