Morris Pilkington is seen at the Colorado Democratic Party’s watch party at Number 38 in Denver on Nov. 5, 2024. (Andrew Fraieli for Colorado Newsline)
Up and down the ballot, Colorado voters on the whole appear to have defied national trends in 2024, throwing their support behind Democratic candidates by margins that were broadly unchanged from recent elections, even as voters across the country swung to Republicans by multiple percentage points.
As of late Thursday, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris led former President Donald Trump in the race for Colorado’s 10 electoral votes, winning 54.4% of the vote compared to Trump’s 43.1% out of more than 2.7 million ballots cast, according to unofficial results. Trump won election to a second presidential term with at least 295 electoral votes, according to The Associated Press, with only Arizona and Nevada remaining to be called.
With several hundred thousand ballots remaining to be counted in populous, Democratic-leaning counties in the Denver metro area, Harris’ margin of victory in Colorado is expected to grow in the coming days. Pollsters with the nonprofit Colorado Polling Institute predicted in a briefing Thursday that the final count will look highly similar to the outcome of the state’s 2020 presidential race, when President Joe Biden defeated Trump 55.4% to 41.9%.
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There was also little to no rightward movement in Colorado congressional races, including in the ultra-competitive 8th District, where U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo appeared on track to repeat her razor-thin winning margin from 2022. Democrats in the state Legislature, too, retained their dominant position in both chambers, including a 46-19 supermajority in the House of Representatives, where all 65 seats were up for election.
The results of a 2024 exit poll released by the Colorado Polling Institute on Thursday pointed toward a few important ways that the Centennial State’s political environment differed from national trends, including sharper partisan breakdowns along certain demographic lines. Younger voters in Colorado, including younger men, voted for Harris at higher rates than their peers in other states, as generational gaps in voting patterns shrank nationally.
“Here in Colorado, we bucked that trend, and age was a very good predictor of who you voted for,” said Kevin Ingham, a principal at Democratic polling firm Aspect Strategic. “Harris run up enormous margins among young voters while keeping the race competitive among older voters.”
We’re a heavily urbanized state, and we’re a very highly educated state, both facts which benefit Democrats. But Colorado is also one of the least religious states in the country, and that clearly helped Harris as well.
– Kevin Ingham, of Aspect Strategic
With their fellow Democrats around the country reeling from Trump’s victory, party leaders here in Colorado say they’ve found “a blueprint for how to bring people together around a vision of prosperity that includes everyone,” as Colorado Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib put it in a letter this week. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, too, credited Tuesday’s results to his “prosperity and abundance agenda,” including income and property tax cuts as well as programs like universal preschool.
CPI pollsters, however, emphasized the broad demographic trends that may have helped make Colorado less susceptible to a pro-Trump shift.
“There’s a few things I think we could point to,” Ingham said. “We’re a heavily urbanized state, and we’re a very highly educated state, both facts which benefit Democrats. But Colorado is also one of the least religious states in the country, and that clearly helped Harris as well.”
While Trump won by a 2-to-1 margin among Colorado voters who attend church at least once a month, those voters make up only 30% of the state’s electorate. By contrast, Harris won by a 3-to-1 margin among those who reported never attending church.
Harris won among Colorado voters of color by about 32 percentage points, the poll found, but also among white Colorado voters by about 8 points. The poll’s findings, along with early results in heavily Latino counties like those in the San Luis Valley, suggest that Colorado “wasn’t exactly immune” from national trends showing large gains for Trump among Latino voters.
“Some of that national shift among voters of color that occurred towards Trump did trickle down in Colorado,” Ingham said. “But given that voters of color make up a relatively small share of our electorate, this seemed to wash out with Harris’s gains among white voters here.”
A final factor in Colorado’s durable Democratic majorities may have been what Lori Weigel, a Republican pollster with New Bridge Strategy, called a “more diffuse issue agenda,” with voters less singularly concerned about inflation and living costs.
“I can tell you from my other work, holding focus groups around the country, that when we would ask voters in other states to tell us about how things are going in their state, we heard an awful lot about cost of living,” Weigel said. “That wasn’t quite the case (in Colorado).”
“It was more specific to housing, here, than it has been just a broad concern about cost of living overall,” she added.
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