Who's voting in Colorado?
Turnout in the Centennial State's primary looks strong so far, despite confusion about whether Trump votes count, but differs from 2020 in odd ways
Colorado is just one of 15 states with a Republican contest on Super Tuesday, and it’s far from the biggest — Texas and California have far bigger delegate prizes available for candidates. Yet Colorado seems to be getting a fair amount of attention, in large part because it’s the state that kicked off the Trump ballot disqualification cases. So what exactly are we seeing there so far? Fortunately, Colorado’s Secretary of State provides daily data updates on who has sent in their ballots, so we can get some sense of who is voting.
A bit of background: Colorado has an unusual primary system. It’s conducted entirely by mail, and unaffiliated voters (currently 48% of the state’s active voters) receive both the Republican and Democratic primary ballots in their mailboxes. They may send back only one of those. Registered Republicans and Democrats just get their own party’s ballot.
Now, at the end of December, the Colorado Supreme Court determined that Donald Trump was ineligible for the Republican primary ballot due to his participation in and organization of the January 6th insurrection. While the ballots were printed with his name on them, at least at this point, votes for him will not count. Judging from pretty widespread coverage of the US Supreme Court’s hearing of this case in February, it seems very likely that the Court will overturn Colorado’s decision and that votes for Trump will count. Yet there’s still an air of uncertainty about it, and any hope that the Court would render a decision before the primary seems in vain at this point.
(This delay is hardly the most irresponsible thing the Supreme Court has done this year but it’s still pretty irresponsible. I know that the judicial system does not move at the same pace as the political system and should not be on the same calendar. And I know they’re very likely to allow Trump votes to count. But if by some chance they were going to disqualify Trump’s votes, the time to do that would have been before everyone voted; the costs and legitimacy problems such a ruling would create after the election are significantly greater.)
So who’s voted so far? As of February 29th, out of the state’s 3.9 million active voters, 299,544 Democrats, 423,961 Republicans, and 197,480 unaffiliated voters had sent in their ballots. Okay, so what should we compare that to? That’s a good question! As recently as 2016, Colorado used a caucus system. But 2020 makes a reasonably good comparison, given that that primary, held March 3, also occurred on Super Tuesday, was (shortly) before the widespread Covid shutdowns, and also featured a contest where the incumbent had no real challenger but there was competition on the out-party side. (Obviously the 2020 Democratic ballot was quite a bit more competitive than the 2024 Republican one, but it was narrowing down quickly by then.)
Here’s how voter participation in 2024 compares with that for 2020 among party registrants five days before the primary. It’s not surprising that fewer Democrats are participating now, given the lack of competition on their side. What is surprising is how many Republicans still participated in 2020, even though Trump faced no challenger.
Okay, what about the unaffiliated voters? The Secretary of State data doesn’t tell us how they voted, but it does tell us which party ballot they submitted. And as the chart below shows, unaffiliated behavior in 2024 is almost the mirror image of 2020; about twice as many unaffiliated voters are submitting Republican ballots as Democratic ones this year. Again, not super surprising; they want to participate in the contest where there’s more of a choice and where their vote can be more consequential.1
Now, what can we tell about the goals of these unaffiliated voters? Are they truly unaffiliated voters — perhaps Republican leaners — just interested in weighing in on the more competitive contest? Or are they Democratic sympathizers raiding the Republican primary to affect the results? Well, these data only tell us so much. Polling data from previous years suggest that the unaffiliated lean somewhat Democratic, but that doesn’t tell us much about who has submitted a ballot so far.
But here’s a way of looking at this. Below, I have graphed the percent of each county’s unaffiliated voters who submitted a Republican, as opposed to a Democratic, ballot so far, and I plotted that against the percent of the vote that the Republican presidential ticket won in that county in 2020. What it shows is that as counties get more Republican, more unaffiliated voters are participating in the Republican primary. This is hardly iron-clad proof, but it suggests that it’s the more Republican-leaning unaffiliated voters participating in the primary. It doesn’t look much like Democratic raiding.
So what’s going to happen? Like I should know. Well, here’s a thought: Like New Hampshire, Colorado has a Republican primary in which unaffiliated voters can participate, and has a highly educated white population. These seem to be conditions favoring Nikki Haley. Add to that the confusion over whether Trump’s votes will actually count, and I think you have a contest in which she could break 40%. But obviously we’ll know more soon. And just maybe the Supreme Court will let us know if any of this mattered.
There are substantially more unaffiliated voters in Colorado in 2024 than there were in 2020 — 1.9 million as opposed to 1.4 million — so the overall percentages are different here.