The West wants a seat at the table. The head of the table.

There are other reasons so many Westerners are running. One of the big ones is the change in primary schedule. California moved its primary from June to Super Tuesday in early March, as did Colorado. Now they will be among the first states to vote after the four earliest states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, giving them more of a say in who the early front-runners are. Don’t be surprised if Western primary voters favor homies.

Another reason is that 100 years ago, states west of the Rocky Mountains accounted for 55 electoral votes. Because of population shifts, they now account for 128 electoral votes, just under half of the 270 needed to win the White House.

And lastly, the West is far, far away from Washington, D.C., which is the laser focus of an incredible amount of hostility right now. It just might be that the farther a Democratic candidate is from the white-hot center of political dysfunction, the better this election season.

Bennet has said it was his disgust with the way the nation’s capital operates that sparked his desire to run. He has focused his campaign on the theme of making the federal government, especially Congress, functional again.

The rise of the Rockies

So the West has become kind of brand for these candidates to wear – the native home of optimism and innovation, where the American idea still works and the American dream is alive and well.

It’s a playbook the Republicans have employed successfully for many years, built around the idea of frontier individualism. Hickenlooper, for one, is trying to update that myth to one of frontier collaboration and a pragmatic nonpartisanship he believes thrives in the West.

“I think the West has always had a special place in the soul of America,” Hickenlooper said in announcing his bid. “People talk about the frontiersman, the fur trappers. What they forget about is that the fur-trappers rarely went out on their own, they went out in teams,” he said in an interview when he was still considering a bid late last year. “There’s a history of collaboration out here. There were a heck of a lot more barn-raisings than there ever were shootouts.”

We’ll soon find out if this new Democratic reinterpretation of the Western myth is a political idea whose time has come.

Regardless, I doubt the powerhouse West will wait much longer before it demands its day on the national stage.