With Republicans holding a 53-47 Senate majority, Democrats don’t have the votes to stop most of Trump’s agenda. But liberal and progressive activists have pressured Democratic senators, including U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, to do more to erect procedural hurdles, slow down Senate business and vote in blanket opposition to Trump nominees as a protest against the executive branch’s unprecedented power grab.
The administration’s actions have included
When it comes to Senate floor votes, neither Hickenlooper nor Bennet has heeded the activists’ calls. They have been among the Senate Democrats most likely to back Trump’s Cabinet picks, voting to confirm eight and 10 nominees, respectively, out of the 21 selected so far.
A more comprehensive
database tracking 2025 Senate votes, including votes on lower-level appointees, procedural motions and legislation, tells a similar story. The tracker, maintained by Massachusetts-based progressive organizer Jonathan Cohn, tallied 155 votes by the full Senate through March 27.
When collated with 2024 election results, this vote data shows a clear, unsurprising pattern: Senate Democrats representing swing states are more likely than those in safe blue seats to cross the aisle and back Trump’s nominees and legislative priorities. For example, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona — elected narrowly in a state that Trump won by more than 5 percentage points last year — has voted with Republicans on almost 33% in 2025, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren of deep-blue Massachusetts has done so just 3% of the time.
The single biggest exception to this rule? Colorado and its moderate Senate duo, who have voted with Trump and their GOP colleagues roughly a quarter of the time while representing a state that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris by 11 percentage points in the 2024 election.
Through the end of March, Hickenlooper — who is serving his first six-year term and up for reelection in 2026 — has been the Democratic caucus’ number one outlier, voting with Trump’s agenda almost twice as often as would be expected, based on the state’s electorate. Bennet ranks sixth out of 47 Senate Democrats by the same metric.
In comparative terms, the Centennial State finds itself in 2025 with the electorate of true-blue Illinois, but the Senate representation of purplish-red Arizona. No other state with two Democratic senators has such a large disconnect between its partisan vote share and its Senate representation. No other state besides New Hampshire even comes close.
As Democrats and independents across Colorado have begun mobilizing in recent months to oppose Trump’s agenda, their disconnect with Hickenlooper and Bennet has been on full display on social media, at
town halls and demonstrations and in a daily deluge of calls and messages to the senators’ offices.
Bennet has
defended his votes to confirm some Trump appointees — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright — on the grounds that maintaining good relationships with leaders of important executive-branch agencies will help his constituents more than a stance of blanket opposition. He’s also argued that Democrats, after being “repudiated” in the 2024 election, have to “select our battles.”
A rapid political evolution
If such messages no longer resonate the way they once did with Colorado’s Democratic base, it’s largely because of the state’s rapid political evolution in recent years.
Both of Colorado’s senators entered state politics more than 20 years ago — Hickenlooper as a successful restaurateur elected mayor of Denver in 2003, and Bennet, a friend and fellow Wesleyan University graduate, as his chief of staff. At the time, Colorado was a traditional battleground that had veered to the right: Attorney General Ken Salazar was the only statewide Democratic elected official in a state otherwise dominated by Republicans.
As recently as 2016 — when Hickenlooper and Bennet were in their second terms as Colorado governor and U.S. senator, respectively — Colorado had tilted towards Democrats but could still lay claim to bellwether status, with Republicans like former U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner able to win narrowly in favorable conditions for the GOP. But Trump’s rise abruptly ended that: In the last eight years, Democrats have gone 15 for 15 in statewide elections, winning their races by an average of more than 10 percentage points.
Much of that shift has been driven by voters in fast-growing cities and
suburbs along the Front Range. Younger, left-leaning voters have moved to the state in droves. In 2024, even as Democrats lost ground in many states across the country, the party fared relatively well in Colorado, maintaining wide leads among suburban voters and even making gains in more rural areas on the Western Slope.
Political alignments like this don’t last forever. But in an era of nationally polarized politics, Trump has tanked the GOP’s electoral fortunes in Colorado, and for now, a wide gap — partly generational, partly ideological, but perhaps above all attitudinal — has opened up between the state’s two senators and many of its voters.
“Everyone out here, everyone I know — moderates, hardcore left people — they want someone who will fight,” Greeley resident Robert Casey told Bennet at a recent town hall. “And we need that.”
The Trendline offers analysis on public policy in Colorado. Articles explore ways to think about the news based on research, history and other important context, helping Coloradans connect the headlines to the big picture.
Sheila Fambro, Viles Dorsainvil and Denise Williams at the Haitian Community Help and Support Center. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)