Meet the ‘balding gay Jew’ now leading America’s governors

Apparently Kamala Harris wasn’t looking for “a 49-year-old balding gay Jew from Boulder, Colorado,” to be her running mate.

That was Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’ self-deprecating description of himself — a comment that went viral — when asked about his prospects in the veepstakes.

It was classic Polis, the first openly gay person elected governor of a state, and the latest example of how the Colorado governor has painstakingly sought to build a unique national political brand.

Since being elected governor in 2018, Polis has done approximately 1,500 interviews with local and national press, using frank language and humor to guide Coloradans on Covid-19 pandemic precautions and pump up fellow Democrats on Fox News. He’s also curated an active social media profile, frequently posting on TikTok and Youtube, most infamously by dancing to Feliz Navidad.

But Polis also wants people to know that he’s serious about policy. He took on the role of chair of the National Governors Association last month, a position that will further elevate his profile outside of Colorado as Polis guides policy goals for the bipartisan group. He wants his signature issue to be helping states build education systems that better address workforce shortages.

"Governors across the board want to make sure that we’re able to successfully meet the workforce needs of today and tomorrow and that individual learners have the opportunity to support themselves and earn a good living,” Polis said in an interview with POLITICO.

Before Polis entered national politics, he capitalized on the early internet boom of the 1990s by starting several businesses that later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. Polis joined Congress in 2008 as one of its wealthiest members, serving five terms.

Polis sat down with POLITICO to discuss affordable housing, assault weapons bans, why governors make the best presidential running mates — and what advice he has for Kamala Harris in rural America.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

As a Democrat running a state with a large rural population, what advice do you have for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris about appealing to rural Americans? 

Our state is a very diverse state. In the congressional district that elected Lauren Boebert two years ago, I carried it. It’s a rural district. And that means that, yes, there were Trump-Polis voters in this district.

For me, showing up is the big one. I’ve always spent a higher percentage of our time in rural areas. When I spoke to the cattlemen in Grand Junction, they said I was the first governor to address them in a decade or so. It makes a difference. Showing up, being there and being present. You’re not going to agree on everything but people in rural areas particularly value elected officials showing up and caring about being present.

In terms of an issue frame, it’s really about including everyone in the story of American success. We want to make sure that no one is left behind because of where they live or who they are or what kind of work they do. Everybody has a strong vibrant part in America’s future.

Within the context of your education initiative as NGA chair, how do you navigate the deep schism among governors on school vouchers and take into account this party split over how to achieve the best education outcomes? 

At the National Governors’ Association, we always want to focus on something that works in Republican states and Democratic states. What I find from all my colleagues, the governors across the board, is they want to make sure we’re getting what we need out of the major investment we make in education. Are kids ready? Are individual learners ready to succeed? And in the aggregate, are we meeting the needs of the private sector and the workforce?

When we say, let’s get ready, we mean at the individual level, we mean at the statewide and national level, and how can we better look at outcomes to ensure that we’re getting it right? Education is the single biggest expenditure for every state — 20-, 30-plus [percent] of our state budget goes to K-12 education. So, governors are asking the question, what are we getting? Regardless of whether they have district-run schools or they have vouchers and charter schools, governors across the board want to make sure that we’re able to successfully meet the workforce needs of today and tomorrow and that individual learners have the opportunity to support themselves and earn a good living.

Colorado just enacted a massive housing package intended to address the affordable housing crisis. What lessons did you learn during that process that may be useful to other governors also confronting the housing issue, and how do you intend to measure success?

It was our second year that we had the great success and burst the dam on policies that remove barriers to home construction. The first year we attempted to do it in an omnibus bill and in the second where we succeeded we broke up our pro-housing agenda into seven different bills, all of which passed.

We allowed for more density to be built near transit and multi-family homes, accessory dwelling units by right, a number of different bills that remove cost, speed up the approval process and allowed more homes and apartments to be built. And so, like any product, the cost of housing is the function of supply and demand. The demand is high in Colorado because people want to live here. We don’t want to reduce the demand, people love Colorado. What we need to do is remove the artificial barriers to supply and those were mostly local zoning laws that prevented housing from being built that needed to be built, or made it very slow and costly to build that housing. We simply wanted to remove bureaucracy and paperwork, reduce legal costs and speed up housing construction in our state to help meet the demand and make sure that families can afford to live in the great state of Colorado.

