Colorado might have been immune to the 2024 Red Wave, but there is a red river flowing in southern Colorado.

A successful strategy in politics is to find the races — and the places — that are the most inclined to help grow market share.

It was tempting to look at the national map and see Colorado (and New Mexico) as a blue buoy in a sea of red. It certainly gave liberal commentators here something to take solace in as they went through the stages of progressive grief over the Trump landslide.

The reality is much more optimistic for the Colorado center-right.

An analysis of what is clearly a realignment of party coalitions shows a massive opportunity for growth for Republicans — if they immediately get to work to seize it.

Where to start?

Pueblo.

One of the first columns I wrote in this space a few years back argued that Republicans would do themselves a great service by pulling their headquarters out of upscale Greenwood Village and moving the operation to Pueblo.

Instead, the party apparatus spent a significant portion of the election cycle first trying to promote preferred (and unsuccessful) candidates in the primary. The rest of the cycle was spent in a massively unproductive civil war that derailed efforts to provide the funding and electoral apparatus that candidates need.

Nonetheless, there were notable wins. Beyond the headline grabbing victories, what are the trend lines?

After the Republican takeover of Pueblo city government, Donald Trump won Pueblo County, and voters unseated a Democrat county commissioner who had served as House majority leader. County voters backed Republicans for the State Board of Education, and University of Colorado regent. They strongly supported a constitutional amendment on school choice.

Interestingly, Democratic congressional candidate Adam Frisch bested now Rep.-elect Jeff Hurd in the county — reminding Republicans that they must carefully cultivate Pueblo voters and their priorities.

The key point for the GOP is that the winning Trump coalition is, in essence, Pueblo writ large.

For example, according to AP VoteCast, Trump won 47% of Latino men. The same survey showed that the biggest movement toward Trump was among noncollege educated minority voters.

How about union households? If there is any region in Colorado that most identifies with organized labor, it’s Pueblo. According to data from the American Enterprise Institute, while just 14% of union households voted GOP in 1960, in 2024 the parties split the union vote at 46%.

Place your bets that legislative Democrats will act as if this is just an aberration.

Come January, they will once again introduce dozens of bills that make hard-core Boulder and Denver progressives tingly. They will target companies, particularly in manufacturing and energy — precisely where most Pueblo area voters work.

Watch for the progressives to issue cavalier pronouncements about how working men and women can trade their family-sustaining jobs for some unnamed position that, pinky swear, the state will retain them to do.

Remember this is the same crowd that put forth an extreme ban on slaughterhouses in Denver that would have idled workers — with the advocates saying that killing their jobs was the best thing for them.

While Pueblo voters did return two Democrat incumbents to the state House, Capitol insiders continually report that southern Colorado legislators often remind their liberal leaders that their region might as well be on another planet from Boulder.

Amid the disconnect between elite Democrats and southern Colorado working families lies the opportunity for commonsense conservatives to begin an aggressive, nonstop advocacy program.

Remind working families which party has their backs, and which party is stabbing them in the back. Which party stands for their jobs, and their kids and their freedom? It’s a lock that most families in Pueblo, regardless of their ethnicity, don’t have time to consider whether they are speaking in the proper politically correct terms or using appropriate pronouns.

And they sure won’t like it when progressives in the white-collar teacher unions target charter schools for destruction next year — when school choice is a lifeline for blue collar union families.

Republicans who are seeing a rising blue tide in once deep red suburbs must head south to start a wave and seize on the realigning GOP that is more diverse, less wealthy and more blue collar than even a decade ago.

The question for Republicans is how to build on, and animate, the Trump coalition over the next two years.

The clock is already ticking.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.