DENVER — Before Tuesday’s blue wave election, the one bright spot beleaguered Colorado Republicans could point to was that they had as many representatives in Congress from the Centennial State as Democrats did.

But that four-to-four split was upended this week, with two Republican congressmen losing their seats — and the specter of another GOP congressional seat potentially flipping to Democrats by the time ballot counting wraps up.

Colorado Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib said his organization hasn’t discounted the dream of running the tables on all eight of the state’s congressional districts in this week’s midterm election.

“We’re not going to rest until every single vote in every district is counted,” he said. “The whole point in winning big is you can deliver big.”

That could be a tall order, given that Colorado hasn’t sent a single-party slate of House and Senate members to the nation’s capital since 1941, back when the state had just four seats in Congress. That delegation was made up of Democrats.

There’s also the fact that Republican incumbent Jeff Hurd maintained a thin, but growing, lead over Democrat Dwayne Romero in the 3rd Congressional District race as of Wednesday evening. Romero had been leading Hurd the previous night.

But in two reliably Republican districts, both U.S. Reps. Lauren Boebert and Jeff Crank were trailing their Democratic opponents in the 4th and 5th districts, respectively, on Wednesday evening.

Democrat Jessica Killin held a nearly 5-percentage-point lead over Crank in the El Paso County-centered district that has never sent a Democrat to Washington, D.C., before. (On Thursday afternoon, the Associated Press called the race for Killin, marking a flip.)

And Boebert trailed Eileen Laubacher, a moderate Democrat who for years was registered as a Republican, by fewer than 3,500 votes Wednesday evening. That race had not been called as of early Thursday afternoon.

On Tuesday night, Republican Congressman Gabe Evans lost by a wide margin to Democrat Manny Rutinel in Colorado’s closely watched — and closely drawn — 8th Congressional District northeast of Denver. During the campaign, Rutinel was relentless in attaching his freshman opponent to President Donald Trump on every vote he took.

“(These Republicans did not pursue) the priorities that the people wanted their representatives to focus on when they voted for them in 2024,” Murib said.

GOP losses in Colorado were in keeping with the drubbing the party suffered nationally on Tuesday, with Democrats winning control of both the House and Senate as voters resoundingly repudiated Trump’s agenda amid high prices and an ongoing war in Iran.

“I think we’ll end up seven-to-one Democrats” in Colorado’s congressional delegation, said Andy Boian, a Democratic political strategist. “This will be a pretty seismic change for Colorado — at least for the next two years.”

Keeping those seats blue for long will be the challenge, especially once Trump leaves office, Boian said — given the strong Republican makeup of the voter base in those districts.

Case in point, Democrat Betsy Markey won the 2008 election for the 4th Congressional District, a swath of conservative Colorado that largely covers the state’s agricultural Eastern Plains.

Two years later, she was gone.

“I find it difficult to see Democrats holding on to districts 4 or 5 for longer than a term or two,” Boian said. “It could be a sugar high right now.”

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman knows what it’s like to lose an election in a blue wave year, as he lost his 2018 reelection bid to Democrat Jason Crow after having served a decade as Colorado’s 6th Congressional District representative.

But unlike his former district, which he said was reformulated after the 2010 census to be less friendly to the GOP and will likely not see another Republican elected in its current configuration, the 4th and 5th districts will likely return to the GOP fold.

“These districts will eventually return to their roots,” Coffman said. “It’s going to be very difficult for Democrats to balance the needs of their caucus in the House with the needs of the district.”

Dick Wadhams, the former chair of the Colorado Republican Party who is no fan of Trump, said the challenge for Democrats joining the delegation in January — especially those who win a red district — is turning their campaign rhetoric into governance without alienating their constituents.

“Now they have to serve, now they have to vote,” Wadhams said. “There are the loud democratic socialists in the party who will want to dictate the agenda. There’s going to be tremendous pressure on them to vote on things that will be unpopular in their districts.

“They’re going to take some awfully tough votes in 2027 and those will define their candidacies in 2028.”

They risk, Wadhams said, becoming “one-term wonders.”

That said, there’s no question Democrats pulled off on Tuesday a stinging upset that will further set back a Republican Party that has long been in disarray and without direction in Colorado, he said.

“If it ends up seven-to-one in the delegation, that’s pretty extraordinary,” Wadhams said.

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(Denver Post staff writer Elliott Wenzler contributed to this report.)

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