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

Unofficial results updated by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office at 8:22 p.m. show 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.

El Paso County voters on Super Tuesday, March 5, 2024, cast their ballots for their preferred Democratic and Republican presidential nominees in the presidential election this fall. In this file photo from Nov. 7, 2022, election workers process ballots at the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder’s Office for that year’s General Election. (Photo by Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette)

Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette file