For the first time in nearly 15 years, 2 registered Democrats hold seats on Greeley City Council. What does that mean for Greeley's political future?

By Trenton Sperry

For the first time since 2007, registered Democrats hold at least two elected seats on the seven-person Greeley City Council.

Elections for council are officially nonpartisan, but on Nov. 2, registered Democrat Deborah DeBoutez defeated registered Republican Louisa Andersen and registered Libertarian Sean Short to become a council member for Greeley’s Ward II, which encompasses central and southeast Greeley. Andersen was endorsed by U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Windsor.

With registered Democrat Tommy Butler representing Greeley’s Ward I, which covers central and northeast Greeley, 2021 could become a sign that progressives are returning to power, at least somewhat, in a city long controlled by conservative interests.

Graphic shows evolving partisanship on Greeley City Council. Made by Trenton Sperry.

“I was particularly excited Deb won,” Butler told The Optimist on Nov. 8. “Really it was an interesting election. … I mean, we had some really great Democrats running (in other races), and they didn’t make it across the finish line.”

Butler was mostly referring to how a conservative slate of candidates for the Greeley-Evans School District 6 board swept into power in this election, too, taking three of the four available seats and knocking out two Democratic incumbents. Taylor Sullivan, Rob Norwood, and Kyle Bentley sent out campaign literature appearing together with incumbent Michael Mathews. Those four candidates garnered the most votes among 10 possible options, and their victories corresponded with a national wave of conservative anger over coronavirus restrictions like mask mandates in schools, the purported teaching of critical race theory in classrooms, and other reactionary themes.

So is Greeley on the cusp of a progressive bloom, or will its conservative roots hold firm? Its history could shed some light on where its politics will go from here.

How Dems surged before

Greeley has long followed Weld County’s conservative leanings in political matters, said Seth Masket, a political scientist and director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver.

“Greeley is a city, and cities do tend to have somewhat left-leaning politics,” Masket said. “But it’s not a particularly large city, and just by who’s up there and sort of the agricultural leaning of the place, it’s generally been Republican-leaning.”

But in the 2003 election, Democrats dominated the city council races here. Tom Selders, a former Greeley councilman, was elected mayor. Selders at the time was registered as a Republican, but today he’s a registered Democrat. Registered Democrat Pam Shaddock joined Selders in celebration on election night, as she rolled to a win in one of the city’s two at-large council races. Their voting bloc was strengthened by Democrat Debbie Pilch, who represented Greeley’s Ward IV, and unaffiliated Councilman Don Feldhaus, who represented Ward III.

With a majority on the council, the four worked in early 2005 to push out the city manager, registered Republican Leonard Wiest, although an official vote on the effort was never taken. The move ignited controversy at the time, especially given the transparency issues involved, and the backlash was large enough that registered Republican Bill Gillard attempted to recall Selders and Shaddock, though he failed to gather enough signatures to force an election. By November 2005, though, the controversy over the firing seemed to have diminished; Selders won re-election with 67% of the vote, and Feldhaus was re-elected with 55%.

48 hours change Greeley

At 7:30 a.m. Dec. 12, 2006, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, entered what was then the Swift & Co. beef processing plant in Greeley and began a sweep to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. Five other Swift meatpacking plants across the country were raided at the same time in a crackdown over a “large-scale identity theft scheme,” ICE announced, in what was dubbed Operation Wagon Train.

More than 260 employees filled six buses and several large vans at the Greeley plant. They were moved to an ICE holding facility in Denver. Eleven were charged that day.

According to reports from The Greeley Tribune at the time, Leasa Arguijo stood outside the plant that morning beside her 17-year-old daughter, Rocenda Arenas, who wept. Arenas had a 3-month-old baby. Leasa held a sign that read, “Good-bye to my Daddy.”

“I’m ashamed to be a U.S. citizen,” Leasa told The Tribune. “This baby is innocent. Now he will suffer.”

Children were left waiting at school for parents who never arrived to pick them up, and frantic calls from Greeley’s Latino residents overwhelmed nonprofit groups.

The Greeley plant’s production dropped by half in the aftermath of the raid, according to news reports at the time, and employees were instructed to report for weekend shifts in addition to the expanded 10-hour shifts they were suddenly assigned, The Associated Press reported in December 2006.

“This whole event has had a profound impact on the community,” Father Bernie Schmitz, then the pastor at Our Lady of Peace Catholic church in Greeley, told The AP that month. “It’s like a shock and you’re trying to figure out how to recover from that.”

