Yet another youthful rabble rouser from the political fringe joined Colorado’s legislature last weekend. A Democratic Party vacancy committee on Saturday picked 26-year-old Chicano activist and schoolteacher Tim Hernández to represent Denver’s House District 4 in the General Assembly through 2024. The committee’s choice probably was predictable.

Hernández had racked up endorsements from leading legislative Democrats; he uses stirring if inscrutable phrases like, “the change we must build has to be intergenerational,” as quoted by Colorado Politics, and he checks the right boxes on the progressive left’s policy punch list.

Which probably means more proposals to wreck the housing market with measures like rent control; more attempts to tie the hands of law enforcement – because Colorado’s crime rate evidently isn’t high enough – and much, much more spending.

He will replace former state Rep. Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, D-Denver, who resigned the $42,000-a-year District 4 seat after winning a $101,000-a-year post on the Denver City Council in last spring’s municipal election.

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So, things worked out well for both of them. Hernández won his first-ever public office without having to stand for election, and Gonzales-Gutierrez got a 138% pay raise.

But for the state’s ruling Democrats overall, including their standard bearer, Gov. Jared Polis, the outcome is more problematic. At least, if they are looking down the road.

They must be watching warily as Hernández joins the growing ranks of fellow Democrats who are helping define their party’s left wing, especially in the House of Representatives. Like Reps. Naquetta Ricks and Iman Jodeh, of Aurora; Jennifer Bacon, Elisabeth Epps and Javier Mabrey of Denver – the list goes on and is getting longer.

Colorado’s mainstream Democrats ought to be worried. As the legislature grows more progressive, it becomes less representative of rank-and-file Coloradans.

Polis, who has presidential ambitions, and other relatively pragmatic Democrats are aware of what fringe politics has done to the prospects of the state’s floundering GOP. Voters have peeled away amid fanciful theories about stolen elections and GOP attacks on Republicans in office because they weren’t deemed conservative enough.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board