Despite a blue wave in Colorado that saw a Boulder native claim the governor’s office, the 2018 election was not an across-the-board victory for liberals in the state.
Time will tell whether Colorado is permanently a blue state, according to University of Colorado research. For three years now, CU’s American Politics Research Lab has surveyed Colorado voters about state and national issues and politicians and analyzed the results, the newest of which were released this week, including the responses of 800 people who were surveyed in October 2018.
“I don’t think I would go there quite yet,” said Scott Adler, director of the lab. “It was certainly a good year for the Democrats, but we’ll have to see what happens going forward in 2020 in particular.”
The survey did pick up on Colorado’s blue wave, he said, but he was somewhat surprised to see a dip in the number of respondents identifying as Democrats in the latest iteration of the survey.
He theorized that in 2017, a year in which there was much backlash to President Donald Trump’s administration, people who had regularly thought of themselves as independents started to identify instead as Democrats — and that came back to more natural levels in 2018, though they continued to vote like Democrats.
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