This week, as President Donald Trump returns to Colorado for the first of many visits he’s promised this year, he’s landing in a state with a Republican Party entirely in his corner.

Since he was inaugurated in January 2019, Trump has enjoyed record levels of support among Colorado Republicans, who haven’t strayed below 90% approval for the duration of his presidency.

Republican candidates try to outdo each other declaring their allegiance to Trump, with even a whiff of criticism of the president leading to talk of a primary challenge.

More than three years after Trump’s last campaign visit to the state, it’s hard to remember that Colorado Republicans were ever anything but a near monolith of Trump support.

As far as Republicans are concerned, Colorado is Trump country.

But it wasn’t always.

The last time Trump campaigned in the state – capping a blizzard of his trademark rallies, holding seven of them across the state from the first week of October until just days before the election – the crowds were gung ho, but the party was splintered and ultimately unenthused.

Before his rally in Colorado Springs on Feb. 20, Trump’s most recent scheduled rally in Colorado was a late-night event on Nov. 5, 2016, at the National Western Complex in Denver. That followed a flurry of Colorado appearances in the final weeks before the election, including rallies in Pueblo, Loveland, Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, Golden and Greeley.

But even as Trump drew throngs of supporters who yelled themselves hoarse, it’s hard to overstate how lukewarm the Republican apparatus was toward Trump going in to the 2016 General Election. Just weeks before the votes were counted, three of the leading Republicans in the state called on Trump to drop out in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape. At one point, some of the state’s top Republican strategists were warning GOP legislators against putting their names on a list of Trump endorsers.

This was the state, after all, that left Trump empty-handed heading into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, with all of its 34 pledged delegates committed to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

After Cruz forces organized their way to a win through Colorado’s complicated caucus and convention system, including an appearance by Cruz at the GOP state convention that Trump skipped – ironically, at the same Broadmoor World Arena where the president was holding his rally this week – Trump blasted Colorado’s delegate selection process as “rigged” and “crooked,” opening wounds that would linger through the fall.

Matters weren’t helped when the Colorado Republican Party’s official Twitter account followed up Cruz’s delegate sweep by proclaiming “We did it. #NeverTrump” to the world. The state GOP quickly deleted the tweet and disavowed it, saying someone without authorization had posted it, but the phrase lingered.

Before the national convention and into the fall, Colorado was a center of the “Never Trump” movement, a group of Republicans who tried to deny Trump the nomination and then, failing that, prepare the party for a soft landing and return to its roots after the GOP ticket’s anticipated blowout in November.

But a funny thing happened.

Trump won the presidency, even while losing Colorado’s electoral votes by about a 5-point margin.

The state electorate as a whole was more closely divided than people remember, with Trump and Hillary Clinton trading the lead in polls in September, and Clinton only pulling away with the lead she would maintain at around the time the “Access Hollywood” tape scrambled the race in early October.

That’s when the state’s junior senator, and the two prominent Colorado Republicans facing their toughest races in 2016, pulled their support from Trump and urged him to step aside for the good of the party.

“I cannot and will not support someone who brags about degrading and assaulting women,” said U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, who went on to suggest Trump allow Mike Pence to be the GOP nominee. “If he fails to do so, I will not vote for Hillary Clinton but will instead write-in my vote for Mike Pence,” Gardner added.

“His defeat at this point seems almost certain,” said U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, who was running for a fifth term in the state’s battleground 6th Congressional District and called on Trump to drop out. “Mr. Trump should put the country first and do the right thing.”

Darryl Glenn, the Republican nominee challenging U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, at first said Trump was “simply disqualified from being Commander-in-Chief” and should step aside, but later said he would vote for Trump but not endorse him.

Considered a longshot, Glenn came within 5 points of unseating Bennet, who went on to run against Trump in the 2020 Democratic primary but withdrew from that race this month following the New Hampshire primary.

Coffman won his race by a healthy margin over Democratic challenger Morgan Carroll, who has chaired the Colorado Democratic Party for the last three years, but kept Trump at arm’s length for his final term in office before being defeated by Democrat Jason Crow in 2018. Crow was one of seven House managers who prosecuted the case against Trump in his Senate impeachment trial.

Gardner did an about-face after Trump was elected and now stands as one of the president’s most consistent allies, appearing alongside him at the Colorado Springs rally.

Former state GOP chairman Dick Wadhams thinks Trump lost whatever chance he’d had to carry Colorado when the “Access Hollywood” tape was revealed, costing him votes from suburban unaffiliated and Republican women who didn’t like Clinton but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump.

“That was the key event,” he said. “I think that’s when he lost Colorado, though I don’t think it affected his performance in the midwestern states that won him the election.”

Wadhams said he never would have voted for Clinton but was “very discouraged by Trump’s behavior.” What swung it for him was when Trump released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

“Fast-forward almost four years, I still have a problem with his behavior – it still drives me nuts – but I am more than happy with the overall performance of his administration, the tax cuts, judicial nominations, deregulation. That’s why I think he owns the Republican Party now.”

Ryan Winger, the director of data analysis for Magellan Strategists, a Louisville-based Republican polling and political consulting firm, said the data backs that up.

The firm polled Republican voters in the summer of 2016 and found the rank-and-file liked Trump a whole lot more than all the convention drama suggested.

“The average Republican voter was more on board with Trump than were the party insiders and elected officials,” Winger said. “For the establishment and influencers to come around, Trump had to prove himself – let’s see what he does. To their pleasant surprise, they found it was more or less what they would expect from a conventional Republican president.”

Since Trump was inaugurated in January 2019, he said, the firm’s polling has found consistently high levels of support for Trump among Republicans – an unprecedented level of party support for a president.

“Before the election, Republicans weren’t totally gung ho, but once he became president, it’s almost as though they view it hurts the party if they’re unhappy with Trump,” Winger said.

Kyle Kohli, the Colorado spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said the state’s political landscape is vastly different than when Trump last campaigned in Colorado.

“The president’s popularity is through the roof with Republicans, and he maintains exceptionally high popularity with the base,” he said, noting that Trump’s popularity has drawn out volunteers throughout the state.

“In contrast to four years ago, when President Trump was running as a challenger, this year he has a record to defend and promote in Colorado, in terms of unemployment, wage growth, the Bureau of Land Management moving its headquarters to Grand Junction, the Space Force, funding for the Arkansas Valley Conduit. Especially in rural Colorado, he can make a case how he’s delivered for the state.”