Colorado didn't follow the big national rightward swing toward Donald Trump. Here's why

DENVER — Nearly every state shifted distinctly to the right in Tuesday’s election — but Colorado is looking like a rare exception.

The Democratic ticket, led this time by Vice President Kamala Harris, again won the state by double-digit margins, even as the nationwide electorate is projected to deliver the popular vote to former President Donald Trump — the first Republican nominee to win that metric in 20 years.

A Washington Post model for when all ballots are counted projects that Colorado might even end up as the only state with a shift to the left since the 2020 election. As of 6:30 p.m. Friday, Harris had a lead of about 11.4 percentage points over Trump, with roughly 200,000 ballots still left to be counted statewide.

President Joe Biden ended up with about a 13.5-percentage-point margin in his 2020 bout against Trump, and various projections and a poll suggest Harris might land about there, too.

“Colorado was … remarkable for the fact that while the rest of the country moved significantly to the right — and that includes other so-called blue states like New York and California and New Jersey — Colorado did not,” said Kevin Ingham, principal of Aspect Strategic, a Democratic polling firm that helped conduct a bipartisan statewide survey of voters in the last two weeks of the election. He referred to states that Harris still won, but with much narrower margins than Biden had four years ago.

Aspect worked with New Bridge Strategy, a Republican firm, to conduct the poll on behalf of the Colorado Polling Institute. They surveyed 822 Coloradans who either had already voted or would definitely vote in the final days of the election; the margin of error was plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

It predicted a 13-percentage-point margin in favor of Harris when all the votes are counted.

Ingham chalked the state’s political stability up to a few things: Colorado, overall, is overwhelmingly white, has the second-highest rate of higher education attainment among states, and isn’t that religious. All of those are demographic groups that Trump made little headway with nationally while winning the presidency.

The poll found white Colorado voters supported Harris over Trump 53% to 45% while voters of color did so 63% to 30%. College graduates went for Harris 58% to 39%. People who attend religious service at least once a month preferred Trump 65% to 31%, while those who never attend preferred Harris 74% to 25%.

Overall, Colorado is among the states with the highest share of people who never attend religious services, according to a separate Pew survey. (All of the new poll’s subsets have higher margins of error than the overall sample size of the poll.)

Ingham noted that Colorado wasn’t uniform, of course, with more diverse counties shifting noticeably toward Trump, even as voters of color overwhelmingly voted for Harris.

“Some of that national shift among voters of color that occurred towards Trump did trickle down to 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.”

Jeffco holds steady, but a small surprise in Pitkin

Jefferson County was one of the counties that continued its leftward trend this week. The west suburban Denver county bent another percentage point toward the Democratic side on Tuesday compared to 2020. Harris beat Trump there by 19 percentage points.

Jeffco Commissioner Lesley Dahlkemper, a Democrat, thinks Harris’ plans to address affordable housing played a big role in capturing voter support in Colorado’s fourth most populous county.

“A starter home is out of reach for many, and it would take 20,000 new units just to meet Jeffco’s housing demand,” Dahlkemper told The Denver Post this week. “Throughout her campaign, Vice President Harris focused on housing affordability, especially first-time homeownership. These solutions resonate in Jeffco, where many are feeling the housing squeeze.”

In August, Harris proposed providing $25,000 in downpayment help for certain first-time homebuyers and tax incentives for builders of starter homes. Dahlkemper said Tuesday’s result in Jefferson County had less to do with partisan politics and more to do with addressing people’s needs.

“As long as Democrats continue to deliver the results on the issues our community truly cares about, I expect solution-driven leadership will prevail,” she said.

It’s long been apparent, though, that Jefferson is among several suburban Denver counties where Trump’s first win in 2020 kicked off a shift toward Democrats, including in votes for local offices. In 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton led Trump in Jeffco by just under 7 percentage points.

In famously blue Pitkin County, home to glitzy Aspen, the trend was the reverse of Jeffco. A New York Times map showing county by county shifts since 2020 found a 7.6-point shift to the right on Tuesday in Pitkin’s presidential results.

That still meant a lopsided 44-percentage-point advantage for Harris over Trump, but Pitkin County Commissioner Francie Jacober suggested political debate over Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip moved some voters to the Republican column who wouldn’t ordinarily have gone there.

“There are people who feel that Trump has a more pro-Israel stance than Harris,” she said.

Jacober also thinks gender may have played a role in the final analysis.

“I think there are people who are convinced Trump is stronger because he’s a man,” she said, though she added that she doesn’t share that sentiment.

Pitkin wasn’t the only mountain county to shift to the right in its presidential vote. Eagle County leaned 5.4 points more to the Republican side on Tuesday over 2020, and Summit County made a similar shift by 2.2 points, according to the Times analysis.

Denver, too, was showing a slight rightward shift toward Trump. With ballot-counting still underway Friday, Harris had 77% to Trump’s 20%, a 57-point margin that was about 4 points narrower than Denver’s presidential margin in 2020.

Colorado Latinos break with national shift

Overall, Colorado voters identified immigration, abortion and housing affordability as top issues driving their votes, according to the Colorado Polling Institute poll released this week.

While some voters prioritized the economy and cost of living more broadly, it wasn’t as pronounced as in other places, said Lori Weigel, principal of New Bridge Strategy. A separate national survey by the Associated Press found voters who felt pressured by the economy were likely to break for Trump.

“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 the cost of living,” Weigel said. “That wasn’t quite the case (here), although the cost of housing is certainly very top of mind in Colorado.”

Colorado Latinos supported Harris at a higher clip than Latino voters did nationally, helping the vice president secure her margins in the state and buck the overall rightward shift, according to the 2024 Colorado Latino Exit Poll released Wednesday.

That poll, conducted by BSP Research on behalf of Voces Unidas and the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights, surveyed 600 Latino and Latina voters across Colorado and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points

Latinos in Colorado overall voted about 2-to-1 in favor of Harris, landing about 4 percentage points higher than Latinos nationwide. Latinas broke for Harris at a higher clip than men, about 69% to 64% — a notable gap, but far smaller than the spread seen in other states, pollster Gabe Sanchez said.

Overall, Latinos moved toward Harris and away from Trump compared to 2020, Sanchez said — another significant break from the national trend.

About 5% of Latino Biden voters in 2020 said they switched to Trump this year, while about 9% said they flipped from Trump then to Harris now, according to the poll.

“In this overall election climate, where I’m sure you are already seeing a lot of stories talking about Latinos moving towards Trump across the nation and some of the other key battleground states, it’s important to emphasize that was not the story in the state of Colorado,” Sanchez said.