They’re the state’s biggest voting bloc, outnumbering Democrats by over a quarter of a million votes and Republicans by even more.

Some say they embody our maverick spirit and our Western way of bucking politics as usual. Colorado is in fact second only to Alaska in the percentage of its voters who register without a political party, and their share of the electorate is growing fast.

Officially “unaffiliated” but better known as independent, they long have had the ability to swing elections in our perennially purple state – whether by design or default – which arguably makes them the sleeping giant of Colorado politics. 

Each of the two major political parties regularly attempts to rouse them in hopes of enlisting their aid – while also mindful the giant could wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

It is, after all, the unaffiliateds who are credited with having swung Colorado to Hillary Clinton in 2016 even as their unaffiliated counterparts in some other, battleground states carried the day for Donald Trump.

Colorado’s unaffiliated voters also are said to have been instrumental, even pivotal, in bringing about last fall’s Democratic sweep of state government – a visceral response, pollsters have concluded, among independents to the Trump presidency.

Yet, if Trump is toxic to GOP efforts to woo unaffiliateds, the same bloc appeared no more likely to buy into the unsuccessful, Democrat-backed tax hikes and frack ban on last November’s ballot than were Republicans.

Their persistent presence as a political force raises wide-ranging questions for the two parties that at once court and fear them. Can their force be harnessed by either party? Or, is it more like trying to herd cats – given how they represent a political movement that, by definition, isn’t really a movement at all?

Are they principled moderates residing philosophically somewhere between the major parties, or are they at best fickle and perhaps even downright disinterested in politics altogether – voting only grudgingly because society has conditioned them to?

And just what is their place in the political pecking order by the lights of Rs and Ds? Co-equals – or cheap dates to be coaxed and flattered before Election Day and then ignored the morning after?

If it’s the latter, it may help explain a vote this year by the legislature raising the bar on unaffiliated candidates for office. Is it a case of, “We like you as voters, but as elected officeholders, not so much”?

We put those and other questions to eight players in Colorado politics who have had a stake of one kind or another in the trajectory of unaffiliated voters, and we asked them to weigh in on the points they found most compelling.

Contributors include a couple of Coloradans who ran for office unsuccessfully as unaffiliateds; one of them also is a local elected official who points out how little party affiliation matters in municipal government.

There also are a couple of prominent former state lawmakers who left their parties – one R, one D – and explain why.

There’s a respected pollster who draws some pointed conclusions about the trajectory of the unaffiliated vote, and there’s a sober appraisal of independent candidates’ prospects at the polls – by the point man for a statewide and nationwide effort, centered in Colorado, to organize and unleash the unaffiliateds.

A lot of political potential – but can it be tapped?