For the fourth presidential election in a row, voters casting ballots in Colorado’s congressional contests tilted toward candidates from the same party whose presidential nominees carried their districts, though in most of the seats won by Republicans, the ticket-mates diverged significantly.

Colorado’s 2024 results reflect a national trend in recent decades that’s witnessed the dwindling of ticket-splitting between presidential and U.S. Senate races, albeit on a smaller, more localized scale.

It’s become exceedingly rare that electorates opt for a president from one party and representatives in Congress from the other, marking a departure from the state’s voters’ historic habits of picking a White House occupant from column A, and a senator or House member from column B. This past fall, to be sure, saw a slight uptick, as four states that voted Republican at the top of the ticket — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — elected Democratic senators, while the reverse didn’t happen anywhere.

Fallout from this trend includes the near disappearance of split Senate delegations, with the new Congress that took office in early January counting just three states — Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — with senators from different parties. That’s the fewest states with that characteristic in more than 100 years.

Once-common in the state, split-ticket voting was on display — sporadically but sometimes dramatically — as recently as 2008 in Colorado, when losing GOP nominee John McCain barely carried two congressional districts that at the same time sent Democrats John Salazar and Betsy Markey to Washington. Colorado also elected Republican Cory Gardner to the Senate in 2014 on the heels of Democrat Barack Obama’s back-to-back wins in the state, though that happened in a midterm, when the president’s party typically loses strength. Gardner lost his bid for reelection in 2020, the same year President Joe Biden beat then-President Donald Trump in Colorado.

Last year’s election saw Colorado voters collectively hew to the new, more consistently partisan normal, with the four incumbent Democratic House members who won reelection doing so by about the same margins as Vice President Kamala Harris won their districts. Across the aisle, two winning Colorado Republicans markedly lagged Trump’s share of the vote in their districts, one fell short of Trump’s margin by just a percentage point, and one performed distinctly better than the former president.

Harris won Colorado’s electoral votes by 11 points, finishing with a slightly narrower edge over Trump than Biden’s 13.5-point win four years earlier, but she boasted the second-largest winning margin for a Democrat in the state since LBJ’s 23-point romp in 1964. Harris did better than Biden in some corners of the state and worse in others, with Trump flipping one county, Pueblo, from Biden’s column, though Colorado skootched to the right by a smaller distance than most of the country.

That rightward movement swung the outcome in the state’s newest congressional seat, however, with Trump carrying the battleground 8th Congressional District last year by a little under 2 points, according to an analysis compiled by a group of election data experts who calculated presidential vote results broken down by House districts. Biden won the same precincts in 2020 by 4.6 points.

Trump’s showing in the closely divided 8th CD, which covers parts of Adams, Weld and Larimer counties north of the Denver metro area, mirrored Republican Gabe Evans’ feat unseating Democratic incumbent Yadira Caraveo in the same election. Caraveo lost her bid for a second term by about three-quarters of a point, almost exactly the same as her winning margin two years earlier.

Harris won convincingly in the state’s four other Democratic-held congressional districts, which delivered nearly the same margins that propelled incumbents Diana DeGette, Joe Neguse, Jason Crow and Brittany Pettersen to reelection over underfunded Republican challengers.

DeGette won the Denver-based 1st Congressional District by a whopping 55 points, within a point of Harris’ 56-point margin in the district. Neguse, the assistant House minority leader, sailed to a fourth term in the 2nd Congressional District, covering Boulder and Larimer counties and northwestern Colorado, by a hair under 40 points, almost precisely the same margin as Harris posted there.

Crow, also returning for a fourth term, won the Aurora-based 6th Congressional District by a little over 20 points, duplicating Harris’ same margin in the district. Pettersen, seeking a second term in the Jefferson County-based 7th Congressional District, won by 14 points, just shy of Harris’ 15-point win within the district’s boundaries.

It was a somewhat different story among the Republicans who won Colorado’s remaining three House seats last year, though.

Most notably, Republican Lauren Boebert underperformed Trump’s margin in the deep red 4th Congressional District by one of the widest gaps for a winning Republican in the country, posting an 11.6-point win over well-funded Democrat Trisha Calvarese, while Trump won the same precincts by more than 18 points. The district, encompassing suburban Douglas County and the state’s Eastern Plains, is home to the state’s largest concentration of Republican voters.

In the 3rd Congressional District — the Western Slope-based seat Boebert represented for two terms before moving into her new district a year ago — Republican Jeff Hurd also underperformed Trump, defeating Democrat Adam Frisch, fundraising powerhouse, by 5 points at the same time Trump beat Harris by nearly 10 points with the same electorate.

Jeff Crank, another winning Republican congressional candidate, however, outpaced Trump in the open 5th Congressional District, which almost exactly coincides with El Paso County, in his bid to replace retiring nine-term Republican Doug Lamborn. Making his third run for the seat — he lost to Lamborn twice in GOP primaries nearly two decades ago — Crank trounced Democratic nominee River Gassen by just under 14 points, outperforming Trump’s 9-point win in the district.

There’s a plausible explanation for Boebert’s and Hurd’s narrower wins than Trump’s margins of victory in their districts — Calvarese and Frisch, their respective Democratic opponents, were among the top House fundraisers in the country this year, and both vastly outspent the Republicans in the run-up to the general election, even though the differentials weren’t enough to produce the increasingly elusive split-ticket vote.

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