How lower turnout and uneven red wave shaped Colorado’s 2024 election results

Adams County residents wait in line to vote at the Anythink Huron Street library in Thornton, Nov. 5, 2024. (Andrew Fraieli for Colorado Newsline)

Colorado Democrats may have defied national political trends in the 2024 election, largely maintaining their strong performance at the ballot box even as many other states across the country swung toward Republicans. But unofficial results show that Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats fared much better in some parts of the state than others and were hurt by depressed turnout in traditional party strongholds.

In slightly more than half of Colorado's 64 counties, Republican President-elect Donald Trump received a higher vote share in 2024 than he did four years ago, with the most pronounced pro-Trump shifts occurring in southern Colorado. Those swings in more rural parts of the state, combined with lower turnout in more populous Front Range counties, shrank Democrats' overall winning margin in Colorado from over 13 percentage points in 2020 to roughly 11 points this year.

Four rural Colorado counties concentrated in the San Luis Valley — Alamosa, Conejos, Costilla and Saguache — stood out from the others, shifting toward Trump by 9.9 percentage points or more. Alamosa, the region's largest population center, went for the Republican by over 10 points, just four years after distinguishing itself as the most evenly divided county in the state, with Trump edging out President Joe Biden by just 54 votes.

Nearby Pueblo County is a onetime Democratic stronghold that has become a bellwether in recent presidential elections; voters there narrowly backed Trump in 2016, then went for Biden by a similarly close margin in 2020. This year, however, Trump posted his best performance in Pueblo to date, winning the county by almost 5 percentage points.

The rightward shift in southern Colorado lines up with national trends. Multiple exit polls have found surging support for Trump among Latino voters compared to 2020, though the exact size of the shift is disputed. Pueblo and the San Luis Valley are home to Colorado's highest percentages of Latino voters, with over 40% of residents of Hispanic or Latino origin, according to census data. Trump similarly increased his vote share in heavily Latino counties in Texas' Rio Grande Valley and throughout the Southwest.

Two-thirds of Latino voters in Colorado supported Harris in the presidential election, a slightly higher share than Latinos nationally, according to an exit poll released last week by the Colorado Latino Policy Agenda.

In Colorado, the biggest swing toward Republicans outside of the San Luis Valley came in Pitkin County, home to the affluent resort community of Aspen, where Trump held a high-dollar fundraiser in August. Pitkin shifted by 7.6 percentage points toward Trump compared to 2020 — though Harris still won it overwhelmingly, with about 71% of the vote.

Representatives from the nonprofit Colorado Polling Institute said last week their exit polling showed that despite Democrats' relatively strong performance, the Centennial State wasn't immune from the national trend of Democrats' declining support among Latinos and other non-white voters.

"Some of that national shift among voters of color that occurred toward Trump did trickle down in Colorado," said Kevin Ingham, a principal at Democratic polling firm Aspect Strategic. "But given that voters of color make a relatively small share of our electorate, this seemed to wash out with Harris' gains among white voters here."

In 30 of Colorado's 64 counties, Democrats improved on their 2020 presidential vote share — a major departure from the trend nationwide, where only about 1 in 10 counties recorded a similar leftward shift.

Some of Colorado Democrats' biggest strides came on the Western Slope, including Mesa County, where Harris improved on Biden's performance by over four percentage points despite losing handily in the heavily Republican county centered on Grand Junction. Montrose County, another rural conservative stronghold just to the south, also shifted to the left by a similar margin.

Democrats also maintained or slightly improved their vote share in several of the suburban Front Range counties that have proven crucial to the party's electoral dominance in Colorado elections over the last decade. Jefferson County — one of the state's most important political battlegrounds a generation ago — backed Harris by over 20 points, an uptick from 2020. Voters in more conservative strongholds like Douglas and El Paso counties, which have also slowly shifted toward Democrats in recent years, bucked the national trend and again inched to the left.

Turnout drops With ballot counting nearly complete, state elections officials said Wednesday that a total of 3,276,257 ballots have been returned statewide. With a little over 4 million active voter registrations, that puts Colorado on track for a turnout rate of about 81% of active voters — the lowest figure for a presidential election year since 2000.

The decline roughly mirrors national trends. While the data is preliminary, the University of Florida's Election Lab estimates that nationwide turnout dipped from 66.4% in 2020 to 63.6% in 2024.

Turnout rates declined in all Colorado counties by at least 3 percentage points compared to 2020, according to unofficial results compiled by the Colorado secretary of state's office. They declined most sharply in a handful of southwestern counties, including Montrose County; in the San Luis Valley region; and in Adams County and the City and County of Denver.

The depressed turnout in heavily Democratic areas accounted for almost all of the 2-point dip in the party's margin of victory this year. In four Front Range counties — Denver, Adams, Arapahoe and Boulder — Harris received a combined 83,465 fewer votes than Biden did in 2020, while Trump's vote total was virtually unchanged. If Harris had retained that support, her vote share would have been almost identical to Biden's.