Every advocate eventually hits the same wall. You know what needs to change. You know the law is broken. And then someone tells you, “There’s a legislator who might be sympathetic” — and you have no idea whether that means anything at all.
On a recent episode, Andy brought exactly that situation to Larry. A friend in Colorado had heard from a constituent whose husband had been incarcerated and placed on the registry. She believed a particular state senator, Rod Pelton, might be willing to carry a bill creating a path off Colorado’s registry. Andy’s question wasn’t really about Pelton, though. It was bigger: how do you evaluate a politician to figure out whether they can actually be your advocate?
What followed was one of the most practical civics lessons the show has produced. Larry laid out a repeatable method — one you can run in about thirty minutes with a browser and your state legislature’s website — for separating lawmakers who can help you from lawmakers who merely sound like they might.
This matters because advocacy time is scarce. Most people working on registry reform are doing it after work, on weekends, on their own dime, often while managing the restrictions of the registry itself. Spending six months courting a legislator who has never passed a single bill is not a minor inefficiency. It’s the difference between a session where something moves and a session where nothing does.
Larry’s first filter is brutally simple and eliminates most of the field.
Don’t count bills introduced. Count bills signed.
Andy recalled a listener from Kansas a couple of months earlier who had identified a legislator who kept introducing reform-flavored legislation. Larry looked him up and delivered the verdict: he can’t do anything for you. He introduces bills. He doesn’t pass them.
Anyone can drop a bill. Introduction costs a legislator almost nothing — it generates a press release, satisfies a constituency, and requires no coalition whatsoever. Getting a bill through committee, through the floor, through the other chamber, and onto the governor’s desk requires something entirely different: relationships, credibility, patience, and the willingness to trade.
When Larry looked up Senator Pelton’s record, the number was striking. Twenty-six bills either sponsored or co-sponsored had reached the governor and been signed — in a single session.
And then Larry did something most people skip. He looked at who else was on those bills.
Who You Pass Bills With Says More Than How Many
Pelton’s co-sponsors included the president of the Senate and the Senate majority leader. Not freshmen. Not backbenchers. The people who control what moves and what dies.
That’s a meaningful signal. A minority-party legislator who repeatedly appears on legislation alongside majority leadership isn’t tolerated — he’s trusted. Larry was careful to note that he’s never practiced in Colorado and couldn’t assume its sponsor-listing conventions match New Mexico’s, where the first name is typically the lead sponsor. But even accounting for that uncertainty, the pattern held.
What Co-Sponsorship Really Means
Andy asked the question a lot of listeners were probably thinking: isn’t co-sponsoring just putting your name on something? Doesn’t everybody do that?
Mostly, yes. In New Mexico, Larry explained, practically anyone can add themselves as a co-sponsor. On its face it’s a low-cost gesture.
But the politics underneath are more interesting. In a hyper-partisan chamber, a co-sponsor can hurt a bill. If a Republican signs onto a Democratic bill, some Democrats may decide the association is a liability and quietly let it die. Support from the wrong direction is sometimes poison.
And there’s a harsher move available to a party in full control. Colorado’s Democrats hold strong majorities. They don’t need Rod Pelton’s vote for anything. So if Pelton files a genuinely good bill, the majority has an easy option: praise the idea, hand it to one of their own members to sponsor, and let Pelton’s version sit in a drawer until the session ends. The policy passes. He gets nothing.
They didn’t do that to him. That, Larry argued, is the tell. When the majority party lets a minority member keep his name on legislation it could easily have taken, it’s telling you that member has earned real standing.
The Bipartisanship Trap
Here the conversation took a turn worth sitting with, because Andy pushed back and briefly tangled the terms.
Andy’s point: Larry criticizes partisanship constantly, so surely bipartisanship is the goal — compromise, nobody fully happy, something gets through.
Larry’s correction was sharp. He does bash partisanship at every opportunity. But that is not the same as believing bipartisanship is automatically virtuous.
“Bipartisan bad legislation gets through — like a lot of the registry stuff — because you can’t oppose it politically. So if it passes 100 to nothing, it’s bad public policy.”
This is one of the most important observations in the whole segment, and it explains a great deal about how registry law got built in the first place. Unanimous votes on sex offense legislation almost never reflect careful consensus. They reflect the fact that no legislator wants to explain a “no” vote in a thirty-second attack ad. The absence of opposition isn’t evidence of good policy. It’s evidence of political fear.
So Larry’s actual position is narrower and more defensible: bipartisanship is valuable when it produces good legislation. It’s not a virtue in itself.
