PPC’s Top Colorado Political Stories of 2011
by elpresidente | 5:40 am, December 30, 2011 | 2 Comments
Last week, People’s Press Collective put out a call on Facebook for our readers’ suggestions for top political stories in the state of Colorado for 2011. Several dozen stories were crowdsourced, and I took the additional editorial step of combining similar stories into single entries, such as our first place story for 2011, the decennial redistricting and reapportionment battles that occurred throughout the entire year, gobbling up tons of real ink and millions of digital pixels.
We then asked survey participants to rank the stories relative to each other based on newsworthiness, recollection, or long-lasting effects. Points were awarded in reverse descending order (a first place vote was worth 27 points, second place worth 26, and so on), and a final point total calculated. Rather than exhaustive retrospective on each, a quick Google search will result in hundreds of links for the vast majority of the top stories, from old media and blogs alike. Our friends at Complete Colorado kept us up to speed on a daily basis, with a variety of sources for each of the stories listed below. Aside from our own searchable PPC archives, a quick rundown can be found on our allied blogs Colorado Peak Politics and WhoSaidYouSaid, as well as the Energy blog at the Independence Institute, the Education blog at I.I., and our entire list of contributing blogs found in the sidebar. The Denver Post Spot blog also provided coverage of many of the twists and turns of each story as well.
Here are the unscientific-but-fun-nontheless results produced by you, our readers. The number of first place votes is in parentheses.
1. Redistricting/Reapportionment 812 (9)
2. Failure of Prop 103 759 (8)
3. Lobato decision 709 (6)
4. Douglas County school vouchers 656
5. State Rep. Amy Stephens and SB200 634
6. Treasurer Walker Stapleton vs. PERA 612
7. Xcel rates and the New Energy Economy 594
8. Secretary of State Scott Gessler and voting issues 580
9. Occupy Denver/SEIU Wisconsin solidarity rally 533
10. Colorado Department of Labor and Employment report and the “green jobs” myth 522
11. Denver’s Mayoral race, Hancock’s controversy 493
12. President Obama’s poll numbers in Colorado, his Colorado visits, and Colorado as a battleground state 465
13. Fracking fracas 462
14. El Paso County fiasco 452
15. Jefferson County school board races, the “Dads” 423
The rest:
16. Sen. Suzanne Williams’ accident
17. Continued rise of independents in Colorado
18. Sen. Mike Kopp’s resignation
19. State implementation plan, regional haze, Clean Air Act compliance
20. Hickenlooper vs. Obama
21. Larry Carillo and Larimer County GOP
22. Republicans and civil unions
23. BlogCon11
24. Sen. John Morse’s notable quotables
25. Rep. Sal Pace’s “leaks”
26. Child care/sex offender lists crosscheck
27. Aurora’s mayoral race
Any results surprise you? While the results at the top aren’t all that unexpected, I found it interesting that the rather heated and intense Aurora Mayoral race–in contrast to the similarly heated and controversial Denver Mayoral race–came in dead last.
Didn’t see that one coming.
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January 1st, 2012 @ 5:17 pm
[...] fact, 3 out of 4 “Top Colorado Political Stories of 2011” directly involve Colorado’s politicized judiciary (and the remainder, the voter [...]
January 6th, 2012 @ 12:01 am
[...] fact, 3 out of 4 “Top Colorado Political Stories of 2011” directly involve Colorado’s politicized judiciary (and the remainder, the voter [...]