First the whole thing about Garfield being (“Aspen Influenced”) is pure BS by someone who just doesn't know this valley.  Eastern Garco has been moving blue for a long time now, going back even before the Ds cracked the BOCC by electing Tresi Houpt 4 years ago and re-electing here with 57% this time.  People aren't all that fond of Aspen, 40 miles to the south and the economy is quite independent of Aspen's.  Nor would I say Ouray is “Telluride” influenced.  Try the Imogene pass run sometime and you will notice how far 30 miles is between two places.  More people probably commute to work from Montrose to Telluride than from Ouray.

What connects Eastern Garfiled County (Carbondale, Glenwood and New Castle) to the blue map is a change in values among the new arrivals.  The elections now are about clean water, environment, education, transit, managing growth and less about Rovian “values,” property rights and “economic development”  People here are starting to say No to Big Box (Carbondale) and yes to things like Transit.  The Glenwood Economy is as large as Aspen's and is the anchor to one of the state's largest transit systems in RFTA. 

All five mayors in the County are Dems  or at least Dem enough to endorse the assessor candidate who pledged to tax the oil and gas companies. (John Gorman, he won)  In the last two years, Western Garfield has not responded favorably to being the “Saudia Arabia” of the Western United States.  Smoke, water contamination, disruption of wildlife hunting habitat are not to popular and GOP rule making process to expedite these events is not helping the party.

The “value vote” questions in Gafield as a whole  were close, Domestic Partners just missed carrying the county and marijuana was closer here than statewide.  Carbondale went for town owned solar energy and so on. 

Eastern Garco and Eagle and Pitkin and Summit have very similar voting histories on things like Amendment 37 (Wind power) the Tobacco tax, legalized marijuana, Domestic partnerships and Ref C.  These votes say more about us than “tourism” especially since 2nd home construction, sales and real estate are the largest and fastest growing sectors of the local economies.. 

Not just in Colorado, but throughout the west we see the educated (or over educated) towns and counties moving Blue.  Jackson Wyoming, Blaine County Idaho (Sun Valley-Ketchum), Park City Utah all moving toward affordable housing measures, transit and some limits on growth.  If the Utah congressional map is drawn fairly, there is an urban blue District in northern Utah waiting to be created.  That may yet happen if Utah is to get another seat in Congress.

As for Aspen and Poitkin, it's not news – Pitkin was one of 103 counties for George McGovern and, more than a century ago, voted 60%-40% to give women the vote.

Southern Colorado is different.  There are towns and precincts where a majority of the people tell the Census that Spanish is spoken at home and where incomes are very low.  Woind Power was not much of a popular casue down there. 

Chaffee County is going blue.  Not based on Ritter's wipe out but at the local level where grassroots efforts are strong and well organized.  Tim Glen won the BOCC seat in spite of a property rights funded attack on him for even thinking about zoning as a cure to the land development pattern of 35 acre exempt development that  is cutting the county into Ranchettes.  Chaffee also is concerned about recreational water rights, an area where the GOP is weak and where Democrats have supported local communities trying to protect a recreation based economy.

This was the first time we have seen an effective state or national campaign person full time on the West Slope.  The woman on the Dean team wroked her butt off and knew what she was doing.  Grand County voters got direct mail about Ritter and had effective call lists available.

Six years and two years and four years ago, we were sent smarmy young know it alls who had deep experience getting out the vote in presidential primary states and had little idea of what county commissioners and state reps do.  We were viewed as back water yokels with little to offer.  data base management sucked.

This year, new voters got welcome letters, moved voters got voter reg forms and doors got knocked on in places like Gunnison, salida, Manassa, Paonia and Parachute.  The state was able to help track absentee voters who had not returned ballots.  Ds and some Us got cards and calls.

