Colorado didn’t buck trends entirely when voters nationwide returned Donald Trump to the White House for a second term on Nov. 5, but the state moved a smidgeon to the right, even as other Democratic-dominated states leaned markedly toward the Republican, enough to hand the former president the first national popular vote win for a GOP presidential nominee in two decades.

Although initial impressions on election night suggested Colorado was an island of blue in a sea of otherwise red-shifting states, the final, unofficial results compiled as votes continued to be counted over the next 10 days painted a somewhat different picture.

While Vice President Kamala Harris won Colorado by double digits — scoring the second-highest margin for a Democrat in the state since Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide — she lagged the high-water mark set four years ago by President Joe Biden, defeating Trump by 11 percentage points, down from Biden’s 13.5-point margin.

At the same time, Republicans flipped the state’s most competitive U.S. House seat, with Gabe Evans winning the battleground 8th Congressional District by less than 1 percentage point, nearly mirroring Democratic U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo’s narrow win two years earlier in the same seat. The state’s seven other congressional districts voted as expected, electing Republicans in GOP-leaning seats and reelecting Democrats in seats considered safe for their party’s nominees.

A Colorado Politics analysis of the November 2024 election results in Colorado by counties shows that Harris lost support compared to 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.

Further analysis failed to find statistically significant correlations between the change in Trump’s margin in individual counties and other factors — including median household income, post-secondary education levels or relative turnout between the two presidential elections — suggesting that unique dynamics at work among Hispanic populations had more to do with the shift.

The state’s 64 counties didn’t move toward Trump uniformly, the analysis showed. While Trump scored gains in his share of the vote from 2020 to 2024 in 36 of the counties, the Republican lost relative ground to the Democrat in 27 counties and managed to get the exact same share of the vote as he did four years ago in reliably red El Paso County, Colorado’s largest county.

Two of the state’s most consistently accurate public opinion pollsters reached similar conclusions, based on their exit polling and a final voter-sentiment survey, respectively. The pollsters, Global Strategy Group’s Andrew Baumann and Chris Keating of Keating Research, both Democratic firms, said their polling this year and broad understanding of Colorado’s electorate also showed a few reasons why the state didn’t move to the right as markedly as other states or the country as a whole.

Overall turnout in Colorado was slightly lower this year than in the last presidential election four years ago, with about 3% fewer voters casting a ballot. In addition, the share of registered voters who voted dropped from 86.9% in 2020 to 80% in 2024, mirroring trends nationally.

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.

“Looking at the results based on county returns, I think it’s pretty clear that the places where Harris lost most ground relative to Biden were Adams, Pueblo and the San Luis Valley, which are the more Hispanic counties relative to the rest of the state,” Baumann said. “This aligns with what we saw in the survey, where the group where Harris did the worse, relatively, was among voters of color.”

Baumann noted that his firm’s exit poll didn’t break out Hispanic voters from the somewhat larger pool.

“It’s pretty clear from our post-election poll that the area where Republicans gained the most votes was on immigration,” Baumann said, adding that the issue might have had an outsized influence on the Hispanic vote in the state.

“There is sometimes a misperception that immigration is a better issue among White voters,” he said. “But the attacks Republicans have made on Democrats for being too soft on border security actually resonate with Hispanic voters — ‘Me and my family came here the right way and want to see others do that, as well.'”

Baumann said that doesn’t mean that many of the other attacks Trump and other Republicans raised found footing among a large share of Coloradans, noting that other factors could have had as much or more influence on Hispanic voters.

“The Hispanic community has felt the impacts of inflation more acutely than other communities may have,” he said. “One of the things that really happened here — the biggest thing that explains why Trump won this election — is that voters haven’t experienced this type of inflation in more than 40 years. Every party in power around the world lost ground. The key thing here was voters felt the pain of inflation, even though, objectively, the American economy was doing well and was the best in the world. That doesn’t overcome the fact voters were very dissatisfied with inflation, and they blamed the incumbent party.”

Keating, whose late October poll showed Harris winning Colorado by 12 points, just one point different from her final margin, reached a similar conclusion.

“You look at exit polls and people were talking about inflation — and when you have the largest inflation voters younger than their 60s have ever seen in their lifetime or have any memory of at all, it’s a shock to the system. Inflation isn’t something that’s easy for people to understand who’s responsible or why it’s happening or when it’s going away, and even when it does drop like it has, prices are still high.”

Keating said his polling shows the late-deciders appeared to have moved slightly more toward Trump than they did to Harris in Colorado — the same as national exit polls found — but noted that the opposite happened two years ago, when the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was fresh and late-deciders favored the Democrats.

“It swings back and forth,” he said. “If you have the Dobbs decision on one hand and you have inflation on the other, it makes sense the late-deciders swing toward the Democrats one election and toward the Republicans in the next. When you’re the party in charge in the White House and you have high inflation, that’s what happens”

Both pollsters said their surveys suggest that the state’s voters will likely continue to lean toward the Democrats in future elections, in part because of the electorate’s strong support for abortion rights, as evidenced by the 24-point margin of support for Amendment 79, which established the right to an abortion in the state constitution.

By a small margin, abortion was the No. 1 mentioned topic when voters were asked which two issues influenced their candidate picks, Baumann said, just barely edging out inflation. He said his analysis showed Democrats over-performed with voters who cited abortion, with the issue adding a net 4 points to Harris’ total and increasing the votes for legislative Democrats by 3 points.

Keating said the education gap favoring Democrats could account for why Colorado voters didn’t shift toward Trump as much as they did elsewhere.

“If you look at the results we had by education, we had almost a 20-point advantage for Harris for those who had a college degree, and it was basically even, within the margin of error, for those who don’t, and Colorado is one of the most highly educated states in the country,” he said. “Voters that don’t have a college degree are going the other direction. We just have to understand that, in Colorado, you’re not going to see that.”

Baumann’s polling found that 58% of voters said they’d have a hard time voting for GOP candidates in the future, suggesting that there’s a ceiling for the party as long as it retains its current face.

“Going forward, Colorado is blue,” Baumann said. “As long as Republicans in Colorado are defined by Donald Trump and Lauren Boebert, statewide races will be out of reach for their nominees. If at some point Republicans can be defined by other folks, it could become more competitive.”