Joe Biden Is On Track To Win Colorado By The Largest Margin Of A Presidential Candidate In Decades

Updated on Nov. 6 at 10:50 a.m.

Joe Biden has earned Colorado's nine electoral college votes in the race for president. And the state's latest numbers have the Democratic candidate up by more than 12 percentage points over President Donald Trump.

That would be the largest margin of victory in a presidential race in Colorado since Ronald Reagan won reelection in 1984 by more than 28 points.

According to the Secretary of State's office, Biden is ahead with more than 55 percent of the vote. His margin of victory is also higher than Hillary Clinton had in 2016, when she won in Colorado by nearly 5 percentage points.

Biden has also earned more than 393,000 more votes than Clinton did four years ago, while Trump has received over 118,000 more votes than he did in 2016. It's also worth noting that in the last presidential election, third-party candidates like Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein got larger slices of the election pie than the leading third-party candidates in 2020.

According to political researcher Sara Hagedorn from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, one factor behind Biden's victory in the state is the turnout of unaffiliated voters.

"We're seeing all these young people moving to Colorado," she told Colorado Matters. "They don't really love partisan politics — they don't love Republicans, they don't love Democrats — but they are voting [for] more Democrats. For the next few years, at least, I think Colorado is solidly blue."

Unaffiliated voters make up a plurality of Colorado’s electorate. And more than 1,282,000 voted in this year's general election — higher than the numbers of registered Democrats and Republicans who voted in Colorado. Though it's not yet clear how many unaffiliated voters backed Biden.

Four years ago, Colorado was still seen as somewhat of a swing state, according to Seth Masket, who leads the University of Denver's Center on American Politics. He adds that Trump's campaign didn't focus as much on Colorado this election cycle.

"They just didn't figure it was that competitive," he said. "It was just not great for Republican turnout."

All Colorado counties have reported their results, but the state is still finalizing official counts.