If you look at the precinct results in the West, the rule applies: the closer people live together, the more likely they will vote for Ds.  Salida, Gunnison, Aspen, Glenwood, Carbondale, Avon, Basalt, Steamboat, Paonia all going deep blue or violet or whatever you want to color it.  Even Delta, where some of  the Ds were shut out without winning a single pct (Kerry, the CU Regent candidate), Gail Schwartz picked up 4 and the Ds fielded a hard working state rep candidate and actually did voter reg and door to door in the targeted pcts in Delta and Paonia where Schwartz won.

It's not so much tourism that makes a difference but new lifestyle residents.  Rs have a big registration edge in Eagle but it's now 3-0 Ds on the BOCC there and people talk about too much development, they vote for Open Space purchases and they have a large and growing transit system.  People see the Dems as protecting the quality of life they came to enjoy and the Rs as promoting more drilling, more growth, more of everything these folks fled in Urban areas.

ps

Conejos County voted for Kerry by 40 votes.

Summit's county seat is Breckenridge.

The family of John Salazar and Ken Salazar, e.g., has lived in the region for generations, IIRC.

This distinction may also help explain the consistently high performance of Pueblo schools with large Hispanic populations on the CSAPs compared to those in other parts of the state.  In most of the state, a large Hispanic population is indicative of a large immigrant population just learning English and just learning to function in the United States.  In contrast, in Pueblo, these inferences are often invalid.

Hispanic population.

The Hispanic population came back to the Democrats in even larger percentages in 2006 than in 2004 (where Colorado Hispanics led the nation in Dem voting).  Nearly every one of the counties you discussed has a very significant Hispanic population.  Fremont and Custer, while having a Mexican heritage, don't have heavy Hispanic populations.

What I am really doing is cluster analysis.  I am trying to identify as few trends as possible that can describe the result as completely as possible.  The descriptions of the causes are as much heuristic as scientific.

No one doubts that large urban central cities lean Democratic.  Even in Colorado Springs, there is pretty strong evidence that the core urban area is much more liberal than the extensive suburbs. 

The evidence that counties with a tourism oriented economy favor Democrats more than Republicans is also a strong trend. 

The evidence that middle class suburbans are between urban areas and those areas that are more affluent suburbs or exurbs in political leanings is pretty strong.  The evidence that smaller cities act more like middle class suburbs than either rural areas or affluent suburbs is also pretty strong.

There is overwhelming evidence that a large swath of rural Southern Colorado's political culture is very different from that of the ag economy based counties on the Western Slope and Eastern Plains.

Montezuma County, by the way, notably is on my list of “ordinary rural counties” and not extension of New Mexico counties.

If you have a better heuristic explanation of why the Southern rural counties of Colorado are very different politically from the rest of truly rural Colorado, I'd love to hear it.  The political difference absolutely exists, and the evidence that this is not simply a product of individual candidates is also pretty strong.  If someone else has a better instinct as to why that is the case.  Maybe the key point is that these counties are mostly in the 3rd CD and that John Salazar has liberated people from past party identifications.

What is going on in Custer and Fremont counties?  My theory would be that they predominantly impacted by Colorado Springs ex-urb status, which has overwhelmed any other influence.

Interesting and discussion provoking is praise enough for me, in the usually dry as dust venue of political geography and statistical cluster analysis.  I've spent a fair amount of time on the Western Slope, Eastern Plains, Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Greeley and Colorado's mountain towns.  I'll admit to Southern Colorado being the area I have least personal exposure to.  And, again, if you think I'm off the mark, I'd welcome your insights.  No one knows every county in Colorado like the back of his hand, but analysis is almost always written by a single person, so it is an inevitable flaw of every analyst that some intuitions aren't backed up by personal experience.

Grand County is a perfect example.  In nearly every major way, Grand votes heavily Republican, but voted for Ritter this year.  While that supports Andrew's “tourism-based communities” theory, the history in Grand doesn't. 

As a few posters said below, this is an over-simplification.

Less than a third of the housing in the county is single family detached.