President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have easily won Colorado’s presidential primary, edging closer to a rematch this fall.
Colorado was one of 16 states on Super Tuesday where voters were casting ballots in the presidential nominating contest.
And the results in Colorado mostly mirrored Trump and Biden’s dominance across the country.
With more than 80% of the votes reported, the Associated Press called the races for Trump and Biden less than 20 minutes after polls closed. Trump had 63% of the vote in the GOP contest while former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley had 34 %.
President Biden was leading the Democratic primary with 85% of the vote.
Colorado’s presidential primary campaign was unusually quiet, with only one visit from a major candidate so far this year. Haley made a campaign stop in Centennial last week, saying Trump has been bringing chaos around the country and hurting Republicans’ election odds in states like Colorado.
Leading up to the deadline, more unaffiliated voters were casting ballots in the Republican contest than the Democratic contest, according to data from the Secretary of State.That lead to some speculation that Haley could get a boost from moderates and perform better than she has against Trump in other states.
Haley was leading Trump in vote tallies from Routt, Eagle, Pitkin, Boulder and Denver counties late Tuesday.
But her pitch to moderate voters ultimately fell short, and she faced headwinds after Colorado’s Republican Party bucked its tradition ofremaining neutral in primary contests and threw its support behind the former president.
Most of the drama in Colorado’s primary this year played out in courtrooms before election day.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should be disqualified from the primary ballot and the presidency because he incited an insurrection culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The U.S. Supreme Courtoverturned that decision on Monday and restored Trump to the ballot.(might be nice to have a link to that story in here)
In the days leading up to Colorado’s primary, some groups in the state launched a late effort to have Democrats vote “noncommitted”in protest of Biden’s support for Israel during its war with Hamas.
But that “noncommitted” vote represented only 7% of the total with most of the votes counted, far less than the 13% of the uncommitted votes in Michigan’s Democratic primary last week.
With Biden and Trump widely expected to earn their parties nominations, this year’s presidential primary lacked much of the drama and excitement of the 2020 primary.
That year marked the first time Colorado held its presidential nominating contest on Super Tuesday. And Colorado became a battleground in that year’s Democratic contest, with several major candidates visiting the state.
In 2020, The Colorado Sun reported reported that the Democratic candidates spent a combined $9.7 million to run more than 32,000 ads in Colorado alone before the polls closed and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders won that primary.
By contrast, only about a third of active voters had cast ballots in this year’s presidential primary as of 3 p.m. on Election Day.
