If there’s one thing to know about Jared Polis, it’s that he’s not like other Democrats.
That first came through during the COVID pandemic, which hit just over a year after he took office. While others in his party were coalescing, with an almost religious fervor, around stay-at-home orders, masking, and vaccine mandates, Polis stood out. He became one of the first governors to allow businesses to reopen — far ahead of other Democrats and before even many Republicans — and went on to loudly oppose the kind of mandatory vaccinations that even some conservatives backed.
But it’s in the second Trump era that the Colorado governor has truly made an art of zigging when others in his party zag. In November 2024, while other Democrats were panicking over Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Health and Human Services Secretary, Polis applauded the choice, professing himself “excited.” After the Trump-ordered operation in Venezuela, he was, outside of South Florida, the most supportive Democrat in the country, calling Nicolás Maduro a “brutal socialist dictator” and framing his ouster as a “moment to celebrate.” In fact, “socialist” has become a favorite epithet of Polis’ — he frequently uses it against Washington Republicans, who he says have become “the party of socialism, overreach, and intrusion.”
Polis’ penchant for unorthodox positions and statements is especially interesting given that, on paper, he has all the makings of a loyal party foot soldier. He was born to a family of wealthy liberals who have been key financial backers of Democratic campaigns in Colorado. In 2008, he became the first openly gay man elected to Congress as a nonincumbent (until then, the only openly gay men in Congress had been elected while closeted and then outed while in office). To the extent that Polis stood out in D.C. ideologically, it was for being on the party’s left flank when it came to drugs and foreign policy. In 2018, placing opposition to Trump at the heart of his campaign, he won the state’s governorship, becoming the first openly gay person elected governor in U.S. history.
Since then, Polis has hardly governed as the moderate many in the national press often reduce him to. As governor, he signed legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy — something only six other states allow. He also signed multiple landmark transgender rights protections, including measures mandating that insurance companies cover gender transitions and requiring schools to allow trans children to play on teams that align with their gender identities. On his watch, Colorado established an expansive paid family leave program and a public health insurance option, made it easier to sue for gender- or race-based pay discrimination, and became the first state in the nation to require pay and benefit transparency in job listings.
Polis also signed one of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, banning the manufacture of almost all semiautomatic weapons and requiring that customers undergo extensive training and vetting in order to purchase them. He abolished the death penalty and has pardoned thousands of people convicted of nonviolent marijuana- and psychedelic-related offenses. In his most recent State of the State address, he reiterated his support for a national, publicly run healthcare system “like every other country has.”
In short, it’s hard to imagine most conservatives assenting to a description of Polis as a “moderate.” Indeed, a perusal of his social media accounts, which are peppered with Reddit-style memes, shows that almost everything he posts is inundated with angry comments from the right.
Much of that vitriol, though, is fueled less by any action he’s taken and more by his inaction — specifically, in the case of Tina Peters.
Peters is a former Colorado county clerk who played a central role in a bumbling scheme to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. In the spring of 2021, she collaborated with several other conspiracy theorists to compromise several voting machines under her jurisdiction, ordering cameras monitoring the machines to be turned off before allowing an ally, whom she illegally allowed to use an official badge, to steal some of the information on them, including taking photographs of passwords. The case was about as open-and-shut as you could get: Peters was prosecuted by a Republican district attorney and convicted by a jury of her peers, and a district court, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court all denied her attempts to dismiss the charges.
Her conduct after the scheme did nothing to help her case. She initially went into hiding, tried to illegally record another defendant’s court proceedings with her iPad, subsequently lied to police about the location and ownership of the iPad, and never expressed any remorse for her actions. Peters’ zeal for uncovering conspiracies later implicated her own party: in 2022, after she lost a primary for state Secretary of State by 15 points, she accused her Republican opponents of “cheating.”
