El Paso County proved it is still Trump country, with former President Donald Trump earning just over 66% of the local Republican vote in the presidential primary.

Unofficial results showed Trump solidly leading other Republican candidates including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was earning 30.5%.

Across the country, Colorado plus 15 other states and a territory weighed in on the Republican and Democratic parties’ candidates to run in the Nov. 5 presidential election.

El Paso County voters cast more than twice as many Republican primary ballots as Democratic ballots, state data show: 106,581 were Republican ballots and 43,034 were Democratic ballots.

Unofficial returns show President Joe Biden was sweeping the Democratic race among El Paso voters, earning 84.6% of the vote over other Democratic candidates and a “noncommitted delegate” option.

The “noncommitted delegate” had the next highest number of votes, just 6.4%.

A new option on the Democratic ballot this year, it could have resulted in state Democrats sending exactly that to the party’s nominating convention in August. Last week, a group of progressive, socialist and pro-Palestinian organizations launched a campaign urging Democrats to check the box as a way to register disapproval for the Biden administration’s position supporting Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

Results in El Paso County mirrored Colorado’s results, which as of 8:51 p.m. saw Trump winning the Republican primary with just under 63% of votes statewide and Biden winning the Democratic primary with nearly 85% of votes statewide.

State data show voter turnout in El Paso County hitting nearly 33%, falling short of Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker’s expectation it would reach 50% this year. It so far has fallen behind local voter participation in the 2020 presidential primary that hit nearly 43%.

Trump and Biden were both in the presidential primary races in 2020. That year, Trump won 93.6% of El Paso County Republican votes and Biden took 26.4% of Democratic votes. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont won the county’s Democratic primary that year, earning 36.5% of votes.

In El Paso County, active unaffiliated voters by Monday evening outnumbered active voters who are registered with any major or minor political party combined, clerk’s data show.

State data last updated at 3 p.m. Tuesday showed unaffiliated county voters had cast more than twice the amount of Republican ballots — 28,894 — as Democratic ballots — 11,266. Another 18,816 unaffiliated ballots were still being processed as of that time, according to the data.