Democratic voters have told The Denver Post they’ll be sizing up 2020 presidential candidates’ ideas and history grappling with thorny issues such as climate change and race.
To help voters who aren’t as familiar with former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper we’ve put together this roundup of his position on some hot-button issues.
This will be updated as the campaign progresses.
Abortion and reproductive health
Hickenlooper is a supporter of abortion rights. However, it has never been a defining issue for him.
Instead, Hickenlooper often likes to talk about his work preventing unwanted pregnancies, especially for teens. In 2014, he celebrated a state initiative to reduce teen birth rates by providing more than 30,000 contraceptive devices at low or no cost, leading to a 40 percent drop in teen pregnancy over five years. The rate continued to drop through 2017.
Hickenlooper is a supporter of Planned Parenthood — in fact, he told a house full of Iowa Democrats that one reason he could never run on a unity ticket with former Ohio Gov. John Kasich because the Republican doesn’t support the organization.
Death penalty
Hickenlooper has famously evolved on the death penalty. Before 2013, Hickenlooper was a supporter of it. He has said that he grew up understanding the biblical lesson of an “eye for an eye.” However, after several conversations with spiritual leaders, including the former Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, and facing a decision whether to grant a man convicted of killing four at a suburban pizza parlor, he changed his mind.
However, Hickenlooper stopped short of fully commuting the killer’s death penalty, instead indefinitely postponing it. He said he wanted to strike a balance between what he thought was right and respecting the judicial process.
Hickenlooper now says he believes the death penalty is wholly unjust. Still, he never advocated for or signed a bill that would have repealed it in Colorado.
Education
The former governor has long been a champion of education reform policies that include charter schools, more rigorous national academic standards and teacher evaluations linked to standardized test results.
During several years of testing reform efforts, he held firm that students in all grades between third and 11th grade should be required to take standardized tests in order for parents to have an objective view on how their students were doing.
Hickenlooper also advocated for teacher licensure reform. However, he and his legislative partners could never mount the coalition needed to make changes.
Environment
A former geologist, Hickenlooper has regularly tried to strike a balance between protecting the environment and protecting Colorado’s oil and gas economy.
Throughout his two terms as governor, Hickenlooper pushed for tougher regulations, including developing what he calls the toughest methane gas regulations in the country. However, many environmentalists have raised concern that Hickenlooper hasn’t done enough. During his tenure, he twice fought ballot issues that would have forced oil companies to drill more than 2,000 feet from homes, schools and parks.
Still, on his way out of office, he took heat from Republican state lawmakers and the state’s auto dealership association for pushing for lower emission standards.
Green New Deal
Hickenlooper has said he supports the idea of the Green New Deal but has stopped short of embracing any specific portion of the resolution in Congress.
Guns
Hickenlooper was governor when Colorado and the nation saw some of the worst acts of gun violence in their history. This includes the Aurora theater shooting and the Sandy Hook shootings.
In response, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature passed three pieces of gun-control legislation, including universal background checks and a limit on gun magazines. (The day before Hickenlooper signed the legislation into law, a member of his own cabinet was shot at his home.)
Hickenlooper has touted this accomplishment on the campaign trail as an example of his progressive bona fides. And while the former governor has expressed no regret in signing the bills into law, he has expressed remorse for not working more collaboratively with the state’s sheriffs and rural parts of the state during the debate.
Health care
The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was just becoming law as Hickenlooper started his first term. He worked with the legislature, where one party controlled each chamber, to create the state’s own exchange.
Later in 2013, Hickenlooper opted to expand Medicaid again adding an estimated 160,000 Coloradans to the program.
Hickenlooper’s national profile rose in 2018, due in part to health care. That’s when he and Ohio Gov. Kasich teamed up to create a path toward improving the nation’s health care system amid heated debates in Washington, D.C., over Obamacare.
Their seven-page proposal advocated a broad range of goals, including keeping the federal individual mandate, streamlining bureaucracy and basing health insurance costs on a family’s finances.
Hickenlooper has been cautious about embracing a single-payer system and other public options.
Jobs and the economy
Hickenlooper was first elected governor as Colorado was still coming out of the Great Recession, and he immediately went to work promoting Colorado to businesses. By the end of his first year in office he scored a win when Arrow Electronics decided to move its headquarters from New York to suburban Denver.
Hickenlooper has also led the effort to rethink job training in Colorado. He helped start CareerWise, an apprentice program for high school students. And in 2016, working with Microsoft and foundations, Hickenlooper launched Skillful, a nonprofit that helps connect displaced workers with new training and jobs.
LGBT rights
Hickenlooper has long been a champion for LGBT rights. He often tells the story of the time when, as a brewery owner, he promoted an openly gay employee. It was in the late 1980s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic that contributed to rampant homophobia. As mayor, he worked to include protections of LGBT employees in the city.
Most famously, as governor, Hickenlooper called a special session of the legislature in 2012 after the Republican House speaker shut down debate on legislation that would have established civil unions in Colorado. After an election that ended Republican control of the state House, Hickenlooper signed the civil union legislation into law.