DENVER–Colorado keeps on growing, but have you ever wondered where all those people are coming from? Ben Engen from Constellation Data & Analytics took a hard look at census data and found that between 2004 and 2017, just under 457,000 people moved to Colorado, with California by far the number one source of that in-migration (just over 98,000), followed by Illinois and New York. In fact, those three states together supplied over 38 percent of new Coloradans.
These are reliably blue states politically, and while Engen found they are mostly sending unaffiliated voters our way, the results of the last several elections are an indicator of their political leanings. He also notes that at the same time, voter registration has grown by roughly twice the number of new people moving to Colorado, with the edge Republicans once held vanishing. Of the outfits doing voter registration drives in Colorado, Engen found “a dozen left-aligned organizations, one conservative one.”
Engen recently sat down with Jon Caldara on the public affairs tv show Devil’s Advocate (airs Friday nights at 8:30 on Colorado Public Television) to talk about his findings, and what it all means for Colorado elections. That video is below and well worth the time. Engen’s data is here.
