As Colorado’s more heavily Hispanic areas aligned with national exit polling that found growing support for Donald Trump among this demographic this year, voters also elected several Latino Republicans in tight races.

Political observers said these victories offer the GOP the opportunity to boost and solidify its gains among Latinos, who, even with their shift toward Republicans, largely remain in the Democratic column in Colorado.

One Republican strategist said the GOP must not squander these gains, arguing the party offers a natural home for Latinos because they, in fact, hold conservative values. In addition, cultivating more Latino leaders, the strategist said, is a winning strategy for the party, which has been shut out of the levers of power at the state Capitol for several years now. 

Meanwhile, progressives insisted that the narrative of the Latino vote shifting to the right has been exaggerated, pointing to Colorado voters enshrining the right to an abortion in the state Constitution.   

There’s a good reason why the party that makes inroads into the Latino vote immediately secures an advantage: Colorado has the seventh-highest Hispanic population, with over 22% of residents identifying as Hispanic or Latino, according to census data. 

As this group becomes an increasingly influential political force nationwide, recent trends suggest a growing shift to the right, particularly among Latino men. Nationally, 55% of Latino men voted for President-elect Donald Trump, compared to 36% in 2020. While Trump didn’t do as well with Latina voters, he still received 38% of their vote, up eight points from the previous election.

This election, several Latino Republican candidates in Colorado secured seats in critical districts across the state, including Representatives-elect Ryan Gonzalez of Greeley and Carlos Barron, and U.S. Representative-elect Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton. Another northern Colorado resident, Yazmin Navarro of Johnstown, won her district’s race for the State Board of Education. Once seated, she will be the only Latina Republican on the board.

Republican observers emphasized the need for greater outreach to the Latino community to ensure it’s not an aberration, noting the GOP still has a lot of work to do within this demographic.  

Despite the trends showing a shift, Colorado’s Latino voters remained largely Democratic supporters: A 2024 exit poll by the Colorado Latino Policy Agenda found that 67% of the state’s Latinos voted for Kamala Harris, while 63% supported Democratic congressional candidates.

GOP strategist: American Dream resonates in Hispanic communities 

Republican strategist Tyler Sandberg has a term for the party’s stereotypical candidate — “pale, male, and stale.”

“For way too long, Colorado Republicans ran one kind of candidate,” he said. “I think what’s most important is that Republicans stop running old, White men and instead really look to the next generation of leadership, which, I think, is in large part Hispanic. We have finally elevated Hispanic leaders in our party to run in top races.”

He added: “In fact, at the moment, almost every single major victory for Colorado Republicans is from a Hispanic candidate.”

Two of Colorado’s newest Republican Latino elected officials, Gonzalez and Navarro, were the first in their family to graduate high school, Sandberg noted.

“There’s very much an American Dream theme throughout,” he noted. “I think the American Dream and the opportunity that America provides is very resonant with the Hispanic community.”

The party’s shift away from traditional “pale, male, and stale” candidates is something Sandberg said he’s been advocating.

“We need to diversify candidates,” he said. “It’s not tokenism, it’s not DEI. It’s about elevating leaders in the communities we seek to represent.”

Sandberg said it’s noteworthy that Gonzalez, Barron, Evans, and Navarro all represent Northern Colorado, a region with a significant Latino population.

Latinos largely remain underrepresented in state politics, notably in the Republican Party. In the last legislative session, Evans was the only Latino Republican in both the House and the Senate. Now, there will be three with Gonzalez, Barron, and Representative-elect Garcia Sander of Eaton.

Republicans need to be strategic to ensure this trend isn’t an aberration, Sandberg said.

“I think it’s an opportunity, but by no means is it guaranteed to last more than one election cycle if Republicans are not very thoughtful and careful about how they engage and grow their relationship with various leaders and community members across Colorado,” he said. “It cannot be an October-of-election-year engagement. It has to be year-round.”

Sandberg also highlighted polling data suggesting the top issues among Hispanic voters included education, cost of living, and housing. School choice, in particular, resonated with Latino voters, he said. 

Sandberg said Amendment 80, which would have codified the right to school choice in the state constitution, did especially well in areas with large Latino populations, such as Adams and Pueblo counties.

‘Family, faith and hard work’

Board of Education member-elect Navarro credited her upbringing in Mexico with instilling what she said are conservative values of faith, family, and country.

