A fast-growing
Mountain West state that was formerly Republican leaning, no Republican has won Colorado by double digits at the presidential level since
Ronald Reagan in his
1984 landslide re-election victory. Colorado was consistently competitive at the presidential level from the late 1980s going through the 2010s, including
Hillary Clinton winning the state by 5% in
2016. In
2020, Democrat
Joe Biden carried the state by 13.5%, becoming the first presidential candidate to win Colorado by a double-digit margin since Reagan. The last Republican to win the Centennial State's electoral votes was
George W. Bush in his
2004 re-election victory, which he won by a margin of 4.7%. Today, Colorado is a
blue state, with Democrats winning the state in every presidential election starting in
2008, occupying every statewide office since 2023, and holding comfortable majorities in its
state legislature. Trump flipped
Pueblo County, which he had won in 2016 but lost in 2020. Nonetheless, he became the first Republican to win the White House without carrying
Chaffee or
Garfield Counties since
William Howard Taft in
1908. Despite the state and the nation swinging right as a whole, several large Colorado counties defied national trends and shifted left, including the West Denver suburban counties of
Jefferson,
Broomfield, and
Douglas. Outside of Denver, other large
Front Range counties also shifted left, such as
Larimer County, home of the city of
Fort Collins; and
El Paso County, home of
Colorado Springs. Harris won the highest percentage of the vote in El Paso County since
Lyndon B. Johnson's
1964 victory and was also the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the county by only single digits since 1964. This is the first time since
2000 that Colorado voted for the popular vote loser, and the first time since 1908 that it voted for a Democrat that lost the popular vote. This is also the first time since
1996 that Colorado backed the loser of both the electoral vote and the overall popular vote. Additionally, Trump won 43.1% of the vote in Colorado, an improvement from his 41.9% share of the statewide vote in 2020, but he still underperformed his 2016 results, in which he received 43.3% of the vote. This made Colorado the only state in the nation in which Trump's 2016 run was the best statewide performance out of his three runs in terms of vote share. Trump also became the first president since
Franklin D. Roosevelt in
1940 and
1944 to win two elections without carrying Colorado, and the first Republican to do so since William McKinley in
1896 and
1900. Colorado and
Virginia have voted for the same presidential candidate in every election since 1996. This was also the first election that Colorado voted Democratic while
Nevada voted Republican. == See also ==