Colorado’s Top Stories of 2019
Summary
The most covered story of 2019 was the ongoing effort to curb rising healthcare costs.
The passage and fallout from Obamacare made healthcare the most covered story of the decade as well.
A close second was coverage on schools, specifically school shootings and student mental health.
Other important Colorado political stories were the shift to all mail voting, the advent of open primaries, and the 2010 Primary.
Introduction
I must confess, it hadn’t fully dawned on me that the decade was ending until I was prompted to reflect on the biggest political story of both the year and decade by John Frank over at The Colorado Sun.
Top Story of 2019 – Baseless Opinion
If I were to stay strictly political I’d say the biggest story of 2019 was the passage of SB19-235, automatic voter registration, and HB19-1278, various modifications to the uniform election code including the expansion of voter service centers. Both pieces of legislation were transparent attempts by Democrats to make their current political advantage permanent. I could even live with this if the press didn’t consistently give Democrats a pass on the behavior. These technical bills that go ignored create permanent shifts in the political landscape.
However, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s baseless political opinions. So let’s see what the data tells us about the year’s top stories by turning their question back on them and analyzing The Colorado Sun’s own coverage.
Top Story of 2019 – Data Driven
For starters, the crew over at The Sun deserve some plaudits for their coverage. Despite being a fledgling, fully digital, outlet with a small staff they turned out thousands of articles in 2019.
I pulled down every story The Sun published in 2019 to make sure I filled any gaps in my existing database of Colorado news. The graph below shows how frequently each word appeared in the Colorado Sun’s headlines this year.
The most common word was “Polis.” As governor he touches every issue that moves through the legislature. But this is too broad, at the very least we ought to narrow things down to single categories. The best fits by that measure are: “school,” “health,” and “gas”. These were the second, third, and fifth most common headline words.
Coverage about schools might seem broad but this year had a consistent theme — school shootings. The passage of Colorado’s red flag law, the anniversary of Columbine, the concurrent suicide of a Florida woman obsessed with the massacre, and another shooting at the STEM school in Highlands Ranch kept the subject in focus throughout the year.
School shooting coverage also dovetailed with the second most covered topic of the year — healthcare. As solutions were sought for the upward march in healthcare costs, mental health resources for students came under scrutiny as potential remedies for Colorado’s twin problems with school shootings and teen suicide.
The legislative fight over oil & gas regulations made “gas” the fifth most frequent title-word in 2019. From the defeat of Prop 112 in 2018, to Democrat’s legislative end-run around the voters, to the subsequent rule-making process at various levels of government, 2019 featured plenty of coverage on the changing environment for one of Colorado’s most important industries.
Top Story of the Teens – Data Driven
To determine the top story of the decade I had turn to The Denver Post. My news database begins in 2017 so I had to scan the Denver Post for seven years of missing data. This was challenging as this was a vast amount of data, The Post web page isn’t nearly as web-friendly as The Sun’s, and The Post’s stories aren’t organized as nicely. To compensate, I opted to take a sampling of stories from The Post as opposed to the comprehensive index I had for The Sun. I went back to each day over the past decade and pulled down a few random Denver Post stories.
Sports news dominates The Denver Post’s coverage, but after winnowing this out we get a very familiar word-frequency.
The word-frequency distribution of The Denver Post’s headlines over the past decade was strikingly similar to that of The Colorado Sun’s over the past year. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?
“Senate” was the most common word. As with “Polis,” this word proved too broad as it appeared in conjunction with dozens of issues that were moving through both the national and Colorado senates over the past decade.
“School” was again the second most common word in the analysis. However, in this case the use of the word “school” was much more broad than in the Colorado Sun’s stories over the past year. Over the past decade, “school” still appeared in the context of school-shootings but was more likely to be associated with mundane stories like high school sports coverage.
“Health” was the third most common word of both the decade and 2019. The word “health” in 2019 mostly appeared around Colorado’s efforts to address rising healthcare costs. For the decade, the word was associated with the conception, passage, implementation, and fallout from Obamacare. All of which has kept the issue front-and-center in 2019 as well.
Top Story of the Teens – Informed Opinion
The consistency of healthcare coverage makes it the clear stand-out story of the The Teens. However, this stems from the passage of Obamacare which isn’t technically a Colorado political story. Despite this being a national policy the impact on Colorado can’t be denied. I myself had not one, but two insurance policies canceled in the Obamacare aftermath and my preferred provider left the consumer market altogether. Since it’s passage, state’s have been left scrambling to address one (un)intended consequence after another.
Top Story – Purely Political Runners Up
For some purely Colorado, purely political stories here are a few I think both have merit and will escape notice:
All Mail Voting – Colorado’s transition to all mail elections altered the political landscape, eroding the consistent turnout advantage that Republican’s once relied on. This marked a permanent improvement in the fortunes of Colorado Democrats.
Open Primaries – The two-party system has been struggling for a while but parties used to benefit from a rebound in membership as voters sought to participate in Primaries. Now that affiliation is no longer required, parties have been left permanently weaker. On top of reduced membership, more resources need to be spent by parties identifying and turning out favorable Unaffiliated voters.
The Nomination of Dan Maes – The decade opened with a near death sentence for Republican’s major-party status. I like to think Colorado is a trend-setter and, indeed, the anti-establishment sentiment that nominated Dan Maes would grow into a national backlash that ultimately elected Donald Trump six years later. In this same contest, the willingness of Democrat’s to play in the opposing side’s Primary marked yet another major escalation in the electoral arms-race.
Recalls, Recalls Everywhere – 2013’s successful legislative recalls showed Democrat’s that there are limits to one-party rule. While the Democrat’s turn-about in the JeffCo School Board recalls showed just how loudly money speaks. But 2019 provided the real lesson by showing that recalls are only effective given a powerful motivator and they aren’t quite as easy to pull off as their targets would have you believe.
Methodology
This analysis was done in Jupyter using Python and the newspaper, matplotlib, Beautifulsoup, nltk, textblob, and wordcloud modules. Not to mention my own random musings.
