In the final weeks of the campaign, operatives all over the state typically participate in the election game called the “ballot chase” as they harass and harangue voters with mail-in ballots to get them in – get them in now.  Come election day, that game morphs into the mad dash to get remaining voters to the polls via any means necessary.  Kidnapping?  Sure!

That’s why many Monday Morning Quarterbacks like to look at turnout for trends in voting that may have caused an election to swing one way or another.  To satisfy everyone’s curiosity, we’ve compiled the turnout from the most populated counties in Colorado to determine which party turned out the most of its voters.  For this chart we took number of voters and divided by all (active and inactive) voters to come up with percent turned out.  And the winner is…..

Republicans.  Sort of.  While Republicans appear to have turned out a higher percentage of their registered voters, as compared to Democrats turnout percentages, models are far more complex these days, particularly with the increase in unaffiliated voters.

Unaffiliated voters comprise nearly one-third of our electorate in Colorado, which makes it difficult and all the more important for campaigns to have voter identification efforts to determine which way UAF voters were leaning as the election progresses.  So, while Republicans turned out a higher percentage of registered Republicans, the UAF voters played a huge role, too.

Sorry, we feel a little like a tease here.  Readers thought we were going to reveal some magic algorithm that would uncover who really turned out the most voters.  We don’t have that.  Sorry.  But somebody sure turned out the unaffiliateds as they came out in droves.