“20 years ago Colorado was a Red state and thriving,” the State Leadership Initiative posted late last week. “10 years ago liberals were writing pieces about how Colorado was the next Silicon Valley.” And now CBS News reports that “Colorado is losing businesses and jobs at an alarming rate.”
This was the hope, according to Denver-based 5280 magazine in 2020: “With another tech company setting up an office in Denver, the state could become a magnet for Silicon Valley firms and other prestigious businesses during the worst economic climate in nearly a century.”
Instead of Silicon Mountain, Colorado is quickly becoming “an economic backwater,” as SLI put it, “an omen for what happens when Red states go blue.”
It seems like only last week [It was just last week, Steve —Editor] I shared the schadenfreudelicious tale of how one TDS-suffering Delaware judge launched an exodus of big-name firms led by Elon Musk. Today, I must share similar news about my once-beloved home state of Colorado.
“The Colorado Chamber of Commerce has been sounding an alarm for years about excessive regulation,” CBS reported, and “the Chamber also said that companies are also relocating out-of-state.” According to the story, “since 2019, 98 companies have either left the state, expanded elsewhere, or scrapped plans to move here.” In the last four years, we’ve lost a total of 34 corporate headquarters, too.
The most recent big name to leave is Palantir, the AI firm recently touted by President Donald Trump for its invaluable contributions to Operation Epic Fury. With basically zero fanfare, the company announced last week that it’s moved its HQ to Miami.
“We are going to be hurting Colordans not just now, but the next generation, the next generation after that. And we just want to course correct,” tech entrepreneur and investor Dan Caruso wrote to Democrat Gov. Jared Polis in a letter signed by more than 200 business and civic leaders.
Polis and the Democrat-dominated statehouse made some polite noises about maybe looking into something resembling deregulation someday soonish, but Colorado requires so much more.
Let’s go back to something I wrote almost exactly one year ago, when we looked at what Colorado was like before and after 2018, the year Democrats took full control of the state government.
Previously, Colorado was:
- Third in the nation for personal income growth.
- A regulatory burden in the lower half of all states.
- Tied for second-lowest unemployment in 2017 at 2.7% — and that wasn’t unusual.
- Job growth of 2.4% in 2017 — typical for a state that was regularly in the top ten.
- A top-10 destination for people moving in from other states.
And this is my state on Democrats, all taken from the 2024 report card published in early ’25 by the Denver Gazette:
- 39th in the nation for personal income growth.
- Sixth-worst regulatory burden in the nation.
- In March, we had the second-highest unemployment rate (not an atypical month).
- Job-growth rate of 0.17% (March 2024-March 2025), 43rd in the nation.
- A bottom-10 destination for people moving in from other states.
2025 was largely more of the same.
Polis leaves office in January of next year, likely to be replaced by either Sen. Michael Bennet or Attorney General Phil Weiser. They’re both Democrats, and both promise more of the same policies that have already turned the promise of Silicon Mountain into the sad reality of a failing blue state.
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