Republican challenger Gabe Evans took a slim lead over Democratic U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo late Friday in Colorado’s battleground 8th Congressional District as county clerks continued to post returns days after Tuesday’s election.

Evans jumped ahead by 2,529 votes when conservative-leaning Weld County reported about 14,000 additional votes Friday night in what’s expected to be the county’s last big ballot drop, marking the first time the state lawmaker has led the race since election night.

As of 6:30 p.m. Friday, Evans had 152,482 votes to Caraveo’s 149,953, for a lead of 0.8 percentage points. A pair of third-party candidates trailed, with less than 2% each.

There remained a chance Caraveo can make up ground when Adams County, which has been favoring the Democrat by a roughly 12-point margin, reports the rest of its ballots, though strategists on both sides cautioned that the race might not be decided for days.

Adams County Clerk Josh Zygielbaum, a Democrat, said Saturday that the county had roughly 17,000 ballots cast by the district’s voters remaining to process. He added that election workers planned to work through the day to finish the count, after the county took a snow day Friday.

Depending on where the race stands after most of the remaining votes are reported on Saturday, the winner could hinge on how many voters “cure” thousands of ballots that have yet to be tallied, mostly for signature discrepancies — something both campaigns have been urging supporters to do in the days since the election.

In Colorado, voters have until Nov. 13 to cure their ballots. That’s also the deadline for county clerks to receive ballots returned by military and overseas voters.

“Based on current returns, we are optimistic that Congresswoman Caraveo is in a strong position for re-election and poised to serve a second term once all ballots have been counted,” Caraveo’s campaign manager, Mary Alice Blackstock, said in a statement Friday.

Alan Philp, Evans’ campaign manager, sounded a note of cautious optimism Saturday morning in a text message to Colorado Politics as he awaited initial reports from Adams County.

Caraveo, a pediatrician and former state lawmaker, won the newly created seat in 2022 by just over 1,600 votes, or 0.7 points, out of more than 236,000 cast.

Stretching from suburbs north of Denver up to Greeley, the district was drawn to be the most competitive congressional seat in the state, and it’s lived up to its billing.

Heading into this year’s election, scant polling showed the candidates locked in a statistical tie.

The hard-fought race was the most expensive contest in Colorado this year, with outside groups pouring more than $20 million into a seemingly endless stream of ads and mailers attacking both candidates.

The 8th CD could help determine which party controls the House of Representatives, with Republicans holding an edge to retain the majority but with more than a dozen races still too close to call.