“Everybody I grew up with was also being taught the same principles and values,” said Navarro, who moved to the United States as a child. “So, for me, the core of the Hispanic person is conservative.”

Navarro won Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, which has the highest concentration of Latino voters in the state. As a teacher, she said she was motivated to run for the Board of Education after growing concerns about the current board members’ ability to address the problems she felt the state was facing when it came to education.

Another one of Navarro’s top priorities is ensuring that Colorado’s Latino population is being adequately represented and heard. She believes her fluency in Spanish will help her engage with constituents who previously faced challenges to participating in politics due to language barriers.

“I think that’s very important for them to see that someone can actually communicate with them,” she said. “There’s something to be said about communication in general, and I can speak from personal experience about how my mom was excluded from a lot of educational things because she didn’t have anyone to communicate with. I became the translator for my mother at a very early age, but she shouldn’t have had to rely on a child. So, I think there’s a lot to be said about the voters of CD 8 who voted for me. They wanted more representation in a Hispanic woman that can truly understand the path that they’ve walked and can actually communicate.”

Navarro said it’s “fantastic” to see more Latino representation in Colorado Republican politics, which she attributed to a focus on issues like school choice, parental rights, and reducing the cost of living. However, she emphasized that her role on the Board of Education will be centered on advocating for all of her constituents, no matter their political or cultural backgrounds.

“I’m always going to be looking out for every single student, no matter their race, their gender, anything,” she said. “I think children are absolutely amazing, and I’m always going to fight for them to make sure that they are protected.”

Abortion rights leader: Latino shift is exaggerated

Dusti Gurule, president and CEO of the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR), said the narrative of Latino voters shifting significantly to the right has been overexaggerated and does not paint the full picture.

She pointed to the Latino Policy Agenda exit poll as evidence that the majority of Latinos, at least in Colorado, continue to vote Democratic. Gurule suggested that the growing support for conservative causes among Latino men may be partially due to individuals immigrating from more traditionally conservative countries.

“There is a gap between Latinas and Latino males,” she said. “Latino males, everyone says, are moving to the right, but the numbers in Colorado aren’t exactly the same. That’s happening less here in Colorado. I think people sort of overstate the fact that Latinos are not a monolith, and one perspective to understand is that as people migrate to a different state or a different country, the realities around the politics are very different. So, I think that could contribute to the sort of variance of voting patterns this election.”

Gurule noted the success of COLOR’s Amendment 79, which enshrined the right to abortion in the state Constitution. The amendment received 62% of the vote statewide and 66% of the Latino vote — it even did well in Republican-leaning areas, she said.

“I think that shows how critical and how important bodily autonomy and self-determination is and how that breaks through the party dialogue,” she said.

While COLOR is celebrating the success of Amendment 79, Gurule said there is still much work to do.

At the state level, she advocated for more engagement with the Latino community by both parties outside of election season, a sentiment also echoed by Sandberg, the Republican strategist. 

Gurule said she was “deeply disappointed” that Evans defeated U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo for the 8th CD seat. Caraveo was the state’s first Latina congresswoman, but even with her losing, Gurule insisted that the narrative that Hispanic values are conservative values is simply untrue.

“We’re not all the same,” she said. “I come from a strong family of matriarchs and strong women. There’s nothing conservative about the way I grew up. My family always worked and still do work toward social justice.”

“We need to think critically and do more in-depth analyses and not just take what people saying as what is really happening, because the majority of Latinos in Colorado have progressive values, and it shows by them voting yes on Amendment 79, and that’s not the only one,” she said. 

A Colorado Politics analysis of the November 2024 election results in Colorado by counties shows that Vice President Kamala Harris lost support compared to President Joe Biden’s 2020 results most notably in the state’s more heavily Hispanic areas, aligning with national exit polling that found growing support for Trump this year among that cadre of voters.

The state’s 64 counties didn’t move toward Trump uniformly, the analysis showed. Four heavily Hispanic counties in and near Southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley stood out with the largest moves toward Trump, all shifting by more than 4 points in the Republican’s favor — Costilla, Alamosa, Conejos and Saguache counties, in that order. The marginal shifts weren’t enough to flip any of the four small counties — Trump won Alamosa and Conejos, while Harris won Costilla and Saguache, the same as Biden had — but the shift in Trump’s direction in nearby Pueblo County moved the Hispanic-heavy county from a slim win for Biden to a nearly equally narrow win for Trump this time.