Nonetheless, her willingness to put Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election into action has made her a cause célèbre on the right, and, in recent months, the president himself has made her case a central focus. In December, Trump claimed to have issued a pardon of Peters, even though she was convicted under state law and is therefore ineligible for a presidential pardon. (Her legal team argues that the president can pardon state-level offenses, an idea one lawyer said occurred to him while watching the 2012 film “Lincoln.”) But as long as the traditional understanding of a president’s pardon power prevails, Peters’ fate rests squarely with Polis, who alone has the ability to pardon her or commute her sentence.
The president appears to have adjusted to this reality, attempting to sway the governor's hand with a whirlwind of posts — including one expressing his hope that the governor and DA will “rot in Hell” — and, more significantly, thinly veiled retribution. In recent weeks, the administration has denied the state disaster relief funds and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and funding. Last month, Trump also vetoed a bill, sponsored by hard-right Rep. Lauren Boebert and passed unanimously by Congress, to provide rural Colorado with a desperately needed water project that would have primarily benefited residents who voted for him.
Now, there are some indications the campaign may be working. In recent weeks, Polis has seemed to open the possibility for a pardon or commutation for Peters, repeatedly calling her sentence “harsh” and talking up “the value of mercy.”
The situation amounts to a key test for Polis, who is sometimes mentioned as a dark-horse presidential contender, and poses a number of tests for his brand of politics: What actually drives his heterodoxy — sincere conviction or contrarianism? How far can the president go in bending states to his will? And, in Trump’s second term, does defying Democratic orthodoxy mean sanding down the party’s opposition to Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies?
Here, it’s worth noting some of Polis’ other actions, the moves that have led some to label him a “moderate.” To begin with, he’s an ardent supporter of charter schools; in December, he announced that Colorado will opt in to the Trump administration’s national school choice program, making it the only blue state to join so far. In 2023, he briefly joined Republican governors in busing migrants to Chicago and New York, the only Democratic governor to do so. He also took pains early in Trump’s second term to cozy up to Elon Musk, frequently tweeting amicably at the billionaire and speaking favorably of DOGE’s efforts. And he has positioned himself as one of the most pro-crypto politicians in the country, making Colorado the first state to allow residents to pay taxes with the currency. And then there are the vetoes.
Over the past year, Polis has drawn national attention for a flurry of vetoes, including several of legislation that passed with bipartisan support. They include bills that would have ended surprise ambulance billing and made forming a union easier. Most significantly, he has blocked several regulations opposed by tech companies, such as mandatory new safety requirements and background checks for rideshare drivers, a ban on landlords’ use of algorithms to fix rents, and a requirement that social media companies remove accounts exploiting minors or selling drugs and guns.
In his telling, the uniting principles behind these moves are his belief in personal autonomy and his dogged focus on affordability. There’s some truth to this. From the beginning of his career, Polis has had a libertarian streak — he was out front on issues like drug legalization before most in his party, and he was the sole Democratic member of the libertarian Liberty Caucus while in Congress. And politicians from Western states, irrespective of party, have always been more skeptical of Big Government.
It’s also true that Polis has positioned himself as a champion of affordability and efficiency. He’s endorsed enough income tax cuts to make even state Republicans balk, and he has overseen aggressive pro-housing policies, strong-arming local governments into allowing for more construction. Polis’ focus on affordability and willingness to break with liberal orthodoxy likely contributed to his 19-point reelection margin in 2022, and it’s won him plaudits from the “Abundance” camp of Democratic politics.
My take on Polis
As a fan of iconoclasm for its own sake, I find Polis’ positioning interesting and, in some cases, prescient. Take the pandemic as an example. His public position on masking in 2021 and 2022 — that mandates were ineffective because most people would mask or not mask regardless of government policy — was pilloried by many in his party but has since been vindicated by numerous studies. It’s quite clear now, five years after the peak of the pandemic, that the actions of most elected leaders did not reflect the nuance of most Americans’ views on COVID — there were, in fact, tens of millions who did not fall neatly into either the forever-masker or anti-vaxxer camp. Polis, whether one agreed with him or not, hewed closer to that complicated reality than most politicians. And he has fulfilled his promise to defend choice, aggressively countering the administration’s efforts to limit COVID booster shots.