There’s some frustration among progressives in Colorado that more has not been addressed through Democrats’ control of the legislature, whether it's through criminal justice reform or renter protections or banning assault weapons. To what extent do you share those frustrations and do you believe that Colorado is fulfilling its mandate from voters who reelected you in a blowout and strengthened Democrats’ margins in the legislature? 

We ran on helping to fix the housing crisis in Colorado and we made major steps last session in allowing more houses to be built. … Homes that might have taken 3-4 years to be built can be built in a year. Homes that could be single-family might now be able to house six families on that lot. So that’s what we set up in Colorado and we’re already seeing benefits over the next few years. We expect more lower-cost starter home inventory to come online in our state.

Of course, what people care about is broader than that. We issued full funding for our schools for the first time in 14 years. We increased the budget for classrooms by about $17,000. Districts are increasing teacher salaries, they’re reducing class size, they’re adding classroom supplies and special support for learners that need it.

So we are now in our second year of universal preschool, which is another key item I ran on. Every kid should be able to go to preschool. Before Colorado families had to pay for it. Now it’s free for every four year old. We moved from 28th in preschool enrollment in the country to 8th in preschool enrollment in the country, in one year, and saved families about $6,000 a year.

What’s one item on the progressive agenda that’s been left on the table and you want to see addressed in the next session?

Costs are a frustrating factor and among the many costs would be health care costs. We’ve taken some great action to reduce health care costs including a Colorado option and reinsurance that have reduced health care rates in the [Obamacare] exchange by more than 20 percent. Absolutely we need to do more to take on pharma, save people money on insurance and out-of-pocket, and I’m looking forward to working with the legislature to make more progress on saving people money with health care.

I want to ask specifically about an assault weapons ban. If Democrats do work out their differences next session and pass a ban, would you sign it? 

Look, Colorado is one of the leading states in gun safety. Just in the last two years I’ve signed bills. For instance, in Colorado before you had to be 21 to buy a pistol but you could buy a rifle at 18. We changed the age to 21 for both rifles and it was already 21 for pistols. We also added a three-day waiting period to make sure the background checks could occur and make it harder to buy a gun immediately to commit a crime. We also have some safe storage requirements. If you have kids in the house, it's the legal responsibility of the adults to make sure the guns are secured. We wanted to make an impact on reducing the tragedies that occur from guns that are inadequately stored when kids are around. We have a very strong gun safety agenda. Its part of our overall public safety agenda.

So would you go one step further and sign an assault weapons ban? 

Well we always want to get the best possible public safety improvements that we can. So we’re happy to look at the data on any particular proposal and we focused on proposals that have demonstrably reduced crime, improved public safety and protect people’s freedoms and the right to bear arms.

Colorado’s pioneering weed market has endured a major downturn that’s led to a big drop in cannabis tax revenues. What do you think should be done to try and revive this struggling industry? 

This was very predictable. Ten years ago, from Colorado’s perspective, it’s great to be the only state where it’s legal. As an American, I’d like it to be legalized nationally. So we’re now in the place where [38] states have some legal form of cannabis, so of course, less people from neighboring states and across the country would come to Colorado and purchase cannabis because it's legal in other states. It’s good policy for the country, but of course Colorado has had decreases now we’re not as special in that area. It's still a great way for the country to get rid of the black market in cannabis, generate legal tax revenues, and legitimate jobs. We still have a very strong industry in Colorado, thousands of jobs, we just surpassed a billion dollars in tax revenue.

Why do you think so many of the names of VP’s harris’ short list are governors — and who [were] you pulling for to join the ticket? 

As chair of the National Governors Association I appreciate that, I’m partial to governors. There’s a logical reasoning there. Governors are executive leaders who run the executive and administrative branches of their state. So they’re ready from day one on the executive side to be in a senior position to govern alongside the president. They face many of the challenges at the state level that we face at the federal level, and have proven a track record of leadership in getting things done.

They’re all my favorites. All the ones that show up and are active members of the governors association are my favorites. But I really think there's a lot to learn by innovations at the state level, on both sides of the aisle. We all try to learn from one another and can also assist the federal government in learning what works at the state level in the laboratories of democracy.