John Hickenlooper thinks he can unite America, bloopers and all

Against long odds, John Hickenlooper, the lanky former governor of Colorado, believes he can change that.

“What I’m really good at,” he said recently, sitting in the back seat of his campaign’s Chevy Tahoe, “is what this country most needs right now.”

Since announcing his candidacy for president in early March, Hickenlooper has stayed at the bottom of the polls, gained just a bump on Twitter and made major news only once, after telling CNN he accidentally watched an X-rated movie with his mother.

He’s a 67-year-old white man in a field of potentially history-making candidates, and he has far less name recognition or fundraising muscle than former Vice President Joe Biden, who announced his official campaign last week. As voters have flocked to the formerly unknown Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Hickenlooper has failed to attract a buzz.

But Hickenlooper says he is simply waiting for his moment. As governor, he brought together warring factions across the Rockies — environmentalists and oil companies, gun owners and regulators, cities and suburbs — and he’s betting that a candidate from the politically purple, deeply pragmatic Mountain West is exactly what America needs. (To be clear, some past Democratic nominees, like John Kerry, were born in the West. But none built their careers in the region.)

“Everybody said it was impossible!” Hickenlooper told a crowd in a packed bar in Concord, New Hampshire, standing on a pair of stools as he ran through his history of compromise. “Well, it wasn’t.”

Candidates from the Mountain West have long struggled to make it to the White House.

But Colorado is in many ways a microcosm of America. Split nearly evenly among Democrats, Republicans and independents, it has significant rural and Hispanic populations and has been ground zero for many of the nation’s most contentious debates over guns, climate change, marijuana and more. Hickenlooper believes his success in the state will help him attract a diversity of voters on the national stage.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.