Business leaders across Colorado are mixed about how the economy will look as President-elect Donald Trump is set to start his presidency, a new report released Tuesday finds.
A surprising report statistic shows business leaders are more confident about the national economy, than Colorado’s, for the first time in 15 years.
The Leeds Business Confidence Index, a quarterly report published by the University of Colorado Boulder measuring economic sentiment in the state, recorded a “neutral” sentiment for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s the first comprehensive look at how business leaders across Colorado’s largest industries feel about the incoming Trump administration since he won the election.
Confidence improved from the last quarter — though it was more positive earlier in 2024 — and the index hit 50, the neutral baseline for the confidence tracker.
But feelings were more neutral than they appeared, according to the CU Boulder economists, as sentiments varied across different segments of the economy.
“What we saw was a pretty wide distribution of positive and negative expectations, but a plurality of responses depending on the question,” said Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business, in a Tuesday news conference.
“It’s sort of indicating a wait-and-see approach where people are really sort of uncertain,” Lewandowski said.
Election seasons typically drive a drop in confidence as businesses are uncertain over who will win the presidency and can jump up after industry leaders have a better sense of how the results affect their futures.
In 2017, the Leeds Business Confidence Index spiked after Trump won the election. But his current victory didn’t incite the same amount of optimism for Colorado business leaders as it did after his first win.
“While we saw an increase in optimism for the national economy headed into Q1 2025, we’re not seeing the same levels that we saw in 2017,” Lewandowski said.
Colorado business leaders cited a positive outlook over Trump’s regulatory and energy policy changes. Yet they expressed concerns over how his tariffs, immigration policy, foreign policy and health care changes could impact their business.
About 50% of respondents said Trump’s trade policies like tariffs would have a negative impact on their business. Nearly 30% said it would be neutral and about 15% answered positive.
For regulatory policy, about 50% said it would be positive for their business, 30% said neutral and 30% said it would have negative effects.
The confidence index also found business leaders feel more optimistic about the national economy than Colorado’s economy — the first time since 2005.
“We’ve hardly ever seen that,” said Richard Wobbekind, CU Boulder senior economist.
Wobbekind explained it could mean that business leaders are far more uncertain about the local effects of Trump’s policies than they do at the national level, citing the state’s aerospace and climate industries.
Trump’s victory mounted fears amidst both Democrat and Republican leaders that when elected, he’d reverse President Joe Biden’s decision to keep the Space Command in Colorado Springs and move it to Alabama.
But it’s not just about Trump.
The state is also slipping in many national economic rankings toward the middle or bottom of the pack, according to the economists. Colorado is still performing well, Lewandowski said, but growth is slower than it was in past years.
“We went through this amazing boom time where we were leading the country for the last 15 years or so,” he said. “And while we’re still posting decent growth, we’re just not at the head of the pack when it comes to growth in many of these economic metrics.”