On the congressional level, a similar pattern showed up, though its potential effects were almost certainly diluted by the districts’ larger size. With above average Hispanic populations, the 1st and 3rd congressional districts both shifted more toward the GOP than anywhere else — enough to help propel Republican nominee Jeff Hurd to a convincing win over Democrat Adam Frisch in the 3rd CD, though insufficient to do more than eat into Democratic U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette’s already overwhelming margin in the Denver-based 1st CD.

In the 8th CD, which has the highest Hispanic population of any district in the state, the shift helped flip the seat to Evans, the Republican, with Adams County, the seat’s largest county and the county with more Hispanic voters than elsewhere in the district, moving most pronounced toward the right.

Conversely, the 4th Congressional District, the seat with the lowest share of Hispanic residents, saw the biggest shift toward the Democrat, Trisha Calvarese, and away from the Republican nominee, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, compared to the same district’s vote two years ago. Numerous factors, to be sure, likely complicated that result — from Boebert’s style and sudden move into the district to Calvarese’s dominant fundraising.

‘They’re more conservative than they’re not’

Like Navarro, Representative-elect Carlos Barron was born in Mexico. He moved to Colorado at just a year old, but he echoed Navarro’s sentiments when it came to the values his parents instilled in him as a child.

“Growing up in a Mexican family, you learn the values of family, faith and hard work,” he said. “That’s how I grew up, and as I got older, I aligned those values with the Republican Party.”

Barron contended that many Latinos share similar values, but they sometimes lack the political knowledge to recognize which party aligns with those values.

“They don’t understand politics enough to understand that they’re more conservative than they’re not, and that’s the reason I got into politics — to be able to represent the Hispanic people, not just in my district, but in the state of Colorado, and not just the Hispanic people, of course. I’m representing all people,” he said.

Like Navarro, Barron wants to use his Spanish fluency to educate his constituents about the ins and outs of the political system.

“My main focus was to help Hispanic people get more involved in politics and help them understand it in their own language,” he said. “A lot of Hispanic people don’t get involved in politics because they don’t have the representation in their own language. I’m not trying to convert them into Republicans, I’m just trying to give them a good understanding of what politics is so they can make their own decision.”

Barron’s district is 65% Hispanic, and while he ran unopposed for the seat formerly held by U.S. Representative-elect Gabe Evans, the adjacent House District 50 was won by Gonzalez by just over 2 percentage points. Gonzalez’s win marks the first time a Republican has represented HD50 in a decade. Gonzalez, who was defeated by Young in 2022, said he believes his constituents were driven by social issues in the previous election, but are more focused on problems like housing and cost of living this time around.

Given recent data suggesting the majority of Latino voters in Colorado vote Democratic, Barron said he is optimistic about the future for Republicans in Weld County, but the party, he added, is going to have to put in significant effort to ensure Latino voters connect with their platform.

“I do believe that this trend will continue as long as we reach out to more Hispanic people and let them know, ‘Hey, we’re here to represent you,’” he said. “If you have any questions, come to us, and we will explain the best way we can so you can make the better decision for you and your family, and the more people start seeing that, they’ll start looking at more Republican candidates.”

When asked how he plans to work alongside Latino Democrats in the House to best represent their community, Barron said he will tap into his experience as a manger for his father’s oil and gas company.

“It’s all about giving the olive branch and saying, ‘You know what? I’m here to listen to you. I’m here to work with you,’” he said. “I know we’re not always gonna agree on everything, but we can have a cordial conversation where we can reach a mutual agreement for the greater good of the entire population. That’s the reason I got in here, too, because I have that experience where I can work with others, even if I don’t agree with them.”

Gonzalez is also prepared to extend that proverbial olive branch, saying Coloradans are tired of the fighting — both between parties and within them.

“They want someone who has fresh ideas, but someone that they want to give an opportunity to be able to deliver on cost of living, on healthcare, on inflation, on energy, among other things,” he said. “That’s what they want. They’re tired of the negative advertising, the attacks, the name calling.”

Ernest Luning and Evan Wyloge contributed to this article.