morgan ✨🪩

How big will the wave be in Colorado? An election night guide Polls close at 7pm MDT, 9pm ET. The first numbers usually land within minutes of that. Colorado typically counts about 90% of its ballots on election night, and the ballots dropped off today don’t get counted until late on Tuesday or on Wednesday/Thursday. So the close races will stay close for a couple days. How to read the night Colorado votes by mail, which means the order the ballots get counted matters almost as much as the ballots themselves. The first drop is mostly the people who mailed their ballot early. The later drops are the people who walked it to a box this week, and those two groups do not look alike as the latter is usually younger and more progressive. In June we saw a progressive shift for late ballots. Melat Kiros was up 2 points on Diana DeGette at the first drop, up 6 when the AP called it at 10pm, and up 13 when the final count posted nine days later. Julie Gonzales trailed Hickenlooper by 14 when the AP called that race early in the night and lost by under 6 at the end. Phil Weiser led Bennet by 10 at 8pm and finished up nearly 14. In Denver and the other blue counties, younger voters and progressives vote late, and the night moves left as it goes. The late ballots behaved differently on the Republican side too. Barb Kirkmeyer led Victor Marx on election night in the GOP governor primary, and Marx passed her over the following week as the last ballots came in. Late ballots are younger, angrier and less establishment in both parties. Keep that in mind when a race looks settled at 8pm. Tonight should look a little different at the statewide level, because Democrats banked their vote early this year. As of Sunday, 1.6 million ballots were already in, about 39% of active voters, compared with 35% at the same point in 2022. Nearly half of registered Democrats had returned a ballot, against 44% of Republicans and about a third of unaffiliated voters. Democrats make up 31% of the ballots returned so far, Republicans 24%, unaffiliated 43%. So the first statewide drop tonight will probably be the high-water mark for Democrats for Colorado and nationwide, and the margins will tighten a bit as Election Day ballots come in. That is normal. Polis was up 61 to 37 at 7:45pm in 2022 and finished 58.5 to 39.5. If Weiser’s number drifts down a few points over the night, that is just the math. That red shift is an aggregate statewide thing, though. In Denver, Boulder, Larimer and the other blue counties, it looks like June again: younger voters and progressives are turning in their ballots late. If a progressive closes early in one of those places, wait. Four stories to watch 1. How many congressional seats flip. I expect CO-8 and CO-5 to flip. If CO-3 goes too, Colorado is one of the bluest states in the country and Democrats are winning rural voters again. CO-4 is the long shot. 2. Do voters split their ballot? There are 14 statewide measures on the ballot and most of them are conservative-backed. Colorado has a long habit of electing Democrats and then voting for half of whatever Michael Fields puts in front of them. There is also a graduated income tax and more money for schools on the same ballot. Do blue-wave voters vote like it on the questions, or only on the candidates? 3. The double supermajority. Democrats hold 43 of 65 House seats and need 44. They hold 23 of 35 Senate seats and need 24. One flip in each chamber. Two-thirds of both chambers let the legislature put constitutional amendments on the ballot directly, with no signature campaign. Right now a citizen amendment takes 125,000 valid signatures spread across all 35 state Senate districts, which in practice means collecting well over 200,000 and spending real money to do it. Democrats have wanted that power for decades, because it is how you start chipping away at TABOR. Two-thirds is also the number you need to override a governor’s veto, and Democrats just spent two years watching Polis veto things they passed. 4. Phil Weiser’s margin. Polis beat Heidi Ganahl by 19 in 2022. I expect Weiser to beat Victor Marx by at least 25. Colorado Republicans have been on a downward slope for years, and Marx only got the nomination because he inched past Kirkmeyer by about 2,500 votes, roughly half a point, after she led him on election night. The party could not even pick its own nominee cleanly. If Weiser clears 25, that is a mandate, and I wrote on Sunday about what he should do with it. Also a subplot is to see if Jena Griswold has the smallest margin. Congress CO-8: Manny Flip-Flop Rutinel vs. Gabe Evans. Evans narrowly flipped this seat in 2024 and it is the most competitive House race in the state, one of the most competitive in the country. Rutinel should win. If he doesn’t, but the rest of the night is a blue wave, that’s more on Manny than anyone else. Either way, the margin matters: a narrow Rutinel win means the 8th stays a coin flip every two years, and a comfortable one means the district is settling in. Rutinel will get both a primary and general in 2028 regardless. CO-5: Jessica Killin vs. Jeff Crank. Colorado Springs was a Republican fortress for as long as anyone can remember. Killin, through force of will and a decade of demographic drift, has turned it into a real race. Polis carried the city in 2022, the first Democrat to do that in recent memory, so the ground was already moving. CO-3: Dwayne Romero vs. Jeff Hurd. If Romero wins, the Western Slope goes blue and Democrats are winning rural voters again. CO-4: Eileen Laubacher vs. Lauren Boebert. Laubacher is a retired Navy rear admiral running about as close to a Republican as a Democrat can get without changing parties. I’m not thrilled about that. Watching Boebert lose to anyone would still be interesting, and I’m honestly not sure we would hold the seat in 2028. State House Democrats need one flip to get to 44. HD16 (Colorado Springs): Steph Vigil vs. Jill Haffley. Vigil lost this seat by three votes in 2024 after a recount, in a bad year for Democrats. Three. The Republican who beat her isn’t running again. This is the likeliest flip on the board. HD19 (Boulder and Larimer counties): Jillaire McMillan trying to flip a seat that was one of the closest House races in the state in 2024. HD50 (Greeley): Tommy Butler vs. Rep. Ryan Gonzalez. Gonzalez won in 2024 by fewer than 600 votes. HD51 (Loveland): Jacki Marsh vs. Amy Parks. Open seat. The Republican won it by about 5 points in 2024 but Harris also carried it by about 2%. Seats to hold: HD25 Tammy Story, HD43 Bob Marshall (Highlands Ranch), HD46 Tisha Mauro (Pueblo), HD59 Katie Stewart. I don’t see much risk in any of them. State Senate Democrats need one flip to get to 24. SD30 (Douglas County): Kevin Leung vs. John Carson. Carson was appointed to the seat. The last Republican to win it, Kevin Van Winkle in 2022, got about 54%. Douglas County was a Republican stronghold and has been trending blue the way suburbs everywhere have; Ganahl carried it by less than half a point in 2022. If there is a wave, this is where you will see it. SD15 (Loveland): Janice Marchman vs. Rob Woodward. A rematch of 2022, when she flipped it. She should hold it with ease. SD3 (Pueblo): Aaron Gutierrez vs. Dana Charles. Open seat; Nick Hinrichsen didn’t run again. He won it in 2022 by about 1,700 votes out of 55,000. Pueblo has been drifting right from its historic Democratic base. Democratic registration in the district is down from about 37,600 in 2022 to 33,400 now, while unaffiliated registration is up from 43,000 to 52,500. This is the one worries more than it should. If Democrats lose SD3 and win SD3 then Colorado Democrats would be trading their historic base of blue-collar workers in Pueblo for white-collar suburbanites in Douglas County. The national party has been making that trade for a decade. Tonight we find out whether Colorado makes it too.

Colorado polls close in 2 hours!! It’ll get lost in the mix, but a BIG story tonight is whether Democrats win a supermajority in both the state House and Senate. I’ll be talking about it all night. Stay tuned!