Why is rural Colorado so liberal?

[Cyrusman]

I was looking at their county map from 2016 and nearly every county west of the I-25 corridor went democrat. These are rural areas in the Rockies.

Why are they so liberal?

[Del Tachi]

Either resort communities or high Latino populations.

[Hydera]

[Cyrusman]

Either resort communities or high Latino populations.

Why are resort communities so liberal?

[Hydera]

Either resort communities or high Latino populations.

Why are resort communities so liberal?

They use a lot of hispanic workers and in regards to white people who live there, look at that map above you.

[Crumpets]

In addition to the reasons listed above, some of the GOP's go-to rural pandering lines don't exactly work in these areas. Farming, mining, and ranching are disproportionately small industries in those areas compared to similar counties in Wyoming or Montana.

[Cyrusman]

This is pretty stunning.all the other areas in the country that are that high in terms of high college graduate percentages make sense. There either in big metro areas or college towns or counties. The Colorado ones don’t. I would have never guessed a bunch of counties within the Rocky Mountains west of the Denver metropolitan area would have that high of a percentage of college grads over 25.

[Grassroots]

I wouldn't consider the Kansas-lite eastern rangelands anything but extremely conservative.

[Adam Griffin]

I mean, I realize the question is framed as western rural CO, but overall, Trump won rural CO as a whole by roughly 20 points (56-37) - which accounted for less than 15% of CO's vote. Rural CO swung 7 points to Trump (Romney +12/Trump +19), while the remainder of the state remained unchanged compared to 2012 (Clinton +9/Obama+9).