Voters in Colorado and across the Mountain West prioritize public land conservation over increased energy development on federal lands by a three-to-one margin, according to the annual Conservation in the West Poll released this week by Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project.

In its 15th year, the comprehensive survey of voters in eight states, conducted by a bipartisan team of pollsters, found the highest level of support yet for protecting public lands instead of boosting domestic energy extraction by opening up federal lands to oil and gas drilling.

The strong preference held in every state and across party lines, with 72% of those surveyed saying they want their members of Congress to emphasize preservation and recreation opportunities on public lands, while 24% want their elected officials to encourage production of more energy by maximizing the public lands available for responsible fossil fuel production. Even self-identified MAGA voters — more than one-third of the sample — favored conservation over energy development on public lands, though by a narrower margin, with 51% expressing a preference for the former and 44% for the latter.

Across the board, voters in the eight states — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — said they support policies contrary to the Trump administration’s efforts to cut back funding and staffing for agencies that manage public lands and expand energy production by loosening drilling restrictions on federal properties.

Majorities also opposed reducing protections for some of the rare plants and animals covered by the Endangered Species Act — with 63% opposing loosening some protections and 36% in support — and opposed expanding the availability of public lands to private companies for commercial logging, with 60% opposed and 39% favoring it.

“The consensus favoring public lands conservation remains consistent and strong in the West,” said Katrina Miller-Stevens, the former director of CC’s State of the Rockies Project and an associate economics and business professor at the liberal arts college in Colorado Springs, in a statement.

“Westerners do not want to see a rollback of national monument protections, and there is no mandate for oil and gas development,” she said. “Voters from all political ideologies are united in support of public land conservation in the West.”

Republican pollster Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy and Democratic pollster Dave Metz of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates jointly conducted the poll from Jan. 3 to Jan. 17 using phone and online interviews. They reached at least 400 registered voters in each of the eight states, for a total of 3,316 respondents, with additional over-sampling of Black and Native American voters, whose responses were calculated relative to their share of the population. The margin of error for the entire poll is 2.46%, while the margin of error for each state is at most 4.9%, the pollsters said. The survey was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the country’s largest grant-making foundations, with a focus on educational, environmental and cultural programs. 

Metz told reporters that the attitudes found consistently in the survey across the years shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the natural environment plays a daily role for most of the region’s residents.

“I think it’s worth noting just the degree to which, as we have seen for 15 years in this research, the outdoors and public lands are an essential part of the fabric of Westerners’ lives,” he said, noting that nearly nine in 10 of those polled this year said they had visited national public lands in the past year, with 42% saying they’d visited at least six times.

“This is something that really makes this region of the country unique,” he said. “The large amount of public land and its accessibility to areas of all the population centers in these states really makes it something that is not just an abstract concept for voters in the West. It’s something that is a part of their day-to day-lives, and it’s a central part of what they enjoy about living in the West.”

Wide majorities of voters said they approve of the jobs federal agencies that oversee public lands are doing. The National Park Service had the highest approval rating, with 86%, compared to just 7% who disapproved. The U.S. Forest Service was next, with 79% approval to 10% disapproval, followed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at 75% approval and 9% disapproval. The Bureau of Land Management scored 63% approval and 17% disapproval, while the Environmental Protection Agency came in at 61% approval and 24% disapproval.

Three-quarters of all voters — including more than two-thirds of Republicans — said they oppose reducing funding for the agencies that oversee public lands, according to the poll, which was in the field in the weeks before President Trump took office, though the Republican campaigned on the cutbacks that have rolled out since.

“The answers are overwhelming that they would oppose such cuts,” Metz said, noting that 54% — an outright majority — of voters said they strongly oppose funding cuts. The sentiment, he added, “is thoroughly bipartisan.”

By an overwhelming majority, Western voters said they oppose reducing the size of national monuments or removing protections for the designated lands — something Trump’s interior secretary, former North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum, has floated this month — with 89% opposing the idea, up from 80% when pollsters asked the same question in 2017 at the start of the first Trump administration.

Opposition to removing land from national monument status also cut across partisan lines, Weigel pointed out.

“There’s no subgroup within the data saying to remove those designations,” she said, noting that supporters of the move only reached single digits in any subgroup.

While 97% of Democrats opposed stripping protection from all or portions of national monuments, 87% of independents gave the same response, as did 83% of Republicans and 81% of self-identified MAGA voters.

Additionally, 77% of all voters said climate change is a serious problem, up from the 55% who said the same in the poll’s first iteration in 2011. Younger generations were more likely to call climate change a serious problem — with 90% of Generation Z voters choosing that category, compared to 71% of Baby Boomers — but at least 50% of each age cohort described it as an extremely or very serious problem.

Along those lines, 72% of voters said they support the federal government taking action to reduce the carbon pollution that contributes to climate change, with 27% opposed.

The poll results didn’t exactly conform to November’s election results across the region, with only Colorado and New Mexico voting for the Democratic presidential ticket and the others picking Trump.

The pollsters said it was clear from plenty of survey data that voter decisions last fall were primarily driven by the economy and cost of living, with candidates focusing on “bread and butter” issues and voters ranking environmental concerns lower on their list of motivating factors.

Weigel said doesn’t mean voters in the Mountain West don’t care about public lands and related issues, calling it “a mistake to think that the votes that voters cast were mandates for significant policy change in most of the areas that we asked about.”

“What this poll is showing,” she said, “is that voters are generally happy with the way that public lands are being managed, and they would much rather continue to preserve something that they see as so critical to their quality of life, as opposed to see a radically different direction.”