Every Colorado race for the U.S. House of Representatives this year turned out the way they should have, according to a tried and true measure of the congressional districts’ partisan performances.

Looked at another way, none of the eight Coloradans who won election to the 119th Congress last month bucked their voters’ historic habits of collectively preferring one major party over the other — not even in the highly competitive district that changed hands by one of the closest margins in the country.

Although the authors of the Cook Partisan Voting Index — a nearly 30-year-old scoring mechanism produced by the venerable Cook Political Report — don’t claim the numbers predict outcomes in particular House races, they came pretty close to accomplishing that in Colorado by sketching out the eight House seats’ underlying partisan leans.

That’s despite 2024 being one of the least predictable election years in memory, full of stunning reversals, jaw-dropping revelations and surprise candidate substitutions at both the state and national levels.

Add to that the tens of millions of dollars pumped into persuasion and turnout efforts across the state’s three most hotly contested House races, including two where the underdogs vastly outspent the favored candidates only to watch the districts vote the way their past behavior suggested they would, and it appears possible that partisan predilection trumped even the most energetic candidate and campaigns.

Cook has calculated PVI ratings for states and House districts since 1997, when its analysts decided to come up with an objective way to compare relative competitiveness, based on how states or districts performed compared to the national vote in the previous two presidential elections.

Heading into this year’s election, that meant figuring a weighted average of each district’s vote for the 2016 and 2020 presidential election, compared to the national results. For instance, a D+5 PVI means the Democratic tickets received 5 percentage points more in district than the Democrats did nationwide, and an R+5 means the district performed 5 points better for the Republican nominees than the GOP’s share of the national vote. Districts or states that came within 0.5 points of the party’s national totals are assigned a PVI of EVEN.

The Cook PVI differs from the site’s individual race ratings — the familiar scale ranging from toss-up in the middle to lean, likely and solid designation for either party — which take other factors into account, including incumbency, the candidates’ demonstrated competitiveness and fundraising advantages.

“Whereas race ratings reflect our outlook for which party will win the next election in each state and district, PVI values take a longer view and seek to measure the underlying partisanship of each district relative to the nation as a whole,” the site states.

Released more than a year and a half before last month’s election, Cook’s 2023 PVI scores accurately pegged the winning party in each of Colorado’s House districts, though most nominees outperformed their electorate’s partisan makeup, while a couple of them fell a bit short.

Staking out the two extremes on that spectrum are Democrat Diana DeGette, who overwhelmed her underfunded Republican challenger in Denver’s extremely Democratic 1st Congressional District, and Republican Jeff Hurd, who won his first run for office by a comfortable margin against a better-funded opponent in Western and Southern Colorado’s GOP-friendly 3rd Congressional District.

Elected last month to her 15th term, DeGette is the Colorado DC contingent’s most senior member — properly known as the “doyen” of the delegation, rather than the dean, she will note, since those are gendered terms — while Hurd is one of the state’s three freshman lawmakers, along with fellow Republicans Jeff Crank and Gabe Evans.

With a PVI of D+29, DeGette’s 1st CD tilts more Democratic than any other district in the state and ranks as the 22nd most favorable seat for Democrats in the country. Still, the incumbent ran even further ahead of the Republican on the ballot, beating Valdamar Archuleta by 55 percentage points, one of the widest margins of her career, outrunning the seat’s partisan lean by 26 points.

The other Democratic incumbents who won reelection also outflanked their districts’ PVIs, though not by as much as DeGette. In Northwest Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District, with a PVI of D+17, Democrat Joe Neguse, the assistant House minority leader, beat Repubican Marshall Dawson by 39 percentage points, or 22 points better than the district’s partisan performance. Democrat Jason Crow ran 20.5 percentage points ahead of Republican John Fabbricatore in the Aurora-based 6th Congressional District, which has a D+9 PVI, putting him 11.5 points ahead of the seat’s lean. And winning her second term in the Jefferson County-based 7th Congressional District, Democrat Brittany Pettersen outdid the district’s D+4 PVI by 10 points when she beat Republican Sergei Matveyuk by a 14-percentage point margin.

Crank, the Republican, also outperformed the Colorado Springs-based 5th Congressional District’s R+9 PVI by beating Democrat River Gassen by 13.8 percentage points, for a 4.8 point edge over partisan lean.

At the other end of the scale, Hurd fell 2 points short of the 3rd CD’s R+7 PVI, beating Democrat Adam Frisch by 5 percentage points — a substantially larger margin than Republican incumbent Lauren Boebert enjoyed two years ago when she edged past Frisch by just 0.2 percentage points in the country’s closest House race.

Facing an expensive rematch against Frisch — whose near-upset helped him raise more money than any Colorado congressional candidate had ever seen — Boebert moved across the state to the open 4th Congressional District, where she also lagged the seat’s PVI in November, though by a little less than Hurd did in her old seat.

Anchored by suburban Douglas County and covering the Eastern Plains, the 4th CD boasts an R+13 PVI, making it the most Republican-leaning district in the state. Boebert beat well-funded Democrat Trisha Calvarese there by 11.6 percentage points, for a 1.4 point shortfall based on its partisan voting history, though her margin was only about half the 24-point advantage retired Republican Ken Buck racked up in the district’s previous two elections.

That leaves the district with a PVI of EVEN, which more than lived up to its billing. In the Northern Front Range’s 8th Congressional District, featuring one of the most competitive races in the country, Evans, the Republicans, denied Democratic incumbent Yadira Caraveo a second term by just 0.74 percentage points, only a hair more than the 0.69 percentage point margin Caraveo won with two years earlier. While Cook assigned the seat an EVEN rating under its rules, the site noted that the district’s “raw” PVI was R+0.45, indicating the slightest tilt toward the GOP, and after all the intense campaigning, that’s where it landed.

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