Considering the implications of Colorado’s primary election results and their proof sanity still reigns across much of the Centennial State just as the national Democratic party faces a long-simmering intramural meltdown may confuse the trees for the forest. A presidential candidacy premised on the notion voters will prefer an intermittently lucid incumbent over a once-rejected and psychotically mendacious blowhard seems an ill-advised gamble.

If “small d” democracy is truly at stake this year, the Democratic Party should release its delegates to select a replacement nominee. Yes, Joe Biden will have to summon the courage shown by Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and step away from his campaign because losing is not an option. A refusal to do so will betray those who most admire him.

In Colorado, the political center held June 25. Both parties moved a long way toward excluding the bulk of their fringe candidates from the general election ballot. It’s unlikely Republicans will recapture the majority in either chamber as they face another few years restoring their political apparatus as a functional political organization. The chances of a more collegial legislative atmosphere appears increasingly possible, particularly as a lame-duck governor’s propensity for twisting arms among Democrats will face newfound resistance — especially if Republicans are seeking compromise rather than the hollow satisfactions of knee-jerk resistance. House Speaker Julie McCluskie seems nearly certain to return in that role, with a session’s experience behind her, even if commanding a somewhat reduced majority. She’s likely to prove smarter, tougher and less pliable as only the second speaker to serve four years since term limits kicked in.

On the Senate side, if majority leader Robert Rodriguez moves up to Senate president, he has already shown a readiness to buck Gov. Jared Polis’s episodic libertarian proclivities. We can expect Barb Kirkmeyer, Greeley Republican, to leverage her position on the Joint Budget Committee where she may be the most effective member in the upper chamber. There will be far more visible friction between the first and second floors at the Capitol. Polis has shrewdly converted an institutionally “weak governor” constitutional framework to his own advantage — but on his way to the exit in 2026 his influence will wane. The legislature will reassert its authority and ignore the Boulder staffers allergic to consulting with stakeholders, convinced they are smarter than everyone else at the Capitol. Just wait for the finger pointing when voters smack them down on property taxes come November.

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The defenestration of Elisabeth Epps and Tim Hernandez by Denver Democrats attracted the most comment following their primary defeats. Both had drawn attention for their full-throated support of the Hamas rebellion in Gaza — Hernandez going so far as to place a Palestinian flag on his desk in the House chamber. Epps also rocked legislative leadership with her objection to the apparently longstanding practice of secret meetings. Together with Bob Marshall of Highlands Ranch, they objected to the violation of the open meetings statutes. To say Epps is not a team player barely captures her chip-on-my-shoulder style. She squawked when reassigned to a different Capitol office and refused to use her newly assigned space, frequently boycotting committee hearings and prompting one colleague to label her a “neurotic narcissist.”

Hernandez is whining he was ousted by a conspiracy of capitalist forces, hyper-conservatives unwilling to share their wealth with the oppressed Coloradans he has tried to champion. Though there were hundreds of thousands of dark-money dollars dumped into his race, he fails to recognize the source of this animosity can be viewed in his mirror. This blindness and his failure to reach beyond a tight circle of Democratic socialists doomed his campaign. His northwest Denver district is the same one I represented 40 years ago. The West Colfax neighborhood was the heart of the Denver Jewish community until the 1970s when many younger families moved to Hilltop in Epps’s district. Golda Meier attended North High School before emigrating to Israel. I learned on election night the current rabbi on the Colfax corridor reached out twice to meet with Hernandez and never had his calls returned. It probably didn’t help with voters he bragged about being fired from his last three jobs. It’s all well and good to speak truth to power, but you wonder whether he wasn’t the problem.

On a positive note, the new District 4 Rep. Cecelia Espenoza, a retired immigration judge, will prove a considerable asset at the General Assembly. It will be helpful to have someone serving in the legislature who actually understands how the immigration system works and where it fails. She has a clever proposal for how Colorado can legally put immigrants without green cards to work. Mayor Mike Johnston should sit down with her. Northside cancel culture warrior and Sen.Julie Gonzales loudly campaigned for Hernandez. As Pamela Paul noted recently in the New York Times, “If liberals are denounced for ‘punching left’ when they express a reasonable difference of opinion, potentially winning ideas are banished.” There is likely to be a lot less of that under the Gold Dome in 2025.

Nor will there be any enthusiasm for the claim Republicans have been losing elections in Colorado because they haven’t moved far enough right. Dave Williams, Ron Hanks and their fellow MAGA zealots took a pounding. Next up will be sacking Williams as party chairman — a move sure to be popular with the 14 moderate Republicans who defeated hyper-conservatives endorsed by Williams and his claque. Squabbles over what Paul identifies as the political “narcissism of small differences” should lose their purchase on both sides of the aisle. Who knows, we may even witness a reasoned conversation about whether the introduction of the wolf as a “keystone wilderness predator” is working out as advertised. Colorado would benefit if we abandoned efforts on both sides of the aisle to legislate that which cannot be legislated.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.