Democrats have long relied on youth turnout as an important part of their path to victory. While the 2024 presidential election saw a swing to the right among young people, especially among young men, Colorado was one of the few places in the country that didn’t follow this trend.
Colorado bucked national trends in several ways this year. Although the 73% total voter turnout in 2024 is a far cry from the 2020 election where Colorado saw a record-breaking 87% turnout, Colorado still ranked in the top five states for election turnout.
Youth (ages 18-34) turnout in Colorado was nearly double the national average. Furthermore, young voters in Colorado aged 18 to 34 did not experience the rightward shift observed nationally, especially among men. Even as young voters’ support for Democratic candidates dropped nationally between 2020 and 2024 — a 25-point margin of victory for Biden over Trump compared to the 6-point margin for Kamala Harris — young voters in Colorado supported Harris by a 25-point margin.
Earlier this year, New Era Colorado, a left-leaning youth advocacy group, launched an initiative to boost progressive candidates in the election. A statement put out by New Era Colorado lauded their Get Out the Vote program as a key part of high youth turnout and the stalwart support for left-leaning politics among young Coloradans. New Era says it reached over one million young voters this election, through a combined effort of door-knocking, calls/texts, mailers, and social media engagement.
New Era’s Executive Director, Nicole Hensel, sees high youth turnout in the state as both an accomplishment for New Era and a testament to the voting system in Colorado.
“We use layered tactics in order to reach young voters, whether it is knocking on their doors, sending mail with tested social pressure messaging, calling them to remind them to make a plan to vote, or being on their college campuses and directly walking over 2,000 young people to the polls,” Hensel said in an interview. “The other thing that’s at play here is that in recent years, Colorado has passed legislation that has made elections more accessible to all people, but especially young people. Colorado boasts some of the best election laws in the country, whether it’s same-day registration, online voter registration, mandated polling places on college campuses, or automatic voter registration.”
Hensel added that New Era played a crucial role in implementing these pieces of legislation, namely mandated polling stations at college campuses.
Hensel argues that young voters are not motivated specifically by political parties or candidates, but rather by issues.
“We’ve always known that young voters are not motivated by political parties or candidates. They are motivated by the issues. Here in Colorado, we had two major ballot measures that New Era worked on that are central to young people’s values,” Hensel said. “Those were Amendment 79, which protects abortion rights in Colorado’s Constitution, and then Amendment J, which overturned the ban on same-sex marriage. Both of these ballot measures spoke to young people’s values of autonomy, fairness, and freedom.”
On the national trend of Gen Z men drifting to the right, Hansel says that there have been warning signs for some time. The economy was paramount in voters’ minds this election and this is also true for young men, if not more so due to societal pressures, Hansel argues. Hansel believes that the current economic system, which she describes as “corporations and profits being prioritized over people and community,” has exacerbated young men’s feelings of isolation, loneliness, and rampant inequality partially resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“All the while, they [young men] have been bombarded by politicized media that preys on these insecurities and negative stereotypes of the other. We know that it’s critical to our work moving forward is bringing young men back into our coalition by explaining how an equitable future isn’t a zero-sum game,” Hansel said.
Colorado Times Recorder spoke with Weston Imer who serves on the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council. Imer was pleased with the results of the election, arguing that his generation, Gen Z, had shown who they wanted as a leader.
“Nationally we had over 40% turnout in Gen Z for the conservative side of the aisle. I think that definitely trickled down here to Colorado,” Imer said. “I have seen incredible activism and engagement with Gen Z out and around Denver. Everywhere I’ve gone over the past few weeks, and I admit I’ve been wearing my MAGA hat a lot of the time. I was walking through Cherry Creek Mall the other day and saw a group of kids all wearing Trump gear. I think my generation has really shown who they want as a leader. In Colorado we had some incredible results, Rebecca Keltie won flipping that district by seven votes and other incredible pick-ups.”
Imer says that he feels this is particularly impressive given the recent turmoil within the Colorado Republican Party. Imer says that, even amid a failed legal challenge to Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams’ leadership and infighting, Colorado Republicans were able to pick up key victories. Imer further argued that Republican turnout was lower this year in Colorado, blaming leaks from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office as discouraging Republican turnout.
It should be noted that other conservative activists, especially those in Colorado’s competitive 8th Congressional District, did not feel that their victories had anything to do with help from the Colorado GOP.
Imer and Hensel disagreed on the prime motivators for Gen Z voters. While both agreed that the economy was a driving factor for most young people in this election, Imer argued that immigration was top of mind for most Gen Z voters. Hensel believes that social issues like reproductive rights were of particular importance, citing that 69 percent of voters aged 18-44 voted in favor of Amendment 79, which enshrined the right to abortion in Colorado’s constitution.
Although the 2024 election has been seen as a wake-up call for Democrats nationally on their ability to reach youth voters, from a Colorado perspective, Democrats continued to be the dominant choice of young people at the polls.
