Colorado used to be the West’s answer to California — all the mountains, none of the madness. Pro-growth, lightly regulated, and magnetically attractive to the kind of ambitious people California was slowly driving out.
That equilibrium is gone.
The strivers arrived from the Golden State, shifted the politics leftward, and brought the policy preferences that made them leave in the first place. The results are arriving on schedule.
Population growth has slowed. The labor force has contracted. Denver now trails Midwestern peers in economic momentum.
Housing costs have climbed to coastal absurdity, with typical homes demanding more than six times median income.
Companies have noticed — major employers have relocated or expanded elsewhere, citing regulatory climate and cost pressures. Infrastructure spending tilts toward transit systems ill-suited to a car-dependent metro while highway expansion stalls.
The governing model has migrated steadily from the Colorado boom of the 1990s toward something that looks, uncomfortably, like Sacramento with ski resorts.
Colorado, at least, still has hope. The natural assets are enviable. The workforce is educated. The damage is recent enough to be reversible, if the political will materializes.
The problem is that political will tends to be the last thing to arrive and the first thing to disappear when the bills come due.
Two other blue states to the east and northeast offer a clearer view of the destination.
Illinois is what happens when you ignore the early warning signs for three decades straight. The state has shed 1.6 million people since 2000 — third worst in America, keeping distinguished company alongside California and New York.
Chicago’s population hovers near a century-long low. The state has added 28,000 government jobs since 2019 and lost 1,900 private-sector ones. It ranks first nationwide in taxes, extracts the most, and produces the least — a remarkable achievement in reverse-engineering prosperity.
Governor J.B. Pritzker recently announced population growth with the confidence of a man who hadn’t checked where the people were coming from. What he failed to mention is that Illinois lost 40,000 residents last year and gained 45,000 migrants, a net positive on paper and a fiscal catastrophe in practice.
The arrivals cost $3 billion. The departing residents took $9.9 billion in income with them. Growth, technically. Hemorrhage, mathematically.
State spending has increased 40 percent since 2019. Fifty-eight tax and fee hikes and counting. GDP growth since 2019 stands at 7.9 percent, compared with a national average of 17.6 percent, ranking the state 46th.
Pension liability stands at $221 billion—the worst in America, 147 percent higher than second-place California, a genuinely staggering distinction.
Illinois’s audited financial reports are now cumulatively 1,810 days late. Legislators are voting on next year’s budget without knowing what last year’s actually cost.
The Chicago Bears — a franchise that survived the Great Depression, two world wars, and Rex Grossman — are reportedly doing the math on Indiana.
Nobody who has been watching is surprised. Indiana answered the phone, offered a deal, and charges less for the privilege of existing.
Indiana could soon have two NFL teams. Illinois would have none.
Virginia is the latest state to discover that copying California’s homework gets you California’s grade. Governor Abigail Spanberger ran as a centrist, won as a moderate, and has governed as though Sacramento sent her a syllabus.
Six weeks into her tenure, Boeing announced it was leaving the state. The symbolism is poetic in a sort of “last chopper out of Saigon” way.
Virginia had spent years cultivating a reputation as a business-friendly alternative to the Northeast’s regulatory maze. That reputation is now under active revision.
The pattern is too consistent to be coincidental. Blue-state governors adopt California’s policy playbook — high taxes, expansive spending, confident messaging, and a studied indifference to people packing boxes — and then discover with apparent surprise that it reliably produces California’s results.
Illinois followed the template faithfully and got the same results, accordingly. Virginia appears to be a quick study of all the wrong lessons. Colorado is earlier in the sequence, which means it still has options the other two have already foreclosed.
The Newsom model has become a franchise. What California took decades to wreck, its imitators are now wrecking on an accelerated timeline.
John Mac Ghlionn is an essayist and commentator who covers politics and culture.
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