Primary delivered on turnout promise
The push to reinstate Colorado’s presidential primary after several cycles of party caucuses came with promises of expanded participation and, just maybe, greater national relevance in the nomination process.
This week’s state Democratic primary, won by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, delivered big on those promises — even as Colorado competed for attention with much larger states, including California and Texas, on Super Tuesday.
“We have clearly seen the difference a primary makes in terms of more voters participating in the decision — and when more people vote, democracy wins,” Morgan Carroll, the Colorado Democratic Party’s chair, said Wednesday.
Most major candidates visited Colora
do during a stretch in February shortly after mail ballots were sent out across the state, with former Vice President Joe Biden the only Democrat not to hold a public event.
Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, had expressed hope last spring, when he and Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced the selection of Super Tuesday for Colorado’s reinstated primary, that the state’s voters would get that level of attention.
Then there was the turnout. More than 1.8 million Coloradans cast ballots in the Democratic or Republican primary, according to Griswold’s office, with a few still being counted. That means at least 51% of the state’s active voters participated, according to an analysis of ballot returns by Louisville-based political firm Magellan Strategies.
More than 1 million of those ballots were for the Democratic primary, with unaffiliated voters allowed to participate.
That participation marks an eightfold increase from four years ago, when about 124,000 Democrats turned out to caucus sites to hand Sanders a victory over Hillary Clinton.
Not all of those votes are showing in Colorado’s results, however, because ballots marked for Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and some other withdrawn candidates weren’t counted. The biggest concern about the primary as Super Tuesday arrived was that some early voters who chose these candidates couldn’t choose again — an issue some politicians are now discussing how to address.
Back in 2016, when 64% of Colorado voters approved Proposition 107, the initiative to reinstate the presidential primary, the leaders of both major parties opposed it. They worried that open primaries would disincentivize party affiliation and could come with unintended consequences.
But their opposition has long since softened.
“We think the move from a presidential caucus to a presidential primary was the right decision,” Carroll said in a statement.
Not surprisingly, turnout in Tuesday’s primary was highest among active Democrat registrants, as nearly twothirds voiced a preference in their side’s highly competitive presidential race. Sanders won Colorado by more than 10 percentage points.
Unaffiliated voters, too, participated eagerly, with about 42% turning out. Magellan says unaffiliated turnout was more than double what it was in June 2018, where contested gubernatorial primaries on both sides provided the state’s first test run of the new system allowing them to participate. This time, they opted to vote in the Democratic primary by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
Yet Republicans didn’t sit on their ballots, either. Even with President Donald Trump facing no serious competition in that primary, at least 54% of active Republican voters returned their ballots. Nearly 93% of GOP ballots cast were for Trump.
“As the president would say, it’s huge,” said Lx Fangonilo, the state GOP’s executive director. “It’s amazing that we were able to turn out this many Republican ballots when it wasn’t competitive.”
While Carroll said the high primary participation showed voters are energized to defeat Trump, Fangonilo speculated that a potential drawn-out primary battle between Sanders and Biden would only help unify Republicans in November. Both may be right. “Looking toward November, if the data from these primaries is any indication, we are looking at sky-high turnout across the board in Colorado,” said the analysis from Magellan, a Republican polling firm based in the state.
Colorado wasn’t alone in seeing surging turnout after changing its election setup. Turnout also soared in three other Super Tuesday states — Maine, Minnesota and Utah — that switched to primaries from caucuses since 2016.