From our September print issue: Eli Sanders on how Mark and Tom Udall are changing the face of the Democratic Party in the Mountain West:
Tom Udall is standing at a rural gas station in New Mexico. He's tall like his cousin Mark but with a rounder face and a lot more brown than gray atop his head. Sagebrush and sun-baked earth recede into the distance behind him, and he's walking toward the camera with a gait that suggests he might have just ridden up to the pumps on a horse. As he walks, he explains to the viewers at home what he intends to do about high gas prices.
Here's what you don't hear Tom Udall say in this campaign commercial: "more drilling." His opponent, the oilman and former congressman, Steve Pearce, is more than happy to utter such words, but Tom Udall plays a different set of cards. "First, stop hedge-fund speculators from driving up the price of oil," he says. "Get oil companies to build new clean refineries in the U.S. to increase supply, or take away their tax breaks. And get serious about alternative energy." He sounds tough-minded and sure of himself, and he sounds angry about the price of gas, but he's channeling that anger toward faceless businessmen manipulating the energy market (read: Republicans).
That an aspiring Mountain West senator is addressing the energy issue in this way is notable and indicative of the changing issue matrix in the region. It's a complicated shift, but to broadly summarize: As economic and environmental issues have come to the fore in recent years, social issues have receded in importance in voters' minds. At the same time, as the Iraq War and other unpopular strategies backed by Republicans have sapped confidence in the Republican Party's ability to lead, more people have become interested in hearing Democratic solutions.
Read the rest of the article here.
--The Editors
