Colorado College’s annual Conservation in the West poll has consistently shown strong support from westerners for conservation on public lands. The 2025 poll is no different.
Pollsters surveyed approximately 3,300 voters in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, Idaho, Arizona, and Nevada in early January. They asked questions about public lands, federal agencies that oversee them, personal connection and access to public lands, climate change, severe weather events, and more.
Researchers say respondents were split evenly between independent voters, Democrats, and Republicans. The Republican category also included a subset of voters who consider themselves part of the “Make America Great Again,” or MAGA, movement.
72% of total respondents in the 2025 survey said they want their member of Congress to prioritize conservation over energy production on federal public lands.
MAGA-identified respondents were more split on the issue, with 51% preferring an emphasis on conservation, and 44% favoring more oil and gas production.
Lori Weigel is one of the pollsters that worked on the survey.
“This is the widest margin to date that we've seen, respondents telling us that they prefer the emphasis be placed on those sort of conservation aspects and recreation aspects of national public lands,” she said. “That emphasis was true across party lines.”
Furthermore, there was overwhelming support among respondents for protections for national monuments. 89% said they don’t want to see the size of national monuments reduced — a 9% increase from 80% in the 2017 survey. President Donald Trump reduced the size of several western national monuments during his first term, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Joe Biden restored the monuments to their original sizes in 2021.
Dave Metz, another pollster that worked on the survey, said 9 in 10 respondents said they’d been to federal public lands at least once in the last year.
“These lands are part of people's day to day lives,” he said. “And so when they think about what should be done with them, it's really through that lens of their own direct personal experience.”
He said surveyed voters overwhelmingly support the work done by federal agencies in their communities, including the National Parks Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.
One question asked voters who they prefer managing federal public lands: “career professionals such as rangers, scientists, firefighters and other specialists who have worked in the field,” or “new officials, appointed by elected representatives, who come from other industries and may
have different perspectives.”
87% of total respondents preferred career professionals. 88% of Colorado voters agreed, along with 85% of Utahns and 75% of Wyomingites. Three-quarters of total respondents said they opposed reducing funding to these federal agencies. 69% of MAGA-identified voters opposed funding cuts for these agencies, too.
The Trump administration has cut thousands of land management agency jobs, including the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Parks Service.
86% of respondents said they supported Native American tribes having more input into managing sacred or culturally significant areas on national public lands.
In addition, the poll looked at issues related to human-caused climate change, with young voters in particular, being very concerned.
90% of Gen Z voters consider climate change to be a serious problem, and 65% say it’s extremely serious.
The majority of older generations like millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers also think that climate change is a problem, though at lower rates than the youngest voters.
Metz said there was less consensus among various states and demographic groups about whether their community is prepared for climate-fueled disasters, like fires and floods.
“White voters are much more confident that their community is ready to handle the impacts of extreme weather,” he said. “Voters of color are much more divided. And notably, Latino voters, the largest community of color within the Western region, are the ones who have the most mixed feelings about how their community is prepared.”
He says states in the northern part of the West, like Wyoming and Montana, are more confident in how prepared their communities are, than places like Arizona and New Mexico.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including KSJD.
