Colorado After Competition

How Asymmetric Party Collapse Turns General Elections Into Intra-Party Fights

I have been thinking about Seth’s post on progressive primary challenges (you should read it) in Colorado not as a prediction, but as a diagnostic. The candidate filings themselves are interesting. What they imply about how political competition now works in Colorado is even more interesting.

The basic empirical point is simple. Competitive legislative primaries have historically been rare in Colorado. The fact that 2026 features a noticeable wave of progressive challengers to Democratic incumbents suggests real organizational capacity on the left. This is not just social media discourse migrating into candidate filings. It reflects donors, activists, and networks willing to contest institutional power.

In most states, this would trigger a familiar cycle. Activists pull a party left, then general election voters push back, then parties recalibrate. What makes Colorado interesting is that the second step in that cycle may be weaker than usual.

The Republican Party’s Problem(s)

Colorado Republicans are not just losing elections. They are out of sync with the state’s demographic and reputational trajectory. They hold four of Colorado’s eight congressional districts, and then county-level power where Republicans are concentrated, but that’s about it. That said, statewide and along the Front Range they are increasingly marginalized.

Colorado is among the most highly educated states in the country, with growth concentrated along the Front Range in urban and suburban areas dominated by college-educated professionals. The state now leads the nation in postsecondary attainment, with roughly 63 percent of adults holding a degree or credential.
Source: https://cdhe.colorado.gov/news-article/colorado-leads-all-50-states-in-educational-attainment

Most population growth over the past decade has occurred along the Front Range corridor, especially Denver, Boulder, and northern Colorado.
Source: https://www.cpr.org/2021/08/12/census-colorado-population-growth-front-range/

Education has become one of the strongest predictors of partisan alignment in the United States. College-educated voters have moved sharply toward Democrats, while voters without degrees have trended Republican.
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-race-ethnicity-and-education/

Trump did not just ride this realignment. He accelerated it, and in a state like Colorado that acceleration mattered. In 2012, Obama carried Colorado by about 5 points. In 2016, Clinton carried it by about 5 points again, but with a different coalition. By 2020, Biden carried Colorado by roughly 13 points. In 2024, Colorado remained solidly blue.
Election results: https://historicalelectiondata.coloradosos.gov/search?bq=false&df=1902&dt=2024

That is not just partisan drift. Hardly. That is a coalitional shock.

Trump redefined the symbolic identity of the Republican Party in a way that made it reputationally costly for a large share of Colorado’s professional class. Suburban Republicans did not just disagree with Trump on policy. They increasingly saw the national GOP as culturally alien, institutionally reckless, and socially costly to associate with.

I have watched this up close in Colorado politics over the past decade-plus. The suburban GOP donor class and technocratic professionals did not become progressive. They mostly became Democrats, independents, or quiet ticket splitters. The party that had been competitive in suburban Denver, Jefferson County, and the northern Front Range essentially lost its social base.

The result was a hollowing out of the Colorado GOP’s suburban coalition. Rural populism became more central to Republican identity. Donors and professional-class candidates became harder to recruit. The party struggled to present a governing coalition that matched where the state was growing.

This matters for a simple reason. Democratic accountability depends on credible opposition. When one party becomes electorally nonviable across large parts of a state, voters do not necessarily become more ideologically aligned with the dominant party. Instead, political competition relocates inside the dominant party.

When Competition Moves Inward

The progressive primary challenges Seth highlights may be less about a sudden ideological surge and more about where political conflict is now being adjudicated.

In a competitive two-party system, parties drift toward their bases in primaries and are disciplined by general-election losses. In a dominant-party system, that discipline weakens. The median voter’s influence is filtered through factional contests inside the dominant party, often in low-turnout primaries, donor networks, and activist organizations.

This is familiar from California Democratic politics and New York municipal governance. The main political choice is not between parties but between factions within a party.

Colorado increasingly looks like this. Progressive activists can push policy left without immediate electoral punishment, not because the median voter is especially progressive, but because the alternative party lacks credibility.