Why Supermajorities Should Worry You
Andy noted that most Americans probably want their side to hold a supermajority so their agenda can sail through. Larry’s response was that this instinct is exactly backwards.
When one party holds a lopsided majority, there is no reason to compromise. The minority gets its three minutes at the microphone and then gets voted down. Nothing they say has to be accommodated, because nothing they say can change the outcome.
When majorities are narrow, the calculus flips. Leadership has to listen. Provisions get added that wouldn’t have been added otherwise. And as Larry put it plainly: your party isn’t necessarily right about everything.
For registry reform specifically, this matters enormously. Reform rarely wins on a party-line vote. It wins when a handful of members from each side conclude the current system is indefensible and build something together.
Criterion Two: Does This Person Have Capital to Spend?
Even a legislator who can pass bills may not be able to afford yours. Registry reform is politically dangerous. Carrying it invites attacks that are easy to make and hard to answer in a soundbite.
So Larry’s second filter is electoral history.
He went back as far as the records allowed and found that Pelton had never won by less than a 70 percent margin. That’s not just a safe seat — that’s a seat where a controversial vote is survivable.
Compare that to a member who won 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent. That legislator may agree with you completely and still be unable to help. They have no capital to risk. Asking them to carry your bill is asking them to end their career, and they will politely decline.
A large margin doesn’t guarantee a lawmaker will spend capital on registry reform. It only means they could. But without it, the conversation is over before it starts.
The Softer Signals
Beyond those two hard criteria, Larry pointed to several softer indicators that are easy to check:
- Temperament, inferred from results. You don’t pass 26 bills if you’re abrasive, inarticulate, or contemptuous of colleagues. The record itself implies someone reasonable and patient — someone you can actually sit down and reason with.
- Bill titles as an ideological fingerprint. Scan what a legislator has actually passed. Pelton’s list included health care payment programs, a bill on changes to practices relating to death, and access to veterinary care. He also supported House Bill 26-1325 on natural medicine without sponsoring it. Larry’s read: this is not right-wing fanatic material. Several items lean progressive.
- Committee assignments. Andy noticed a cluster of animal-related bills — veterinary access, stolen livestock — and the explanation was straightforward: Pelton sits on veterans, agriculture, and natural resources committees. Committee membership tells you where a member has jurisdiction and where their bills naturally originate.
An Endangered Species: The Pragmatic Moderate
Larry’s overall characterization was that Pelton is a moderate, pragmatic Republican — the kind he enjoyed working with in the 1970s and 1980s, and the kind that has largely disappeared from both parties as polarization deepened.
Andy offered a comparison: Joe Manchin, a Democrat in deep-red West Virginia. Larry agreed it was the same species. And he used it to make a pointed argument about what parties lose when they enforce purity. Manchin was never welcome among Democrats, who eventually got what they wanted — and lost the seat, and with it the majority. He was voting with them organizationally on the things that structurally mattered, and they were, in Larry’s words, too damn dumb to understand that.
The lesson for advocates is the inverse: the legislators most likely to move registry reform are frequently the ones their own party’s activists find least exciting.
What to Actually Do Next
Larry closed with concrete direction, and it’s the part worth writing down.
- Map the district. Pull the list of counties Senator Pelton represents.
- Find a constituent. Identify someone on the registry — or a family member of someone on it — who actually lives in one of those counties.
- Have that person make the approach. A constituent asking their own senator for help is a fundamentally different conversation than an outside organization asking a stranger. Legislators answer to the people who can vote for them.
He also offered to help directly if Colorado advocates want it and if Pelton is amenable. His assessment: the senator has all the necessary makeup to do this. The only remaining task is persuading him it’s something he wants to do.
Three Takeaways
1. Count signatures, not introductions. Before you invest a single hour in a legislator, look up how many of their bills reached the governor and got signed. Bills introduced tell you what someone wants credit for. Bills signed tell you what they can do.
2. Check the margin. A lawmaker in a safe seat can take a risk. A lawmaker who barely survived their last election cannot, no matter how sympathetic they are in private.
3. Send a constituent. The most persuasive advocate for a registry bill in Senator Pelton’s district is someone who lives in Senator Pelton’s district. Find that person before you write the first email.
None of this requires a law degree or a lobbyist. It requires a legislative website, a county map, and about half an hour of honest research — which is roughly what Larry spent before concluding that a Republican state senator in rural Colorado might be one of the better shots registry reform has this cycle.