Nicolais: Passage of anti-transgender measures soured extraordinary election for Democrats

While most of Colorado’s Democratic coalition cheered and whooped through Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, betrayal and sadness crept over the LGBTQ community and its allies. 

Propositions 134 and 135, targeted discrimination against the transgender community, both passed. White many states have adopted similar policies, no blue state had voters emboss a stamp of approval until Colorado and Washington did this year.

As a longtime advocate for equal rights, it twisted my stomach like rotten chicken marinated in champagne. 

A week before Election Day, I wrote a column warning Coloradans that these two measures risked returning Colorado to the days when the country knew us as the “Hate State.” Voters did not take heed and passed the measures anyway. 

They allowed far-right antagonists to lull them into a corner with no easy exits. The price is inflicting great harm on our most vulnerable population.

The foreboding dread is only intensified by the environment in which it happened. The 2026 election marked a high tide for liberal and progressive candidates. Democrats won shocking majorities across the country. Not only did they win a majority in the U.S. House far larger than any pre-election prognosticators envisioned, but they won a commanding lead in the U.S. Senate. At the beginning of the year the former seemed questionable and the latter impossible.

Colorado did not represent an exception. Democratic congressional candidates likely won seven of eight races — give up the ghost, Soon-To-Be-No-Longer-Rep. Lauren Boebert — and nearly pulled off a sweep. 

Statewide candidates finished a long-presumed sweep and the legislative chambers achieved the Holy Grail of supermajorities in each. Colorado even passed a graduated income tax measure, the greatest boogeyman of them all for the ultrarich and the conservative groups they puppet-master.

And yet.

When I wrote about Propositions 134 and 135 I compared the people running them to wolves circling a herd of elk waiting to single one out. Apparently there were several wolves running around in elk’s clothing.

For example, a liberal woman our family knows spent the past two years lamenting the bigoted policies of President Donald Trump, marching in No Kings rallies and voting for a straight ticket of Democratic candidates. She also voted for Propositions 134 and 135.

In the longterm, that is the battle that must be fought. Advocates and allies must better educate and communicate with people like her. She bought into the fear-mongering and false-narratives. She pictured “boys” in girls’ locker rooms as the hate-peddlers planned. She gave in to fear and unease created by slick mailers and television commercials.

By the time ballot measures roll around, it is too late. Advocates must engage in a years- and decades-long counter message. 

That means methodically exposing the lies and distortions of anti-transgender activists. The locker room hysteria makes a good case in point: it is easily discredited with a little common sense. 

Transgender teens are almost universally hyper-fixated on their own bodies and how others perceive them; it is definitionally the dysphoria they are in the middle of working through. 

Consequently locker rooms can become places of unease and anxiety, not a place to leer at other teens. In many schools, transgender teens seek out alternative dressing locations where they feel safe from the prying, judgmental eyes of others.

In the short term, Propositions 134 and 135 undercut the new governor and legislative majorities before ever being sworn into office. Both are statutory and can be changed by legislative action. 

A huge portion of the Democratic base find the measures wholly unacceptable. I would be shocked if a Venn Diagram of “No” voters for those ballot measures (1.25 million) and those who voted for Phil Weiser (1.61 million) did not appear as one circle almost entirely contained in, and filling the vast majority of, another circle. 

That means taking no action is not an option. Not if Weiser does not want to find himself on the same approval trajectory within the party as his predecessor: Jared Polis.

But if Weiser and legislative leaders start tinkering with the measures to undercut them through implementation, they open themselves up to claims that they subverted the will of the people or undermined democracy. That is not a guess. Proponents of the ballot measures have issued prophylactic statements saying just that.

Effectively, 350,000 Weiser voters set him up in a no-win scenario before he could measure the drapes. 

I am sure that Weiser and the newly elected Democratic legislative leadership (Sen. James Coleman and Rep. Jennifer Bacon) must be crossing their fingers, avoiding cracks in the sidewalk and carrying around duffel bags of lucky rabbits’ feet hoping advocacy groups file an immediate lawsuit to forestall implementation of Propositions 134 and 135. 

Letting the courts do the heavy lifting would be a welcome relief. Just as the Colorado Supreme Court vacated Amendment 2 three decades ago, they must hope the halls of justice take this headache out of their lap.

If not, it has to be the first thing on their docket when they are sworn in and the legislative session begins in January. The best course of action would be to kill them early and outright. Doing otherwise risks breathing life into the issue for months. The longer it goes unresolved, the closer to 2028 we get. That means the pressure will only grow from both sides of the aisle.

Colorado did not need to go down this path. It did not need to repeat the mistakes of the past. But now that we have, advocates and allies cannot stand idly. Anything and everything must be done to make sure that Propositions 134 and 135 do not find a single day of unopposed acceptance. That is how we won in the 1990s, and that is how we will win again today.

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