The vast majority of Westerners support public-land access for hunting, fishing and other recreation, according to Colorado College’s newly released State of the Rockies poll. They also approve strongly of the federal agencies currently managing that access. The survey is the gold standard measurement of attitudes across eight Western states, and its inclusion of attitudes around federal vs state management of public land are particularly timely.
The poll, released Wednesday, comes out amid what some sportsmen call an unprecedented attack on public lands. This includes recent layoffs targeting thousands of trail crews, biologists, wildlife disease researchers and park service rangers across the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.
Here are a few highlights from the survey:
- Nearly two-in-three (65 percent) Western voters oppose “giving state government control over national public lands, such as national forests, national monuments, and national wildlife refuges in its borders.”
- A majority in every state oppose turning federal lands over to the states, including 57 percent in Utah. This opposition is even more decisive than in 2017, with a significant ninepoint increase,
- Three-quarters of Western voters are opposed to reducing funding to the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies and more than half say they are strongly opposed.
- By more than a nine-to-one ratio, Western voters prefer that career professionals make decisions about natural resources over new officials with different perspectives. In other words, 87 percent of Westerners prefer those who have been guiding land management and resource decisions to continue doing so.
- Nearly nine-in-ten Western voters (89 percent) say national monument designations for some public lands protected over the last decade should be kept in place – not removed. In fact, three-in-five (57 percent) say they should “definitely” be kept in place. Strong majorities from all parties support keeping the existing designations in place, “including four-in-five self-proclaimed MAGA supporters.”
- You can dive deeper into the survey’s findings about attitudes toward public land management, conservation of public lands, and wildlife.
More than 70 percent of registered voters also said they want public officials to prioritize protecting clean water, clean air, and wildlife habitat as well as access to public lands over maximizing energy production. The poll includes both Republicans and Democrats in Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico.
The poll results were announced a day just before a Senate amendment to reinstate thousands of those fired federal employees fell short by a narrow margin of 48-52 Thursday.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in states like Wyoming and Utah have also targeted public lands this year, proposing bills to divest federal public lands including some national parks and even taking their claim to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Public lands have been under threats of land transfers for a long time,” says Jeff Muratore, a Wyoming hunter and longtime conservative. “And that’s not going to change anytime soon.”
But what statehouse leaders have seen amid recent protests like the one Wednesday in Helena, Montana that brought about 1,000 camo-clad hunters, anglers, ranchers, and recreationists to the state’s capitol is that most Americans don’t want federal public lands turned over to states or sold to the highest bidder.
In fact, 83 percent of those polled consider the loss of nature a “serious problem,” up 19 points from 2011. Their fervor is likely a result of how much Westerners camp, hunt, fish, hike and otherwise recreate on public lands. Almost 90 percent of Westerners reported they visited national public lands once in the last year, and roughly 30 percent of voters in Wyoming and Montana said they visited more than 20 times in 2024.
Voters continued listing public lands, fish and wildlife as high priorities across the poll, with 82 percent saying fish and wildlife decline is a “serious problem” — an all-time high. They also don’t support using public lands to build houses, a proposal floated in states like Utah. Instead, respondents prefer to build housing within existing communities that are near jobs, roads and other forms of transit.
The poll, conducted by Republican pollster Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy and Democratic pollster Dave Metz of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, surveyed 400 voters in each state across a variety of demographics.
While attempts to wrest public lands away from the federal government and into private hands isn’t a new phenomenon, observers say this may be the most effort in recent years.
President Trump himself signed one of the largest bipartisan public land conservation and recreation bills called the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020. But his recent federal appointees, including former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burman as Secretary of the Interior and oil and gas advocate Kathleen Sgamma as head of the Bureau of Land Management, have turned the focus more toward energy production.
Burman recently called America’s public lands its “balance sheet,” and said many of them are “assets” that should be developed, something some fear will be used to justify their eventual sale.
For Muratore, the poll results just reaffirm what he already knows — that public lands and conservation are a bipartisan issue, something that’s important to most people living and recreating in the West. At the same time, he feels like there have been a lot of assaults on public lands this year, including a bill in the Wyoming Legislature that he says is a “violation of private property rights” that would prevent private landowners from selling their land to the federal government.
Read Next: Feds Fire 4,400+ Public-Land Employees, Including Forest Service Workers, National Park Staff
That’s why many conservation groups are asking people who hunt, fish, hike, camp and recreate on public land to make their voices heard.
“When I look at this poll, it shows that we need to have an uprising of people that say I didn’t vote for this,” says Land Tawney, co-chair of the newly formed conservation group American Hunters and Anglers. “The only thing we have right now is the people.”
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