Obama wins Colo.; Democrat Udall wins senate seat

DENVER -- Maria Piñon turned 18 one week before Election Day, and celebrated Tuesday with a vote for Sen. Barack Obama.

The orthodontic assistant, who came to the polling place in her working-class Hispanic neighborhood wearing scrubs, said her family and friends voted the same.

"He's something new, something fresh to bring to our country," the first-time voter said. "I feel like my vote's going to make a big difference."

Voters like Piñon are part of the reason this battleground state gave its nine electoral votes to Obama.

The Centennial State used to be reliably red in presidential races. The last time voters here anointed a Democrat was in 1992, when Colorado went to Bill Clinton, and that was an anomaly.

But population changes have fueled a political transformation. Registration in the state has grown by 700,000 in the last decade, surging to 3.2 million now.

Among the new voters are large numbers of Hispanics and transplants from other states, especially California.

"The thing about Colorado, like the other intermountain West states, it's not just people changing their mind about candidates. It's new people coming in," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

For instance, there was an 18% increase in eligible Hispanic voters in Colorado between 2000 and 2006, according to a report Frey co-authored using Census data. Hispanic voters, he says, tend to vote Democratic.

Mi Familia Vota, a group that encourages civic participation among Hispanics and immigrants, says it registered 2,300 people since late May by visiting churches after Spanish-language Masses, staffing tables outside Mexican groceries and courting newly naturalized Americans at citizenship ceremonies.

Eighty percent of the voters they added are Hispanic, said Grace Lopez Ramirez, the group's state director. Some were new citizens, and some had been here for generations but felt alienated from the process, she said.

"We want to empower our community through voting," she said.

The state wasn't solidly for Obama. In heavily Republican Douglas County, a southern suburb of Denver, Chantel Seas, 24, of Parker, opted for McCain.