Just when you thought that every of out-of-state publication hadrun a story on the election results in Colorado, along comes the L.A. Weekly with a pretty good one. Once you get past the author’s mediations on the time he lived in Boulder, you get some pretty good insights like this:

Although Colorado has traditionally fallen in line with the Rocky Mountain retro states, the explosive growth seen in recent years — including an influx of residents from California and the Northeast — has created a unique blend of metro ideals melded with a strong desire by retro residents to preserve the quality-of-life elements serving as the initial catalyst. As it happened, the moderate Democrats best appealed to each side’s sensibilities.

This is something important for Western Democrats to consider. Yes, Democrats have been doing better in Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and Montana. But those states are all different from each other. For one thing, there is a booming urban component to the mix in Colorado and Arizona (largely related to high tech industries) that is small to nonexistent in Wyoming and Montana. So while Western Democrats do well to note the differences between our region and the rest of the country, they should also note the important differences among the various Western states themselves.