Migration, Sorting, and the Reinforcing Loop

Migration matters here too. Colorado has absorbed large numbers of migrants from California, Texas, and the Midwest, disproportionately younger, college-educated, and tied to tech, higher education, and professional services. These are exactly the voters who have sorted hardest against Trumpism.

Net in-migration has been concentrated in the Denver metro and northern Front Range, with migrants disproportionately holding college degrees and working in professional and technical services.

The Front Range has become a magnet for this class of migrants. That reinforces education polarization and Democratic dominance, which further hollows out the GOP’s suburban bench.

The Missing Feedback Loop

In a competitive system, ideological drift is corrected by losing elections. In Colorado, that feedback loop is attenuated.

Voters dissatisfied with progressive governance may dislike the GOP more. They may see it as incompetent, culturally alien, or reputationally toxic. Rather than switching parties, they may support moderate Democrats. That reinforces intra-party competition rather than inter-party competition.

The result is a strange equilibrium. Policy can drift away from median voter preferences without triggering partisan turnover. Accountability becomes delayed and indirect, mediated through internal party processes that are less visible and less participatory than general elections.

So, this is not a revolutionary progressive takeover. It is a quieter transformation. Inter-party competition is replaced by intra-party factionalism as the primary mechanism of democratic contestation.

What This Argument Assumes

This interpretation rests on several assumptions that are worth making explicit.

First, it assumes the Colorado GOP’s weakness is structural rather than cyclical. Party systems are resilient. Collapse often looks permanent until it is not.

Second, it assumes progressive primary challenges translate into leftward governance. Institutions, donors, and coalition constraints often moderate outcomes. Primary rhetoric does not always map cleanly onto legislative behavior.

Third, it assumes education polarization is durable. Education is partly a proxy for cultural class identity, which can shift with issue salience. Housing costs, crime, schools, and public disorder could reconfigure coalitions even among college-educated voters.

Finally, it assumes the absence of credible opposition reduces electoral constraint. That is plausible but not inevitable. Ballot initiatives, courts, and localized backlash can substitute for partisan competition.

These are not fatal weaknesses. They are the conditions under which the argument holds.

Why This Could Break

There are also reasons to think this equilibrium may be unstable.

Colorado’s 8th Congressional District shows Republicans can win under the right demographic and messaging conditions. Progressive governance failures on affordability or crime could activate suburban backlash even without a strong GOP infrastructure. Primary polarization does not necessarily produce extreme governance. California and New York often elect ideologically diverse Democrats who govern pragmatically, though not without exceptions.

Party collapse is endogenous. A post-Trump Republican Party oriented toward suburban technocratic governance could reenter competition faster than many assume. Colorado’s political future is contingent, not predetermined.

A Broader Pattern

Colorado may be an early case of a broader phenomenon. Political scientists would call this a move toward a dominant-party equilibrium with factional competition replacing inter-party competition. Demographic sorting and reputational collapse can transform electoral competition into internal ideological sorting within dominant parties.

This is not democratic stagnation. It is democratic transformation. But it carries risks. When dominant parties face no external constraint, organized factions exert disproportionate influence. Policy becomes less tethered to median voter preferences and more responsive to mobilized minorities. Accountability shifts from general elections to internal party processes that are less transparent and less accessible to ordinary voters.

That is not illegitimate. It is just different, and in some ways institutionally thinner.

What Colorado Might Be Teaching Us

Colorado is not simply becoming more progressive. It is becoming a place where the structure of competition itself is changing.

Progressive activists are testing how far policy can move when the opposition is fragmented and reputationally damaged. Moderates are testing whether intra-party coalitions can substitute for cross-party coalitions. Voters are testing whether dissatisfaction leads to party switching or factional bargaining. None of this looks like the classic median-voter story political science textbooks teach.

The most consequential political battles in Colorado in the medium term may not be between Democrats and Republicans. They may be between progressive and moderate Democrats, fought in low-turnout primaries that increasingly function as the real elections.

That is not a progressive takeover. It is something quieter and, in some ways, more consequential. Colorado increasingly resembles a system where democratic competition is pushed inside the dominant party rather than between parties. The question is not whether that system can produce accountability. It is whether it can do so in a way that remains visible, participatory, and legitimate to the broader electorate.