Some of Colorado’s grassroots campaigners, especially Democrats, had hoped near-universal mail-in balloting might be their not-so-secret weapon in drumming up an avalanche of votes before this week’s election.
But while turnout across the state was higher than in the last midterm election, in 2010, dreams of a Democratic advantage vanished quickly Tuesday night as returns came in.
Thousands of remaining ballots still were being counted Wednesday, but the numbers showed that the electorate that voted largely was a demographic that favored Republicans, including a surge of at least 100,000 voters older than 65.
The voters sent U.S. Sen. Mark Udall packing and elevated Republican U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner to his seat.
Democrats’ consolation was that last-minute votes cast in the Democratic domains of Denver and Boulder counties were enough to rescue Gov. John Hickenlooper in his close race against Republican Bob Beau prez.
As of Wednesday morning, according to an outside analysis of state voting data, ballot returns grouped by party registration favored Republicans over Democrats by 5.4 percentage points. That’s a slightly narrower margin than in 2010, when ballots from Republican-registered voters outpaced Democrats by 5.9 percentage points. The margin could narrow slightly with the tabulation of remaining ballots in Democratic-leaning counties.
But the overall lesson, said a political analyst, was that the purple state of Colorado tilted Republican along with the rest of the country Tuesday — as expected in a midterm election under a Democratic president.
“It’s hard to say what the overall lesson for turnout is” from the universal mail-ballot law, said Seth Masket, chairman of the University of Denver’s Department of Political Science. “But what happened in Colorado doesn’t look too different from what happened in an awful lot of other states, in that you saw some Republicans who outperformed the polling, and Democrats took losses (nearly) across the board.”
Masket long had been skeptical that the 2013 law passed by Colorado Democrats — requiring the sending of a ballot to every registered voter with a verifiable address — would boost Democrats’ prospects in a non-presidential election.
The same law also allowed for same-day voter registration. While figures were not yet available, the Denver Elections Division, among others, said they did see voters take advantage of the ability to register and vote on the same day in large numbers.
On Wednesday, Denver was wrapping up its ballot counting after an all-night effort, and other counties that had taken a break were back at work.
The state Senate majority appeared to depend on uncounted ballots in Adams County, which had 25,000 ballots left to count after election night, and Jefferson County, which had about 14,000 remaining. Meanwhile, counting underway Wednesday in Adams and Arapahoe, which also started the morning with 25,000 left, left key state House races undecided.
Teams of election judges were busy throughout Wednesday in those places as well as Boulder, Larimer, El Paso and Weld counties, which also had thousands or tens of thousands of ballots left to count. Some anticipated counting on Thursday, too.
Counting took longer than usual for a midterm in some places. Officials cited reasons including heavy turnout on Election Day, local ballot initiatives, an all-write-in county surveyor race in Adams County and, in Republican-leaning El Paso County, accommodations of the 2013 law.
As of Wednesday morning, nearly 2.1 million ballots had been cast in the election, compared with 1.8 million in 2010, according to a well-regarded analysis of Colorado voting data by Magellan Strategies. The Republican polling firm is in Louisville.
After counties finish their regular ballot counts, they also will work in the coming week on gathering military ballots and rectifying signature verification issues on ballots amounting to less than 1 percent of those cast in most large counties.
Statewide, although Republicans outpaced Democrats again in returning their ballots, there were some notable differences compared with 2010.
While Republican-registered voters returned more ballots than Democrats, each party’s share decreased. Unaffiliated voters cast a larger proportion of ballots than in 2010, at about 31 percent this year, compared with 32 percent by Democrats and nearly 38 percent by Republicans, Magellan reported.
Although unaffiliated voters made up a 15 percent larger share of the electorate this time, they still were less likely to vote in the midterm than partisans. Registered Democrats and Republicans each make up 31 percent of Colorado’s registered voters.
In 2010, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet won re-election thanks to a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort that confounded polls.
But this year, public polls — which showed Gardner leading Udall but Hickenlooper neck-and-neck with Beauprez — were more dependable.
Compared with 2010, the share of voters who were older than 65 increased by 13 percent — amounting to more than 100,000 additional ballots — while voter shares decreased by 14 percent for those age 45 to 54 and by 5 percent for those age 35 to 44.
Those figures, suggesting a much more conservative-minded electorate, could change slightly as final ballots are tabulated.
Ben Davis, a Democratic political strategist who helped run Udall’s Senate campaign in 2008, said he didn’t see overall turnout as a problem for Democrats this time around.
“We did achieve what we wanted to in many respects,” Davis said, in raw numbers.
“The challenge we had was it was an electorate that was not favorable, and it was a wave year in a far more dramatic fashion than any of us on the ground thought was going to happen.”
Democrats did succeed in pushing up the number of voters ages 18 to 35, generating 70,000 more votes from that group compared with 2010.
But that gain was outpaced by the increased participation of older voters.
Craig Hughes, a Democratic strategist who managed Bennet’s 2010 campaign, suggested older voters may have been more suited to the near-universal mail ballot system.
“While some of that increase could be attributed to the vote-by-mail, those older voters also were part of the Republican base, and those were the folks most motivated to participate,” Hughes said.
Davis said the surge in older voters dashed Udall’s re-election hopes, especially considering the Udall team’s message was tailored toward a younger electorate.
He banked much of his campaign on emphasizing Gardner’s past support of personhood initiatives that could outlaw abortion and reduce access to birth control, a strategy aimed at damaging Gardner’s support with women.
But younger women didn’t show up in increasing numbers this year, Magellan’s analysis shows.
The share of unaffiliated voters who were women was 48 percent, the same as in 2010.
Among registered Democrats who voted, women made up 60 percent, also the same as four years ago.
Jon Murray: 303-954-1405, jmurray@denverpost.com or twitter.com/JonMurray
