Jared Polis: Boulder Congressman Has Big Plans And Big Money

BOULDER, CO – BY Alex Burness, Colorado Independent. Jared Polis wants you to know he doesn’t answer to anyone but the people of Colorado. No “special interests” or corporations. No big individual donors. He says he’s unshackled and that’s why his campaign for governor has prioritized small meet-and-greet events with voters across the state instead of big-donor fundraisers. He could be spending time at Denver steakhouses courting support from millionaires, he says, but he insists that’s not the kind of person or politician he is.

As Polis tells it, he’s about bold ideas like Medicare for all, a statewide transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040, and free universal pre-K and kindergarten.

He was the first openly gay parent in Congress and supported legalized cannabis and marriage equality before both causes were fashionable. He says he went maverick five years ago by rallying against the oil and gas industry with concerns about the environmental and public health threats of fracking.

His is a “refreshing” campaign, Polis said by phone near Vail Pass en route to a campaign stop earlier this month. He describes his opponents in the Democratic gubernatorial primary – former state Sen. Mike Johnston, former state Treasurer Cary Kennedy, and Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne – as “status quo” candidates, boasting that he’s the only one among them who isn’t from Denver.

If he’s elected, he promises, he’ll fight back against President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and “anyone else who seeks to intervene in state law.” On that front, he says, he’s got a head start on his primary rivals, given that he’s spent the last year and a half opposing the administration from his seat in Congress.

Voters are taking note, he explains, of all of these ways he surpasses the competition, and they’re driving his bid for the governor’s mansion.

“It’s a people-powered campaign,” Polis says. “Other candidates have billionaire friends funding them, corporate friends funding them. In my case, if I have the opportunity to serve as governor, I won’t owe it to anyone except the voters.”

His own backer

If you’re going to bank on people power, as Polis says he does, it helps to also have financial power. The congressman –whose net worth the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics estimated in 2014 to be about $200 million, and possibly much more – bankrolls his campaigns at levels so high that, at 43, he has built a political career that’s already peppered with record-breaking achievements of campaign finance.

In his mid-20s, the Boulder native and Princeton grad benefitted from one of the dot-com era’s most extraordinary cash-outs, turning his family’s greeting card business, Blue Mountain Arts, into an e-card retailer, then selling it for $780 million to a company that sold it two years later for just $35 million. He also launched TechStars, a start-up accelerator, with three partners and co-founded American Information Systems and ProFlowers – both of which have since sold – among a dozen other businesses
Having turned himself into a multimillionaire, Polis decided he’d run for the State Board of Education in 2000. That’s a seat for which candidates typically spend in the tens of thousands of dollars. He dropped a record $1.2 million on his campaign, while his opponent spent just $10,000. Polis won by 90 votes. He was 26 years old.

In 2008, Polis won his congressional seat by defeating Joan Fitz-Gerald by 4 points in the primary before breezing to victory in the general election. Many had seen Fitz-Gerald, the first woman state Senate president in Colorado history and later the chamber’s minority leader, as a natural successor to Mark Udall, who vacated his seat in Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District and became a U.S. senator.

Fitz-Gerald raised almost $2 million over 16 months during her campaign, but Polis raised $7.3 million, mostly from his own bank account, in what would end up among that year’s most expensive primary contests in the country. The money Polis put into his campaign in 2008 smashed the previous state record for candidate self-funding.

“It’s like watching a tsunami come,” Fitz-Gerald said at the time of the way Polis has drawn from his wealth to help win elected office.

In this year’s gubernatorial race, for which the primary election is June 26, Polis so far has spent $10.5 million of his own money. That’s roughly the same amount all candidates spent combined in the last governor’s race in 2014. It’s also more than the considerable combined expenditures made so far from outside groups – or, as Polis calls them, special interests – on behalf of other Democrats, like the pro-Johnston PAC Frontier Fairness and Teachers for Kennedy.

Polis brushes off the common suggestion that he’s bought his way into political office. He characterizes his massive self-funding efforts as just another way he’s uniquely liberated from “special interests.” His mantra is that he’s the only contender worthy of electing because he alone isn’t bought and paid for.

On multiple occasions this month, including at a candidate forum hosted by 9News, he has lobbed blanket criticisms of opponents whose campaigns are fueled by those interests, then declined to say specifically which candidates he sees as compromised and by whom.

