Across Colorado, attendance at Tuesday’s Republican caucuses was down significantly from four years ago.

About 12,000 El Paso County Republicans participated in the caucuses in 2008.This year, that dropped to 10,955. That is a fraction of the 118,000 active registered Republicans in El Paso.

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum won Tuesday in Colorado, including El Paso County.

Statewide, the change in turnout was similar. There were just over 70,000 Republicans who participated in the caucuses in 2008, and this year, only 66,027 showed up. There are 793,000 active Republican voters in Colorado.

Eli Bremer, chair of the El Paso County Republican Party, attributed the decrease to cold weather Tuesday night. By the time the caucuses began at 7 p.m., the temperature was 21 degrees.

In fact, he said, it was impressive that they had as many participants as they did.

“Unless you’re really devoted to a candidate, you don’t do that,” Bremer said. “On a good weather day, the turnout is much higher than on a bad weather day.”

During the caucuses, Republicans elected people to attend the county assembly. Those people will in turn help decide who gets the GOP nomination for president.

State party chair Ryan Call echoed Bremer, and said he was very happy with the turnout.

“The results, in a fair analysis, were pretty comparable to 2008,” he said. “I was expecting something between 50,000 and 70,000, so the fact that we had 66,000 was pretty good.”

Call pointed out that in 2008, the Democrats and Republicans had their caucuses on the same day, which would have likely driven mutual participation, through media coverage if nothing else.

He also said a lot of Republicans are determined not just to get a particular candidate into office, but to get President Barack Obama out. That, he said, may have been a driving factor behind the amount of turnout in the face of freezing weather.

“What I heard from folks around the state was that no matter who the nominee is, we need to get behind that person, because we can’t afford four more years of Barack Obama,” Call said.

Photo by CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE