November 09, 2024 01:15 PM UTC

Rep. Caraveo Concedes Hard-Fought CO-08 Race

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

SUNDAY UPDATE: With the count failing to close a persistent gap of around 2,500 votes, incumbent Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo concedes the race to Republican challenger Gabe Evans:

—–

As Ernest Luning reports for the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog, the agonizingly slow count in the close-as-can-be CO-08 race, which as of this writing is one of the last congressional races pending to determine control of the U.S. House, leaves us unable to call a winner in the most important race in the state this year four days after the polls closed:

Republican challenger Gabe Evans took a slim lead over Democratic U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo late Friday in Colorado’s battleground 8th Congressional District as county clerks continued to post returns days after Tuesday’s election.

Evans jumped ahead by 2,529 votes when conservative-leaning Weld County reported about 14,000 additional votes Friday night in what’s expected to be the county’s last big ballot drop, marking the first time the state lawmaker has led the race since election night…

There remained a chance Caraveo can make up ground when Adams County, which has been favoring the Democrat by a roughly 12-point margin, reports the rest of its ballots, though strategists on both sides cautioned that the race might not be decided for days.

With conservative Weld County mostly done with their counting, all eyes now are on the count proceeding in more populous Adams County to the south where the count has been breaking solidly for incumbent Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo. A major problem for those of us trying to track the count updates has been initially inaccurate estimates of the remaining ballots to be counted from both the Weld and Adams clerks, who both have reported and then corrected that all-important figure scrambling both sides’ calculations.

With the count resuming in Adams County today after a snow day yesterday, the race is once again rapidly narrowing:

If that 58-38% margin holds for the remaining ballots in Adams County it’s good news for Caraveo, but neither side should be projecting false confidence in the outcome at this point. This count is back to the trend we’ve seen since Tuesday night of narrowly favoring Caraveo, but the final margin could be extremely close–to the point where ballots that require supplemental action by the voters to confirm, a process known as ballot “curing,” becomes decisive. Again, there’s nothing mysterious about this process, in which canvassers for the respective campaigns reach out to their voters with ballots that need curing. For observers who went into Election Day hoping for instant gratification, and especially in a race that could determine control of the U.S. House, the wait while this process plays out is stressful to put it mildly.

But it’s also completely normal. A Republican and a Democratic clerk have presided over the two biggest counties counting ballots in the CO-08 race. In a district drawn to be as competitive as possible, we have a race so close that any outside party who starts complaining about the long count risks undermining their own preferred candidate. Both candidates in this race have a powerful incentive to tell supporters to slow down, to not be bullied into premature conclusions, and to count every single countable vote.

Colorado is getting the nail-biter race we drew this district to provide.

So if you’re not knocking doors this weekend to cure ballots, sit back and enjoy the suspense.