December 08, 2022 01:00 PM UTC

The Tide Swamps Future Republican Hopes in Colorado

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• by: Republican 36

(Interesting analysis — promoted by Colorado Pols)

I took a break over lunch hour and looked at some of the election results here in Colorado. Bottom line: the cracks are in the Republican firmament in Douglas, El Paso and Weld counties. Mesa remains reliably Republican but its significance is declining due to the growth on the Front Range.

Douglas County: Ganahl defeated Polis by less than 1%. Jason Crow won the area of Douglas County in his district. O’Dea defeated Bennett 53% to 45% which is well below par for what Republicans used to win in that county in major statewide races.

El Paso County:  It’s still a Republican county but the margins in the major races are down significantly and the county now has 3 Democratic state representatives and 1 Democrat in the state senate. Ganahl defeated Polis 51% to 47% and O’Dea beat Bennett 53% to 44%. Remember the old days when a major Republican candidate would win El Paso 2 to 1. In 1992, when Gov. Romer ran for his third term, he put 20+ paid campaign staffers into El Paso because he wanted to be the first modern Democrat to win that county. After all that effort, Romer received 35.9% of the vote. Bruce Benson, a flawed candidate, blew Romer out of the water in El Paso. In other words, with urbanization and population growth, El Paso’s bright red is fading to a pale pink.

Weld County:  Weld still looks and votes Republican and will do so for the next few cycles but a closer look shows major shifts have begun, especially in southern Weld along the I-25 corridor. Those areas voted for Biden in 2020 and the same areas voted almost exclusively for Democrats running for the General Assembly this year, plus the eastern half of Greeley has been blue for quite some time. The northern metro suburbs (southern Weld) will continue to grow and the population expansion there is going to eat away at the Republican dominance in that county.

Bottom Line: Two things are going on in Colorado. One, former Republican strongholds, Arapahoe and Jefferson counties have turned absolutely bright blue. Two, except for Mesa, in the remaining large counties (the three above), the Republican Party is slowly losing its grip and even if they continue to vote Republican, the Republican margin of victory will be so thin in those counties that a statewide Democrat will win every time. Unless the Democrats nominate an absolute lunatic, the Republican Party cannot build a coalition that can win major statewide races in Colorado for the foreseeable future. In fact, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better for the Republicans. Through their silly stupid machinations and positions, they have alienated the vast majority of Colorado voters.