“They all trouble me in the sense that we should have a governor that works for the people,” he says.
Over the state’s previous eight general election cycles, only four other candidates – Republicans Joe Coors, Jack Graham, Pete Coors and Bob Beauprez – poured more than $1 million of personal cash into their races. All lost. And if conventional wisdom and current polling prove accurate, Republican gubernatorial candidate Victor Mitchell, who’s loaned himself about $4 million, will join that list.

“Clearly,” Polis says, “money can’t buy victory.”

One reason that may be true, said Colorado Democratic strategist Steve Welchert, is that “as the stakes rise and the races get bigger and have a bigger platform, your money, while important, can be more easily used against you."

This election cycle, Welchert was the campaign manager for Congressman Ed Perlmutter’s short-lived bid for governor. Perlmutter entered the race last May, then dropped out in July just weeks after Polis announced his candidacy. Discussing that turn of events, Polis says, “I think part of (Perlmutter) hoped I wouldn’t run.” The two congressmen say they’re friends.

Welchert, who has worked for former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer and advised the presidential campaigns of Ted Kennedy, Al Gore and Barack Obama, says spending big money can have the consequence of overexposure. Compared to candidates with leaner budgets, he says, those like Polis can come off as “trying to be all things to all people.”

“Polis runs five different ads at the same time. It’s a scattergun approach,” he adds. “I think if you put 20 people in a room, they’d have a harder time defining Jared Polis’s brand. What’s he stand for?”

At the end of May, pollsters at right-leaning, Boulder County-based Magellan Strategies spoke with 500 likely voters in the Democratic primary, for a poll funded by a Texas energy analysis firm. While the firm’s report didn’t touch on how those voters perceive the candidates, it did indicate Polis is in a comfortable position ahead of the Democratic primary. He’s up 13 points on Kennedy, though 39 percent of respondents remained undecided, according to the poll, which had a 4.5-percent margin of error.

That apparent lead has helped Polis reclaim the headlines Kennedy had earlier seized after strong showings on caucus night in March and at the assembly in April.

He’s fond of noting that Kennedy, when trying to defend her state treasurer seat in the red wave mid-term election of 2010, outspent but still lost to Walker Stapleton, the current frontrunner Republican candidate for governor.

‘Ahead of my time’

Polis at one point tried to distinguish himself out of about 200 Democrats in the U.S. House by seeking to chair the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The position would have vaulted him into the House leadership circle, and, though he made the final cut, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi picked Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico instead.

Four years later and five terms into his tenure in Congress, Polis is leaving D.C. These days, he believes, “the opportunity for innovation and moving forward is at the state level.”

Over the past decade, Polis has, by many measures, been more active than the average member of Congress. The nonpartisan Center for Effective Governance – a joint project of researchers at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University that ranks lawmaker “effectiveness” based on 15 indicators – has often ranked him well above Colorado’s Democratic U.S. senators and Congress members.

In D.C., he has been a champion for immigration reform, early childhood education and drug policy reform, in particular.

Related: See how Jared Polis answered our 20 questions

But he may be best known for a fight he waged back home – a high-stakes stand-off over Colorado’s regulation of the oil and gas industry. It was the most significant blow-up of his political career, and it ended in a now-infamous compromise with outgoing Gov. John Hickenlooper.

In 2013, Polis learned that a company was fracking next to his second home in Weld County and posted a short video detailing his willingness to become a “face” of the movement against oil and gas development. He spoke of the death of the “Colorado dream” that he and his partner, Marlon Reis – with whom he now has two kids, ages 3 and 6 – had carved out on 50 acres near Berthoud.

In 2014, Polis had helped collect nearly 300,000 petition signatures for two proposed ballot measures that greatly worried the state’s $30 billion oil and gas industry and its supporters. One would have required drilling rigs to be set back at least 2,000 feet from homes. The second aimed to add to the state Constitution a new “bill of rights” so local governments could have greater ability to set environmental protection laws.
Meanwhile, the industry was gathering signatures for two other ballot measures that would have barred local governments that prohibit oil and gas development from gleaning any oil and gas revenues from the state. It also would have required fiscal impact notes accompanying future ballot initiatives.

Read more in the Colorado Independent

Photo by Phil Cherner

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