Claudia Mendoza told The AP exactly what impact the raid had on the Latino community in Greeley.

“Now, we are all afraid,” she said.

A trip to D.C., and anger re-ignited

About five months after the raid, Selders, Greeley’s mayor, made a trip to Washington, D.C. He spoke to lawmakers about the need for immigration policies that work, according to Denver Post reports at the time, and the social turmoil the raid caused in the city.

That move irked many in Greeley.

“He didn’t represent me when he went to Washington, and he didn’t represent a lot of people in Greeley,” Ed Clark, then a former Greeley police officer, told The AP on Nov. 7, 2007.

Clark, a registered Republican who now occupies one of Greeley’s at-large council seats, had filed to run for an at-large seat on the Greeley City Council in 2007, but he submitted new paperwork to run for mayor following Selders’ visit to D.C. He was supported in the race by then-Weld District Attorney Ken Buck, and Clark defeated Selders with 61% of the vote.

“(Voters) were trying to say Greeley is prime for a change, that we need to go in a new direction and we need new leadership,” Clark told The AP.

Democrat Shaddock ran for and won Democrat Pilch’s Ward IV seat in the 2007 election, but Republicans swept into power: Registered Republican Maria Secrest replaced Shaddock in one of the city’s at-large seats, giving the GOP a 5-2 majority over Democrat Shaddock and unaffiliated Feldhaus.

It’s taken Democrats years to recover.

The long road back

In April 2009, Shaddock resigned her seat in Ward IV to work for then-U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat who was elected in Colorado in the Democratic surge of 2008, which saw the historic election of President Barack Obama.

Greeley experienced little to nothing of the national Democratic wave, though, at least as it pertained to local elections. Following Shaddock’s departure, Republicans controlled all seven seats on the Greeley City Council from 2009-15. (Registered Republican John Gates replaced unaffiliated Councilman Feldhaus in Ward III following the 2009 election. Gates is currently Greeley’s mayor.)

In the 2015 election, Democrat Rochelle Galindo won the Ward I seat, which encompasses central and northeast Greeley and which historically has contained one of the largest shares of the city’s Latino residents. She ran unopposed.

Galindo was joined on the council in January 2018 by registered Democrat Stacy Suniga, who was appointed to an at-large seat. But the two Democrats’ overlap on the council was short-lived. Galindo resigned her seat on the council four months later so she could run for Colorado’s House District 50, a seat she won but eventually resigned amid scandal. A Republican was appointed to Galindo’s seat in Ward I, and Republicans again had a 6-1 majority.

In November 2019, registered Democrat Butler won the Ward I seat back to Democrats, but Suniga lost her election effort to Republican Kristin Zasada in a close contest; Suniga lost by 15 votes following a recount.

So do this year’s results even matter?

Because Greeley’s city council races are officially nonpartisan, it can be argued that this year’s election and its partisan outcome don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Masket, the DU political scientist, said it can be hard for voters to take partisanship into account when making decisions in nonpartisan races. Instead, they look for other ways to determine whose bubble to fill.

“They’re not necessarily looking through the ballot to see if they can figure out who the Republicans and who the Democrats are,” he said. “On the other hand, just pretty much by definition, they don’t know much about the candidates in those races, and they don’t know too much about the issues those people face. So, they’re looking for other cues out there to help them make those decisions.

“One of those is endorsements. They’re looking to see who is backing various candidates. If it’s a Republican-leaning voter and they see a lot of people who are prominent in the area Republican Party who are backing this someone, it doesn’t necessarily say to them, ‘Oh good, this is clearly the Republican,’ but it does say, ‘This is someone I can trust on the issues I care about.’ And that’s often enough to make a decision.”

But Butler said he thinks Greeley voters pay more attention to party registration than they’re liable to admit, even in officially nonpartisan races.

“At the end of the day, we always say that it’s a nonpartisan race, but (candidates) have partisanship and that does lead to policy,” he said. “I mean, I ran as a proud Democrat. I didn’t walk away from it. I put that I was endorsed by the Weld County Democratic Party on my literature, because at the time there was only one Democrat on the city council and I knew Ward I was more liberal. So, I ran as who I was, and it was honestly one of the most freeing things I could have done. … That slate that won for the school board ran as a conservative slate. They did not shy away from who they were, either. And that turns out specific voters.”

