Bipartisan majorities in Western states oppose Trump’s rollback of public lands protections
- Mark Sabbatini
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
By Chase Woodruff
News From The States
Large, bipartisan majorities of voters across eight Western states remain concerned about the impacts of climate change and opposed to efforts by the Trump administration to weaken environmental rules and public lands protections.
Eighty-four percent of Western voters say that “rollbacks of laws that protect our land, water and wildlife” are a serious problem, up from 68% eight years ago, according to a poll released Wednesday by Colorado College’s State of the Rockies project.
The college’s annual Conservation in the West poll has measured Western voters’ views across a range of environmental and energy issues since 2011. The 2026 survey is based on interviews conducted in January with 3,419 voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.
“After 16 years, it’s become a rare longitudinal data set that lets us track how public attitudes have shifted over time throughout the West,” Ian Johnson, Colorado College’s director of strategic initiatives and sustainability, said in a media briefing Wednesday on the 2026 results.
“Communities are now grappling with pressure on land and water, wildfire risk, competing energy priorities and questions about stewardship that define both livelihoods and quality of life,” Johnson added. “This poll helps us move beyond any assumptions and provides clear bipartisan insight into what Westerners actually think, and what they want their leaders to prioritize.”
More than half of voters across the West now describe climate change as an “extremely” or “very” serious problem, a share that has doubled since 2011. Three-quarters describe it as at least a “somewhat” serious problem, making up a majority in every state surveyed except in Wyoming, where slightly more than 50% of voters say it’s not a problem.
The 2026 survey was conducted jointly by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, a national Democratic polling firm, and New Bridge Strategy, a Republican firm based in Colorado.
By a 76% to 21% margin — the largest in the survey’s 16-year history — poll respondents said they want the federal government to manage public lands with an eye towards environmental protection and recreation, rather than prioritizing energy production.
That’s a stance sharply at odds with the “energy dominance” agenda embraced by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, who have moved to rescind Biden-era protections like the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule and reduce the royalty rates paid by oil and gas companies to drill on public lands.
Nearly 9 in 10 Western voters, including 75% of self-identified “MAGA supporters,” told pollsters they’re concerned about “funding cuts to national parks, forests and other public lands. And a slew of specific policies enacted over the last year by the Trump administration — the exemption of smaller streams and wetlands from the Clean Water Act, the rescission of the U.S. Forest Service’s roadless rule, rollbacks of Endangered Species Act protections and more — are opposed by solid majorities of Western voters.
“Now that things are happening, the level of concern is very different,” said New Bridge Strategy’s Lori Weigel. “It’s much more tangible, and there’s a real level of intensity behind what we’re seeing throughout the data.”
Overwhelming majorities of voters also remain opposed to selling some public lands to private companies for the purposes of energy development or housing construction, the poll found. Last year, a proposal backed by Utah Sen. Mike Lee to facilitate the sale of millions of acres of federally owned land failed to make it through Congress.
Colorado River negotiations
The 2026 poll also measured public opinion on water issues among voters in the six surveyed states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — that are parties to the Colorado River Compact.
Earlier this month, negotiators from those six states, along with California, again failed to reach an agreement on how to share the Colorado River Basin’s dwindling water supply starting next year.
More than 4 in 5 voters from those six states say they’d support an agreement requiring “all states in the region to reduce their water usage” to preserve the Colorado River’s health.
“Definitely people say that they’re willing to use less. We’ve seen over time that they say, ‘Yeah, we ought to be able to conserve our way out of some of these problems,'” Weigel said. “Whether that’s true or not, I think maybe left to be seen.”
• News From The States is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
