George Washington left the presidency in 1796 with one overriding fear — not foreign invasion, not economic collapse, but political parties. His farewell address named factions as the greatest internal threat the republic would face: engines of division that would place loyalty to a group above loyalty to country, allow organized minorities to seize the machinery of government, and corrupt the principle of self-governance. The Constitution he helped write contains no mention of political parties. The founders designed a system in which citizens chose individuals, not teams.
The loyalty the Constitution demands is to the document itself — to its structure, its limits, and its protections — not to any faction that claims to represent it. A voter who believes the Constitution is sound has no need of a party to tell them how to apply it. A voter who believes it is flawed has a remedy: Article 5, which sets out the amendment process precisely so that fundamental disagreements can be resolved through the people and the states, not through party platforms or legislative workarounds. The founders built that exit door into the document on purpose. What they did not build in, and explicitly warned against, was the idea that a private political organization should stand between a citizen and that choice.
Washington lost that argument before he left Philadelphia. Parties formed within his own cabinet, built around Hamilton and Jefferson’s competing visions of what the Constitution permitted. For more than two centuries the two-party structure held — through civil war, depression, realignment, and every political upheaval in between.
It is no longer holding in Colorado.
As of April 1, 2026, Colorado’s active registered voters break down this way, according to Colorado Secretary of State data: 2,032,366 unaffiliated, 1,003,187 Democrat, 910,438 Republican. The two major parties combined collect fewer registered voters than the Coloradans who belong to neither of them. Unaffiliated voters have held an absolute majority of the state’s active electorate for consecutive months. In January they stood at 2,009,437. By March they reached 2,032,366 — a gain of nearly 23,000 in two months, roughly three times the combined growth of both major parties in the same period.
This is not a recent development. In 2015, about 35 percent of Colorado’s active registered voters were unaffiliated. By 2020 that figure reached 38 percent. It crossed 47 percent by mid-2023, hit 48 percent through the 2024 election cycle, and crossed the majority threshold in 2025. The exit from both parties has been consistent and shows no sign of reversing.
Colorado’s voter rolls added 32,094 net active registered voters in the first three months of 2026, with nearly 23,000 of those landing in the unaffiliated column. That number sits alongside a separate and well-documented reality: Coloradans are leaving the state. How a state losing residents sustains that pace of voter roll growth is a question the data raises but does not answer.
In Colorado’s high country, the numbers are more definitive than the statewide figure suggests. Summit County’s active voters are 56 percent unaffiliated. Eagle County sits at 56 percent. Gunnison at 55, Routt at 55, La Plata at 54, Pitkin at 53, Garfield at 53, Chaffee at 52, Grand at 51. Of the twelve counties in HCA’s primary coverage area, nine have cleared the unaffiliated majority threshold. Only Jackson County, where Republicans outnumber both Democrats and unaffiliated voters, runs against the pattern.
Unaffiliated voters now outnumber registered Democrats by more than a million and registered Republicans by more than 1.1 million. They are not a fringe. They are the electorate.
Washington named this possibility and called it a warning. Two million Colorado voters are treating it as an instruction.
Support Independent Local Journalism — High Country Advocate was created as a real alternative to regional media that too often silences dissenting voices while taking sides in the political struggle. Producing in-depth, unflinching reporting like this series and others is expensive: servers, editing, research time, and legal review all add up quickly. If these articles have informed you or given you new perspective, please consider supporting HCA with a paid subscription — every subscriber helps keep this reporting strong and independent. 