Colorado Politics: Millennials Move Colorado Left

The Millennial generation, 75 million strong, are finally fully within voting age. They are shifting politics to the left, especially on many cultural issues, and helped give Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton their Colorado wins and make the state one of the first in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana.

In a Colorado Politics column (4), the impact of Colorado’s Millennials on the 2012 election is described:

Millennials Moving Colorado to the Left

Although Colorado remains competitive between the two main political parties, with candidates representing both parties winning statewide races and splitting control of the state legislature, the state has, in fact, moved at least two points to the Democratic side of the scale since 2006. This is most clearly shown in terms of registration and voter behavior in presidential elections. Republicans have lost their registration advantage. Voters not affiliated with a party are now the largest political group in the state, and polling shows that they skew younger and somewhat more liberal and Democratic. The presidential races since 1996 offer evidence that Colorado has shifted to the Democratic side with Barack Obama’s elections, and has remained in that camp through Hillary Clinton’s win in the state during the 2016 presidential election.

One reason for the shift is that voters under 35 years old are flooding the voter rolls nationally and, when motivated to vote, are changing the politics of the country and Colorado. 

Millennials have now overtaken Baby Boomers as the largest population cohort, and as they register and turn out to vote, they will become the dominant voting bloc by the 2020 presidential election. In 2016 presidential election polls conducted by the Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Denver’s Korbel School, Colorado’s Millennials distinguished themselves with a number of characteristics. More