John Mertz’ family is a microcosm of Colorado’s electorate — it leans to the left in the aggregate but contains a generous splotch of purple.
Mertz, his wife and a daughter are voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s presidential election, while another daughter and son support former President Donald Trump. Despite the intrafamily schism, Mertz, 75, says they all agree on one thing.
They can’t wait for the election to be over.
“I’m really tired of the political ads. They’re so frickin’ negative,” said Mertz, who lives in Arvada. “I will be extremely happy when it’s done.”
That sentiment is one that longtime Democratic strategist Andy Boian is increasingly hearing from voters bombarded by this campaign season’s steady stream of attack ads, angry political memes, and over-the-top rhetoric and insults — including the use of terms like “scum,” “garbage,” “racist,” “low-IQ” and “fascist.”
Add to that the surprising, the unexpected and the occasionally unsettling events that have marked this election like no other in recent memory, making many voters eager to put it in the rearview mirror.
Boian has worked on the last seven Democratic presidential campaigns, dating back to Bill Clinton’s in the 1990s.
“This one by far was the most bruising,” he said.
Since Trump announced the launch of his third run for the White House nearly two years ago, he rose to the top of a field of nearly a dozen GOP rivals to clinch the nomination in March. Two months later, he was convicted of 34 felonies — a first for a former president — in one of four criminal cases brought against him.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee this year, is rushed offstage by U.S. Secret Service agents after being grazed by a bullet during a rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
In July, a gunman tried to kill Trump during a political rally in Pennsylvania. Two months later, in Florida, authorities arrested a man who was allegedly planning to assassinate the former president as he golfed.
On the Democratic side of the aisle, President Joe Biden was pressured by his party this summer to drop his reelection bid — a first in modern American politics at such a late stage — after a disastrous debate performance against Trump in late June raised serious questions about his mental acuity.
Closer to home, Colorado’s elections have been marked by unexpected turns, too.
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert late last year switched congressional districts in an attempt to salvage her political future, scrambling a pair of the state’s U.S. House contests in the process. And the state’s Republican Party descended into internecine warfare that landed warring factions in court and led to an unsuccessful attempt by some party members to oust chair Dave Williams less than three months before the election.
All of that has led to Colorado voters “feeling a good amount of fatigue” as Election Day dawns, said Robert Preuhs, a political science professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“By any measure, this election is unprecedented in modern times,” he said.
Two-year-old Alessandra Caffa holds her toy bunny while watching her father Juan Pablo Caffa vote for the first time after recently becoming an American citizen, at a voting center in the McNichols Civic Center Building in downtown Denver on Nov. 4, 2024. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
Democracy a top concern
Elaine Little, an 86-year-old Republican who lives in Denver, agreed that Tuesday couldn’t arrive soon enough.
“I’ll be happy when it’s over,” she said. “I think our election process is way too long.”
A Trump backer, Little is not always enamored of how the former president speaks or the name-calling he engages in. But the way Democrats have been characterizing him in recent weeks is irresponsible, she said.
“I don’t think he’s Hitler. I don’t think he’s a dictator,” Little said. “All these things the Democrats are saying are not true.”
Not that Tuesday will necessarily be the end of anything. Colorado State University political science professor Kyle Saunders said there will be no shortage of lawyers from both sides. They will be making sure all vote counting goes according to the book, especially with the potential that the winners of close races may not be known for days.
“The attorneys have all been retained and are in place in every competitive state and will be deployed by both sides at the slightest transgression — of that I have no doubt — as is their right in our legal system,” he said. “I believe in our institutions. However, those institutions are about to be challenged. And I believe they will endure that challenge.”
Stickers are ready to be handed out to voters on Nov. 4, 2024, at the voting center in the McNichols Civic Center Building in downtown Denver. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
The 2024 election’s potential effect on American democracy greatly concerns Marsha Peterson, a Loveland Democrat who moved to Colorado from Minnesota four years ago. Peterson, 73, is one of more than 7,200 people who responded to the statewide Voter Voices survey, in which The Denver Post took part.
Survey results show democracy and good government as the top concern among respondents. That’s Peterson’s top issue, too, and she worries about what Trump might do if he retakes office in January.
“He didn’t care about democracy. He didn’t care about law and order,” Peterson said, referencing the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by Trump supporters. “We must have a president who reveres our Constitution, our Bill of Rights and the history of our country.”
Former Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams, now a political consultant, has long condemned Trump’s insistence — without evidence — that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And he’s wary of what could happen in the days and weeks following Tuesday’s election.
“I’m fearful that there could be chaos and charges of vote stealing and fraud that will be unsubstantiated,” Wadhams said.
But it’s not automatic that it will be Republicans making false post-election charges, he said.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democrat who faced off against Trump in the 2016 presidential election, told CBS News in a 2019 interview that Trump was an “illegitimate president” and that the election she lost “wasn’t on the level.” That same year, she told an audience in California that she had been warning candidates for the 2020 election that they could run a great campaign — even clinch the nomination — and still “have the election stolen from you.”
“It’s important to remember that the stolen election stuff started with Hillary Clinton in 2016,” Wadhams said.
The big difference, he said, is that Clinton’s denials of the validity of the election results didn’t lead to an insurrection.
“It would be good for whoever wins (this time) to win it by a wide margin so we don’t have to go through what we did in 2020,” Wadhams said.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a church service at Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ, Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
“Let’s not talk about it anymore”
As of midnight Sunday, nearly 2.1 million Colorado voters had turned in their completed ballots, which is about a half million fewer than at the same point in the election cycle four years ago. About 29% were from Democrats, 27% from Republicans and 42% from unaffiliated voters. Women were outpacing men in voting in every age group. But the final two days are typically among the heaviest for ballot returns.
Colorado is considered safe for Harris — a trio of polls from September showed her with a double-digit percentage-point lead over Trump. But nationally, the race is a nail-biter, with The New York Times on Monday reporting a one-point lead for Harris in the popular vote in its polling average.
The spread between the candidates across the seven swing states that are likely to decide the election is also tantalizingly close, with Trump leading in five of them — mostly by a whisker — as of Monday, according to the Times’ state polling averages.
A Denver police officer drops off a ballot outside the Denver Elections Division on Nov. 4, 2024. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
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Preuhs, the Metro State political science professor, said that while today’s sharp divisions within the American electorate can result in increased levels of anxiety surrounding elections, it’s also indicative of a new and exciting level of engagement and interest in the democratic process.
“Political scientists 30 years ago were concerned about apathy and lack of interest among voters,” he said. “And those things have changed.”
And negotiating political disagreements in 2024 within a household is different for every Colorado family.
For Mertz, of Arvada, his family’s strategy is to “avoid the subject.” For Little, the Denver Republican, she knows her vote will be the opposite of her 93-year-old partner’s. And there’s no need to take it any further than that, she said.
“I voted, you voted,” Little said. “I canceled you out — so let’s not talk about it anymore.”
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