By the Numbers: Election Returns

Wednesday 5:00 a.m.

According to the Secretary of State office:

Governor
Hickenlooper: 873,790
Beauprez: 862,488

Senate:
Gardner: 903,570
Udall: 814,642

CD6:
Coffman: 128,860
Romanoff: 102,993

Secretary of State
Williams: 859,517
Neguse: 768,452

Treasurer:
Stapleton: 896,346
Markey: 768,776

Attorney General:
Coffman: 922,505
Quick: 712,906

Tuesday 9:50 p.m.

According to the Secretary of State office:

Senate:
Gardner 51.1
Udall: 43.7

Gardner leads by close to a 110,000 votes.

Governor:
Beauprez: 48.7
Hickenlooper 47.1

Beauprez leads by 24,000 votes.

CD6:
Coffman: 53.4 percent
Romanoff 41.9 percent

Coffman leads by 23,000 votes.

It looks like GOP sweep of Jefferson County offices.

Control of the state Senate is still uncertain. Democrats lead by one seat now but Senate races in Jefferson County now may be leaning Republican.

Tuesday 8:15 p.m.

Secretary of State office reports 1,329,630 votes tallied.

Governor’s race: Beauprez leads Hickenlooper by a little over 10,000.
U.S. Senate race: Gardner still leads Udall by about 90,000 or 7 percent.

Tuesday 8:00 p.m.

News organizations are beginning to round numbers but it’s still early. Nate Cohn at the New York Times’s Upshot says strong trends for Gardner.

upshot

Tuesday 7:40 p.m.

Also: Watch the COIndy twitter feed for more and faster updates.

The Secretary of State’s office is just putting up first-round numbers, but in a universal-mail-ballot state, those numbers will build fast.

With 954,618 posted Republican Cory Gardner has the lead in the U.S. Senate race.

Udall: 45.0
Gardner: 50.0

In bellwether Jefferson County, Gardner is also ahead by about 4,000 with about 50 percent of the votes cast, according to the county website.

Gardner: 48.0
Udall: 47.5

Governor John Hickenlooper is leading challenger Bob Beauprez in Jefferson County

Hick: 50.1
Beauprez: 45.8

Tuesday 5:40 p.m.

Latest reported returns cover 1,839,766 ballots. Ballots cast by registered Republicans still lead significantly, but Democrats have at last made the long-predicted climb to under a 7 point spread.

GOP: 38.7
Dem: 31.9

Analysts have been saying tonight that Democrats are hoping to see slightly more than 2 million votes cast, a sort of critical-mass of voters that will tilt the midterm electorate to look more like a presidential election year and put Democrats in office.

Tuesday 1:50 p.m.

Good stuff via Twitter from The Upshot‘s Nate Cohn, who has been all over Colorado voter returns. Takeaway: the gap isn’t closing for Democrats, so far.

cohn on CO numbers1

Tuesday Noon

Democrats appear to be catching up to Republicans but are still trailing by significant margins. Insiders saying Dems have to close the gap to less than 7 points (at least) for the top of the ticket candidates. Here’s an update on 1.6 million votes cast:

Dems: 519,225
GOP: 636,223
UAF: 433,648

So: 1,589,096 votes is the total cast and recorded at start of day. Dems have a 32.7 percent share; Repubs have a 40.0 share. It’s a little over a 7 point spread.

Tuesday 7:30 a.m.
Coloradans, taking advantage of same-day registration, early voting and universal mail ballots cast 1.4 million ballots through Sunday. According to numbers reported by the secretary of state, Republicans hold the edge in early turnout numbers, as expected. Democrats have closed the gap but conservative Arapahoe county reportedly did not submit vote tallies over the weekend. The rough 1/3rd unaffiliated registered voters in the state will decide the election.

Dems: 446,448
GOP: 558,996
UAF: 359,496

On Halloween, Nate Cohn at The Upshot offered a good early look at the numbers in swing–states with tight races, including Colorado. He found 24 percent of early voters this year hadn’t voted in midterm election 2010, which seems good for Democrats, except that more of the those voters were registered Republicans.

Democrats are hoping to turn out numbers more like those that mark presidential election years, where young people and minorities traditionally vote in much greater numbers than they do in midterm elections. Older, whiter more conservative voters turn out in midterm elections, which explains why Republicans traditionally make gains in these years.

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