Born on May 12, 1975 in Boulder, Colorado, Jared Schutz Polis earned a B.A. in political science from Princeton University in 1996. That same year, he founded an online offshoot of Blue Mountain Arts, his family’s greeting-card and publishing business. In 1998 Polis started the flower-sales website ProFlowers.com. He also has served as founder (in 2000) and president of the Jared Polis Foundation, a philanthropy focused on giving low-income students and families access to technology; founder (in 2004) of the New America School, whose mission is “to empower new immigrants, English language learners, and academically underserved students”; chairman of the Colorado State Board of Education; and co-founder of American Information Systems, an Internet-access, web-hosting, and application-service provider.

A longtime Democrat who volunteered for the political campaigns of such notables as Al Gore, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis, Polis was an Executive Committee member of both the Colorado Democratic Party and the Boulder County Democrats from 2000-07. In 2008, the voters in Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District elected the openly gay Polis to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he co-chaired the LGBT Equality Caucus and became a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

When the House of Representatives voted by a 345-75 margin to defund the notoriously corrupt community organization ACORN in September 2009, Polis was one of the 75—all Democrats—who voted to continue funding the group.

In 2009, Polis, who sat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was a leading supporter of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which he said would greatly increase the effectiveness of America’s healthcare system. Meanwhile, that summer Polis invested millions of dollars in Bridge International, a medical tourism company. As bestselling author Peter Schweizer explains: “[Polis] knew exactly what he was doing because the medical tourism industry in the summer of 2009 was saying, ‘If ObamaCare passes, this is going to be a boon to our industry because surgeries are going to become more scarce, and people are going to want to go overseas to avoid a lot of red tape.’ So, here you had an individual who was supporting a law, and he knew that the economic consequences would not be good for the healthcare system, but he sought to profit off of it by buying a huge chunk in a medical tourism company.”^[1]

The Obamacare law of 2010 also contained a provision that would give biotechnology companies a twelve-year patent protection on their drugs, rather than the traditional five years. This prompted Polis to purchase millions of dollars in biotech sector funds, which yielded him a profit of about 25%.^[2]

During Barack Obama‘s second term in the White House, Polis supported the executive actions which the President took in order to prevent the deportation of millions of illegals living in the U.S.— specifically, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA, 2012) and the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA, 2014). Polis urged Americans to “celebrat[e]” Obama’s decisions to enact these items “in light of the continued failure of this Congress to finally fix our broken immigration system.”^[3]

On October 13, 2010, Polis participated in a large-scale vigil and rally in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, where numerous House and Senate members were launching a new push for comprehensive immigration reform that would provide a path-to-citizenship for millions of illegal aliens. Also present were such notables as Xavier Becerra, Yvette Clarke, Raúl Grijalva, Luis Gutierrez, Mike Honda, Robert Menendez, Michael Quigley, Jan Schakowsky, Nydia Velazquez, and Lynn Woolsey.

In November 2013, Polis participated in a National Council of La Raza event promoting immigration reform in Congress.

In May 2015, Polis was outraged when the Twin Peaks Charter Academy in Longmont, Colorado elected not to permit its valedictorian, Evan Young, to deliver his commencement address—because Young intended to use the occasion as a forum for announcing that he was a homosexual. In an aggressive open letter to the school’s administrators, Polis demanded that “reparative actions … be taken to ensure that no student at Twin Peaks is discriminated against based on his or her sexual orientation or gender identity.” In a separate letter to Twin Peaks’ district supervisor, Polis denounced the school’s actions as “violations of district policy, state law, and Evan Young’s basic right to privacy.”

Polis again sparked controversy in September 2015, when he suggested, at a subcommittee meeting about preventing rape on campus, that colleges should be able to expel students accused of sexual assault even if they are innocent. “If there are 10 people who have been accused,” said Polis, “and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people. We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty; we’re talking about them being transferred to another university, for crying out loud.” Polis subsequently called his remarks “a major gaffe” that “went too far.”

Also in September 2015, Polis announced that he approved of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had recently negotiated with Iran—an agreement allowing the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and have a near-zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. By Polis’s telling, “this enforceable, verifiable agreement is the best available option to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

In November 2018, Polis was elected governor of Colorado, defeating Republican Walker Stapleton by a margin of 52.3% to 44%.

In 2019, Polis signed bill HB19-1039, which simplified the process of changing the gender identification on a person’s birth certificate — no longer requiring surgical sex change, a court order, or a doctor’s note.

In 2019 as well, Polis also signed bill HB19-1129, titled “Prohibit Conversion Therapy for A Minor,” which made it illegal for state-licensed mental health care providers to counsel transgender minors to accept their biological gender. Said a summary of the bill on the website of the Colorado General Assembly:

“The act prohibits a licensed physician specializing in psychiatry or a licensed, certified, or registered mental health care provider from engaging in conversion therapy with a patient under 18 years of age. A licensee who engages in these practices is subject to disciplinary action by the appropriate licensing board. ‘Conversion therapy’ means efforts to change an individual’s sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

On April 6, 2025, the Democrat-dominated Colorado House of Representatives passed HB 25-1312, a bill known as the Kelly Loving Act authorizing the state to legally strip custody from parents guilty of “deadnaming” or “misgendering” their children — i.e., using a “transgender” child’s birth name or biologically correct pronouns. According to the legislation, such parental transgressions would: (a) constitute “coercive control”; (b) violate the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act; (c) influence the child custody decisions made by Colorado courts; and (d) require dress-coded public schools to allow children of either biological sex to follow the dress code of whichever gender they preferred — without the consent or guidance of their parents.

• explicitly defined “deadnaming” and “misgendering” as discriminatory in contexts such as workplaces and public accommodations, but no longer contained a provision that would have classified those practices as evidence of “coercive control” that could influence child custody disputes;
• required school policies be “inclusive of all reasons” that a student might change his or her name;
• required schools to permit all students to choose from any variation contained in dress code policies;
• authorized individuals to change their gender marker on a driver’s license or other form of identification a second or third time without needing to obtain a court order;
• allowed county clerks to issue new marriage licenses to transgender individuals who legally changed their names.

Over the course of his political career, Polis has been endorsed multiple times by J Street, an organization that likewise favored the Iran nuclear deal of 2015. In October 2009, Polis spoke alongside Representatives Bob Filner and Jan Schakowsky at J Street’s Annual Conference.

For an overview of Polis’s voting record during his years in Congress, click here.

As of 2022, Polis’s net worth was more than $400 million. During the five-year period of 2001-05, he paid no federal income tax.

For additional information on Jared Polis, click here.

Further Reading: “Jared Polis” (Ballotpedia.org, Votesmart.org, CSMonitor.com, Keywiki.org); “Dem Congressman Sends Threatening Letter to Colorado Charter School” (Breitbart.com, 6-4-2015); “Boulder Rep. Jared Polis: ‘I Misspoke’ on Campus Rape” (Daily Camera, 9-15-2015); “Polis Announces Support for Nuclear Agreement with Iran” (9-4-2015).

Footnotes:

1. “Peter Schweizer on Congressional Insider Trading and Why Media Have Mostly Ignored It” (Newsbusters.org, 12-6-2011).
2. Ibid.
3. “Dem Rep: ‘Someday, There Might Be More People Here Illegally Than Legally’” (Breitbart.com, 5-20-2015).

Additional Resources:

• The Top Three Ways Obama’s Mini-Me Jared Polis Wants to Fundamentally Transform Colorado
  By Joy Overbeck
  September 11, 2018