The highest voter turnout in the history of Aspen and Pitkin County came out Tuesday night and handed president-elect Barack Obama the largest margin of victory for any presidential candidate here.
A total of 9,845 voters hit the polls and Obama garnered 73.7 percent of the vote compared to John McCain’s 24.8 percent.
The local vote contributed to Obama winning Colorado over Republican McCain by more than 140,000 — and put the Centennial state in the Democratic column for the first time since 1992.
However, Aspen, the poster child for limousine liberalism and the birthplace of Freak Power, has not always been a lock for Democrats.
The local vote, which has risen consistently since the opening of the ski mountains and the founding of modern Aspen in the 1940s, broke for a Republican candidate as recently as 1984, when President Ronald Reagan topped Walter Mondale 3,117 to 2,293 county-wide.
The county, in fact, voted for Reagan twice.
In 1980, when Reagan ousted incumbent President Jimmy Carter, 39 percent of local voters supported him while 32.5 percent pulled the lever for Carter (independent candidate John B. Anderson hauled in 27.7 percent).
The Aspen area also went for Richard Nixon twice.
In 1968, Tricky Dick topped Democrat Hubert Humphrey with 56 percent of the county vote. Third-party candidate George Wallace, who had in the past run on segregationist platforms for other offices, even scored 156 local voters that year.
Locals chose Nixon over John F. Kennedy as well in 1960. Though Nixon lost the national election that year, he scored 58 percent of the Pitkin County vote and took Colorado.
Presidential election results evidenced a seismic local demographic change between Nixon’s 1968 victory and his 1972 landslide re-election over Democrat George McGovern.
In those four years, local voter turnout more than doubled — from 1,999 in ’68 to 4,595 in ’72 — and turned Democratic. McGovern, who lost every state in the Union except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia on an anti-war platform, won 55 percent of the surging Pitkin County vote.
In those four years, Aspen voters evolved out of Nixon’s “silent majority” into proud members of McGovern’s so-called “Amnesty, Abortion and Acid” crowd.
“1968 was just the beginning of people coming to Aspen from all over the country,” said former Aspen Mayor Bill Stirling, who moved here in 1972. “It was sort of a post-hippie place but it was growing out of the hippie movement. They were coming for the lifestyle and not to make money, they came to be on the edge of the community and near the wilderness. And they had an innovative, progressive worldview.”
Of course, those “drop-outs” are still here, many now in public office or serving as pillars of the business community. Now aged in their 60s and older, they helped serve up Obama’s electoral stomping on Tuesday.
But they were also here in 1980 and 1984 when the Reagan Revolution took hold of America and even, apparently, of Aspen.
Stirling, who served as mayor from 1983 until 1991, chalked up Reagan’s victories here as a combined result of a global economic recession that put a hurt on Aspen and the weak Democratic candidates who faced off against Reagan.
Ann Owsley, who grew up here in the 1950s and ’60s — and volunteered for the Obama campaign this year — noted that Aspen was a refuge for independent-minded drop-outs long before the post-hippie influx.
“My parents were drop-outs from suburban Connecticut,” said Owsley, noting that her father was a proud hippie-hater. “And there were the 10th Mountain Division guys like [former Aspen Times editor] Bil Dunaway and [ski industry pioneer] Fritz Benedict, who came here after serving in World War II. But this was a ranching community and we were a small town with unpaved streets.”
Owsley said she began observing a change in attitude here in 1968 — but not entirely because the Age of Aquarius crowd was moving in from New York and San Francisco.
The propagation and expansion of the Vietnam War bruised Aspen’s conscience and independent spirit, she said, and turned the community against the war and the president. “That was a sea change, in 1968, that was when you started to see candlelight vigils in the parks,” said Owsley, whose brother was killed in combat that year.
And despite Aspen’s homogeneously Caucasian population, 2008 is not the first time locals have supported an African-American candidate for president of the United States.
During Colorado’s Democratic caucuses of April 1988, enough locals caucused for Rev. Jesse Jackson to send Mayor Stirling to the National Democratic Convention as a delegate for the Rainbow Coalition founder.
On the eve of the caucuses, Jackson visited Aspen, and spoke at a fundraiser at the Hotel Jerome that brought support from such prominent Aspenites as Goldie Hawn and the late Ed Bradley.
andrew@aspendailynews.com