Colorado is different.
And you can thank whatever higher power — or maybe just plain old demographic math — that it’s so.
While much of the country took a giant swing toward Donald Trump — his majority vote is slightly under 51%, but that’s still a majority as we wait for millions of California votes still to come in — Colorado basically held.
White Latino voters nationally swung wildly toward Trump — with 45% voting Republican, including 55% of Latino males — Colorado Latinos still swung, for the most part, to Democrats and Kamala Harris.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 5 percentage points in Colorado. In 2020, no matter what Tina Peters says from her jail cell, Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 13 points in Colorado.
In 2024, with more than 80% of the votes counted, Kamala Harris is leading Trump by more than 11 points in the state.
There are theories, of course.
There are always theories.
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The first is obvious. Colorado is a highly educated state. According to one study, Colorado has the highest rate of college attainment in the country. And those with a college education were among the most likely cohort to vote Democratic nationally. According to the CNN national exit poll, college-educated voters picked Harris by 13 points.
According to a Colorado exit poll, conducted by the nonpartisan Colorado Polling Institute (CPI), 55% of voters are either college graduates or have a postgraduate degree. Among college graduates, Harris won by a 58-39 margin. Among postgrads, it was 62-33.
So that explains a lot. So does the fact that Colorado has a large percentage of urban voters.
But what about the Latino vote?
The CPI poll didn’t release data on Latino voters in their initial exit poll — the sample wasn’t quite large enough to suit the pollsters — but the unofficial Latino total showed 64% for Harris, 28% for Trump and 6% who either didn’t vote for president or voted for a third-party candidate.
The Colorado Latino exit poll, meanwhile, came in with similar numbers, finding that 66% of Latino voters in the state chose Harris while only 30% chose Trump.
Why is there so much difference in the Latino vote in Colorado and nationally? Maybe Colorado Latinos are different, in the best ways — say, economically and/or educationally.
But pick a number. Pick any number. They added up to an easy Harris victory in Colorado while much of the rest of the country moved in a different direction.
In Virginia, which, like Colorado, was a once-solid red state now turned blue, Biden won by 10 points in 2020. Four years later, Harris won by 5. In New Jersey, a solid blue state, Biden won by 16 points. Harris won by 5.
And so on.
But let’s look a little closer, and maybe see that while demography may, in many cases, be destiny, there may be more to this Colorado exception than simply numbers.
There may be the state of Colorado’s Republican Party, which I think we can safely describe as a dumpster fire, to consider. Maybe the fact that the state GOP is chaired by a xenophobic bigot like Dave “God Hates Flags” Williams — who makes Trump at his most outrageous look, well, almost normal — has something to do with it.
Dissenting Republicans tried to kick Williams out of his job, but he beat them in court. So how do you think that little fiasco played in the polling booths?
I asked Lori Weigel, the Republican pollster who contributed to the CPI poll, if the state party was an issue. She said, “Maybe the Republican brand in Colorado is a little more tarnished than in some states.”
Uh, yeah.
The most public face — and not just, uh, face — of the Republican Party in Colorado is Lauren Boebert, the carpetbagging canoodler and Bettlejuice bejeezuser, moved from the 3rd Congressional District, where she feared she would lose, to the 4th CD, where any breathing Republican should win.
Boebert beat her Democratic opponent, Trisha Calvarese, by 11 points. That may look like a comfortable margin, but the truth is that it’s a nail biter in the reliably conservative 4th CD. Ken Buck won his race in 2022 by 24 points. In the June special election to replace Buck, Republican Greg Lopez, with almost no name recognition, beat Boebert’s opponent, Calvarese, by 20 points.
In The Sun’s Unaffiliated newsletter — which you should really subscribe to if you care about Colorado politics and have a few extra bucks lying around — they dug a little deeper, showing that Boebert was leading Calvarese by only 1,726 votes in redder-than-red Douglas County. In 2022, Buck won the county by nearly 30,000 votes.
Are people, including Colorado Republicans, growing tired of Boebert’s act? That may be the easiest question to answer about the entire campaign.
Meanwhile, back in the Boebert-abandoned 3rd Congressional, Republican Jeff Hurd, who replaced Boebert, beat Democratic candidate Adam Frisch by just three points. In 2022, of course, Frisch came within 546 votes of beating Boebert, which is why she skedaddled to the 4th in the middle of the campaign.
Frisch raised a ton of money, and that probably helped him come so close this time out. But in a state where Republicans have little to cheer, that deserves maybe only two cheers out of three.
The 8th Congressional District, which was drawn to be as close as possible, is almost as close as possible. Votes are still being counted for a seat that may yet help determine which party controls the U.S. House. As of Friday afternoon, 90% of the votes in the 8th CD had been counted and Democratic incumbent Yadira Caraveo leads Republican Gabe Evans by half a percentage point.
The good news, for voters everywhere, is that the non-stop campaign ads for that seat have finally come to an end.
In the state legislature, which the Democrats dominate and where Republicans hoped to pick up seats, it was basically a draw, which amounts to yet another GOP setback. The best Colorado Republicans can say is that they denied Democrats a supermajority in the state Senate.
It was that kind of election, in Colorado anyway. Which we can safely say has successfully resisted Trump’s charms.
Nationally, Democrats may be desperate to figure out how they could have lost. For Republicans in Colorado, I think we already know.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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