National polarization filters down

Masket said municipal and school board races becoming hyperpartisan is part of a multifaceted trend. It starts, he said, with a relatively new phenomenon.

“You have a number of conservative-leaning groups -- anywhere from media organizations to Proud Boys -- who are encouraging right-wing activists to show up at school board meetings and to show up at city council meetings and to protest masking rules and protest other COVID restrictions and to try to really intimidate school board members,” he said. “That’s been a particular tactic we’ve seen in lots of different areas of the country.”

The District 6 school board in fact experienced such protests. The board in late August voted unanimously to require masks for pre-K through eighth-grade students and staff indoors. There were protestors at that and subsequent meetings, a relatively rare sight at typically benign bureaucratic proceedings.

Masket said hot-button cultural issues becoming partisan matters can make issues with a generally national focus suddenly prominent in small cities like Greeley.

“Education is one of those (issues) which is not traditionally a major national issue,” he said. “But when groups throw around terms like critical race theory and parental choice and things like that, that’s a way of sort of bringing a national political frame to local politics. And (voters) can hear about that from the candidates and they can see some of the local news coverage about who is sort of throwing around those buzzwords that seem to resonate a lot with their national partisan instincts.”

From his standpoint, Masket sees a decline in local legacy media driving this trend.

“Most of the news that people are getting about politics starts with a national focus in a way that it didn’t really use to,” he said. “And there’s a story in there about declining local media, the decline in local newspapers, and most of the remaining media resources going to national sources like The New York Times or The Washington Post or Fox News or CNN. There’s obviously still some local news, but for the most part when people are informed about politics, informed about what’s going on in government, the first story they hear is about the national world and national party divisions. That just takes up a lot of space, and they end up seeing all local politics through that same window.”

What the future holds

Registered Democrat DeBoutez’s victory should give Democrats cause for hope during the next decade, Butler argued. Combined with Greeley’s movement from a solidly Republican congressional district to a new, highly competitive one following the redistricting process this summer, the city’s politics could be primed for a shift not seen since 2003.

“I think long-term Greeley is going to become more liberal, it’s going to become more progressive,” Butler said. “It’s a growing city. Weld County itself is becoming slightly more liberal over time. … It’s one of those things where, yeah, we’ve got the voters here that want a liberal future, that want to elect a liberal, we just don’t turn them out in off years.”

Masket generally agreed, though he cautioned it’s hard to predict the future. Still, he said, Greeley’s growth and its relatively large Latino population would seem to make it a region primed for political change.

“The trend in the state is that as the Latino population increases, they tend to vote more and they tend to vote more Democratic,” he said. “So that’s a reason to think that at least in (the Greeley area) things might be shifting somewhat toward the Democrats.”

Take, for example, the recently crafted 8th Congressional District, which includes Greeley. Colorado gets to add a representative in Congress following the U.S. Census count because of massive population growth. The newly created district has the largest Latino population of Colorado’s new districts, and it will elect its first representative next year. The 8th Congressional District is also Colorado’s most competitive from a partisan standpoint; it leans Republican by about 3 percentage points, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, a national politics blog.

“When the 7th District was drawn 20 years ago, it was designed to be as neutral as possible,” Masket said. “It was a third Democrat, a third Republican, a third unaffiliated. Over time, just because of who moved there, it just trended leftward and became a fairly Democratic district. So we could see a similar trajectory for the 8th.”

But does a growth in population automatically mean a political sea change?

“It usually means some kind of change,” Masket said. “It really depends on who’s driving that population growth.

“The population growth in Colorado really over the last two decades is a big part of what turned this state from a reliably red-leaning state, at least in presidential elections, to a fairly blue-leaning one. And this is because of people moving here -- a lot from the West Coast -- and a somewhat growing Latino population. The state became bluer as a result of who moved here. And that can certainly happen within the state, at the county level, as well.”

So, where will Democrats likely be on offense this decade, and where will Republicans try to prevent progressive gains? Butler said redistricting changed everything, and that the map is now wide open.

“I think the biggest gains are going to come from congressional money being involved in this whole thing,” he said. “When you’re spending a bunch to turn out voters and you remind them to vote down-ballot, you end up winning races you wouldn’t have normally won. I think we have real opportunities at the county commissioner level, in (state Senate District) 13, and then keeping (state House District) 50. … And, yeah, I think the right at-large (city council) candidate can definitely win in Greeley.”