Colorado group pursues ballot measure to pave the way for a new congressional map

A new Colorado group launched an effort Wednesday to place an initiative on the ballot this year to pave the way for a new congressional map that would favor Democrats for the 2028 and 2030 elections.

Coloradans for a Level Playing Field, a group that formed earlier this month, is hoping voters will approve a measure to temporarily bypass the state’s independent redistricting commission as a response to Republican-led states redrawing maps over the last year.

“No one wanted to have to take this action — independent redistricting is the ideal,” the group’s spokesperson, Curtis Hubbard, said in a statement. “We can sit back and do nothing, or we can take action to approve temporary maps that will help keep our elections on a level playing field.”

The group is proposing several measures for the November ballot. The ultimate goal is to enact a redrawn congressional map that would create seven Democratic-leaning districts and one Republican-leaning district for the next two election cycles, and then reimpose an independent redistricting commission after the 2030 census. The state’s congressional delegation is currently split evenly between the two parties.

The group will need to gather roughly 125,000 signatures for one of the initiatives to qualify for the ballot.

Colorado is just the latest state to enter the mid-decade redistricting fight. The effort comes on the heels of new maps going into place ahead of the midterm elections in Republican-controlled states like Texas, Missouri and North Carolina. Florida Republicans are set to pursue their own redistricting effort this spring.

Democratic-led states have already responded, with California voters last year approving a new map and Virginia set to hold a special election this spring in which voters will decide on a redistricting constitutional amendment.

In 2018, Colorado voters approved a measure creating an independent redistricting commission that is charged with redrawing the state’s congressional boundaries with an eye toward creating politically competitive districts.

One of the Republican-held seats, Colorado’s 8th District, serves as one of the most competitive districts in the U.S. The map proposed by Coloradans for a Level Playing Field would make Colorado’s 8th District lean more heavily toward Democrats. GOP Rep. Gabe Evans won that seat by less than 1 percentage point in 2024, the same year that Trump carried the district by less than 2 percentage points, according to an analysis by the NBC News Decision Desk.

The proposed map would leave one Republican-leaning district in the state, Colorado’s 4th, which is currently represented by GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert.

A spokesperson for Coloradans for a Level Playing Field declined to answer questions from NBC News about who is leading the group and how the effort came about.