The same is true for Kennedy’s nomination. At a time when Democrats have lost significant ground among voters who distrust the academic, political, and scientific establishments, a nuanced position — one that, say, denounces dangerous anti-science policies while acknowledging Americans’ rightful dissatisfaction with their country’s abysmal food and agricultural policy — could potentially be politically potent. It’s worth remembering that millions of Americans are ardently pro-choice while being deeply concerned about illegal immigration, uncomfortable with climate denialism and leery of immediate fossil fuel transition. One can disagree with Polis’ eclectic stances while acknowledging that they reflect the spirit of much of the electorate.
But in Polis’ recent moves, some see another pattern at play: a philosophy that, regardless of his stated motivation, has resulted in policymaking that aligns neatly with the desires of Big Tech and wealthy interests. His vetoes of the surprise ambulance billing measure, which passed the legislature unanimously, and the rent-fixing measure are prime examples. These bills hardly constituted excessive intrusions into private markets — if anything, they likely would have had very little impact on either industries or consumers.
This reading of Polis also finds some ammunition in the smoke signals he has recently taken to sending on social media. He’s advised his Twitter followers to read controversial writers, some of whom, like Richard Hanania, are despised by many on the left, and has praised Argentina’s hard-right president, Javier Milei, who has overseen cuts to healthcare and welfare programs far steeper than those Polis has criticized Trump for. Just last week, Polis made a friendly appearance on the Bari Weiss–occupied “CBS Tonight.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these decisions — but together, they sketch a picture of someone following the shifting political consensus of a heterodox group of thinkers who often swim in parallel with the corporate elite and Big Tech.
The governor himself comes from the tech world, having made his fortune by selling off several web companies during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. In Congress and as governor, his record has almost invariably aligned with Big Tech interests. For years, that presented little issue for a Democrat. But now, much of the tech world has drifted right, increasingly falling into step with the political circles that, for example, are now pushing for Tina Peters’ release.
All of which means that Polis’ approaching decision about Peters will open questions about his motivations. If he pardons her or commutes her sentence, will he have done so out of a genuine belief that her sentence was too harsh, a desire to protect his state from more executive-branch retribution, a coziness with tech figures and thinkers, or a combination?
Over and over again during the Trump era, we have seen ideological apostasy become a self-reinforcing process, with politicians and political commentators adjusting their positions to follow their cultural cohort (as one observer recently noted, this can lead people to some very strange places). Where Polis eventually lands on Peters’ case will send a big message a year into Trump’s second term; if skepticism of liberal dogma, annoyance with woke activists, or policy heterodoxy now also means turning a blind eye to something like criminal election subversion, we’re about to see something entirely new emerge.
In Peters, the governor is not presented with someone who merely wandered past a barricade on January 6. She used her power as an elected government official, including access to voting machines that her neighbors and constituents had entrusted her to protect, to steal sensitive information belonging to the public. She clearly knew what she was doing was illegal and intentionally sought to conceal her actions. Even a conservative still clinging to 2020 denialism who believes the circumstances necessitated that a “whistleblower” break the law must acknowledge that she did break the law.
A central pillar of Polis’ governorship has been his insistence that he is motivated by principle and is willing to stand alone if necessary. Refusing to bend to the administration would validate that. On the other hand, if the governor caves to Trump, it casts a different shadow over his governorship, calling into question what, if anything, those principles ever meant.
Polis’ decision could ultimately reverberate into the 2028 Democratic primary contest, which the governor has been opaque about his desire to join. Listening to his final State of the State address last week, though, one can hear a national message coming together. Whether he wants to deliver it himself is still unclear. I asked two Democratic operatives, both high-ranking veterans of 2020 Democratic efforts, about the likelihood of a Polis campaign in 2028. Conveniently reflecting my own haywire internal compass, one bet that he will run and one did not.
In the meantime, Polis’ action in the Peters case will also echo for other Democratic-run states, who will be watching his decision closely. If Trump is successful in his effort to blackmail Colorado on even the most clear-cut of issues, it will send a loud message to other governors. And with three-fourths of his term left to go, it’s likely the president will take the lesson happily.
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