The only surprise on election night in Colorado was that there weren’t any big surprises.

Capping the most turbulent campaign stretch in memory — including everything from one of the state’s Republican members of Congress retiring, another switching districts and the third resigning midterm, to the Democrats replacing the top of their presidential ticket just over 100 days before ballots were due — by the time preliminary returns had posted on Tuesday, both parties appeared to be pretty much where they’d started.

Contrary to the hopes of party leaders on both sides of the aisle, hardly any flippable seats changed hands, as, true to form, state voters approved statewide propositions from the left and from the right, while shooting down others advanced by both shades of partisans and centrists alike.

As expected, the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz won the state’s 10 electoral votes by double digits over Republican nominees former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. JD Vance. It’s been 20 years since a Republican candidate for the White House has carried the state. 

It wasn’t a sweep for either side of the ideological spectrum.

As has become customary in the last decade, Colorado voters tilted left, except when they didn’t, in the more Republican-leaning regions. At the same time, voters split their decisions on ballot measures, passing a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to an abortion and took a hard line on public safety initiatives, approving a truth in sentencing measure and earmarking state funds to pay for increased law enforcement.

Meanwhile, a sweeping proposal to change the way Colorado conducts its elections, Proposition 131, went down to defeat by a double-digit margin, despite its well-heeled backers having overwhelmed opponents with millions of dollars in spending. The ballot measure would have scrapped the state’s traditional primary system, replacing it with a wide-open scrum sending the top four candidates to the general election ballot, which would then be decided by ranked-choice voting.

Both major political parties  — and the minor parties that weighed in — opposed the measure, and voters appeared to agree.

Two years ago, Colorado was home to two of the closest House races in the country. Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert came within fewer than 600 votes of losing reelection to the the GOP-leaning 3rd Congressional District in Western and Southern Colorado, and Democratic U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo won in the newly created 8th Congressional District, stretching north of the Denver metro area, by just over 1,600 votes.

After nearly two years of solid campaigning and tens of millions of dollars poured into the pair of competitive districts, however, both seats looked at press time like they might remain in their respective party’s columns.

In the 3rd CD, Republican Jeff Hurd held a 2-point lead over Democrat Adam Frisch, who came close to beating Boebert in the district in 2022, while Caraveo led Republican challenger Gabe Evans, a state lawmaker, by about the same margin in the tossup 8th CD.

Neither lagging candidate was ready to concede, leaving open the possibility that the election could eventually yield an upset. That, too, has familiar rings, since neither seat was decided on election night in 2022, and the 3rd CD was close enough to trigger a mandatory recount.

Elsewhere around the state, voters in the congressional seats occupied by Democrats returned their incumbents to office, and the seats held by Republicans stayed in the party’s hands.

Boebert, who jumped to a safer district after her razor-thin win in the last election, carried her new seat by a healthy margin, filling the seat left open by former U.S. Rep. Ken Buck’s abrupt resignation earlier this year.

In the reliably Republican 5th Congressional District, veteran GOP operative Jeff Crank takes over for retiring U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, who has warmed the seat since 2006, when he beat Crank and four others in a wide-open primary.