It’s almost exactly a year until Colorado’s 2024 general election ballot will be set, and already the contours are beginning to emerge.

Next year’s election will be one of those rare occurrences when Colorado voters are faced with deciding only a couple of statewide races: the presidential contest and the race for the at-large seat on the University of Colorado Board of Regents.

Every 12 years, unlike in most general elections, neither Colorado’s statewide executive offices — governor, attorney general, secretary of state and state treasurer — nor one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats appear on the ballot, throwing the spotlight on congressional and legislative races.

According to national political organizations and election forecasters alike, Democrat Joe Biden has a lock on Colorado’s electoral votes, taking the state off the table in the presidential contest. Only two of Colorado’s eight U.S. House seats will be in contention next year, along with a handful of legislative seats.

The reelection efforts of U.S. Reps. Lauren Boebert, a Silt Republican seeking a third term, and Yadira Caraveo, a Thornton Democrat seeking a second term, will take center stage in next year’s general election, in what are already shaping up to be expensive campaigns that could decide which party wields the gavel in the House after voted are counted.

It’s no coincidence that both lawmakers won election last year in extremely tight races — Boebert defeated Democrat Adam Frisch by 546 votes in the 3rd Congressional District, and Caraveo bested Republican state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer by 1,632 votes in the 8th Congressional District.

Frisch is mounting a bid for a rematch against Boebert, and while Caraveo has yet to draw a Republican challenger, a half dozen prospective candidates have said they’re considering a run, including Kirkmeyer.

A glance back at the archives from late June 2021, at the same juncture in the last election cycle, however, suggests that as clear as the road ahead might appear a year out, there are likely some curveballs in store.

Count on plenty of surprise developments and the emergence of at least a few unforeseen characters out of left or right field.

At this point two years ago, for instance, Democrat Ed Perlmutter was gearing up to run for reelection representing the suburban 7th Congressional District, and few outside Aspen had heard of Frisch, the resort town’s former councilman, at least in political circles.

And outside Mesa County on the Western Slope, Republican County Clerk Tina Peters hadn’t made much of a splash, other than grabbing headlines more than a year earlier when hundreds of uncounted ballots from the previous election were discovered in a drop box outside her headquarters. Election workers, it turned out, had forgotten to collect the ballots on election night in 2019, sparking a brief, unsuccessful attempt to recall her from office.

Months later, all three would have major impacts on the 2022 election — Perlmutter retired rather than seek a ninth term; Frisch jumped into a crowded field of Democrats hoping to challenge Boebert and later came within a whisker of scoring a major upset; and Peters was accused of breaching her own county’s voting equipment in an attempt to prove an earlier election had been rigged. Peters later sought the Republican nomination for secretary of state, hoping to challenge Democrat Jena Griswold, but lost the primary to former Jefferson County Clerk Pam Anderson, who lost to Griswold in November.

Likewise, political observers thought they knew in June 2021 what the dominant issues would be in the 2022 election. But the bombshell repeal of Roe v. Wade, which helped turn an anticipated Republican rout on its head, was still a year in the future.

Even amid the deluge of daily news, it can be hard to grasp just how quickly things can change over a relatively brief stretch, and how the twists and turns can influence voters.

Uncertainty reigned in late June 2021, chiefly because the once-a-decade redistricting process was only starting to get into gear, leaving dozens of potential candidates idling until the new congressional and legislative boundaries were known.

As well, the state was still slowly emerging from the COVID pandemic, though a return to some semblance of normalcy was in sight.

Mainly, though, Colorado seemed on track to swing the way the state had in previous midterm elections, penalizing the party in power by reducing its ranks. In 2022, that meant that voters were primed to take Democrats down a notch, since the party not only held the White House and both chambers of Congress but also controlled every lever of state government, following unprecedented sweeps in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

What’s more, Colorado’s independent redistricting commissions had just unveiled their preliminary maps, and things didn’t look good for Democrats.

While the maps were destined to undergo plenty of adjustments before the commission approved final versions, months later, the initial boundaries had Republicans cheering and Democrats singing the blues.

Designed to give the state’s growing number of unaffiliated voters an equal voice in the process, voters created the commissions in 2018 ballot measures. As the process got underway, Colorado learned it would gain an eighth congressional district due to increased population since the previous census.

Based on admittedly imperfect data — precise census numbers wouldn’t be available for a while — the first version of the congressional district map created four seats that were solidly Democratic, three seats that were solidly Republican and one competitive seat.

As it turned out, that’s essentially how the final set of boundaries was configured, though Democrats protested that the early version failed to reflect the state’s political makeup while at the same time rearranging traditional combinations, like grouping Pueblo County with the Eastern Plains in the 4th Congressional District, instead of with the Western Slope in the 3rd CD.

The legislative maps, meanwhile, threw at least seven pairs of House Democrats and three pairs of House Republicans into the same districts, forcing primaries that would automatically cost plenty of incumbents their seats. Based on an analysis of the new districts’ partisan leans, Democrats, who held a 41-24 majority ahead of the election, stood to lose as many as 10 seats off the bat, with several more seats competitive enough they could go either way.

The preliminary state Senate map, on the other hand, appeared to favor Democrats roughly by the 20-15 margin the party enjoyed in the chamber, drawing howls of protest from Republicans.

Under different legislative district boundaries from those initially proposed, Democrats increased their majorities in both chambers in the 2022 election.

Democratic incumbents were seeking reelection in every statewide race on the ballot, from U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Gov. Jared Polis to Attorney General Phil Weiser, Secretary of State Jena Griswold and State Treasurer Dave Young. At this point two years ago, none of their eventual Republican challengers had yet launched their campaigns.

While the field would eventually swell, just two Republicans were running for Senate, and one of them, first-time candidate Erik Aadland, would switch to the 7th CD race by the end of the year. He went on to win the GOP nomination in the district but later lost the general election to state Sen. Brittany Pettersen, who sewed up the Democratic nomination after Perlmutter announced his retirement.

The two candidates who faced off a year later in the 2022 GOP primary — state Rep. Ron Hanks and wealthy business owner Joe O’Dea, who won the primary but lost to Bennet — were still months from declaring their bids.

Greg Lopez, who finished third in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, was the only Republican vying to take on Polis two years ago. CU Regent Heidi Ganahl, who eventually defeated Lopez in the primary but lost to Polis, was honing her stump speech and preparing to kick off a campaign later that summer.

Boebert had already attracted eight potential Democratic challengers, but Frisch was not yet among them. The presumed frontrunner, state Sen. Kerry Donovan, would later drop her bid after she wound up outside the 3rd CD’s boundaries.

Neither Caraveo nor Kirkmeyer were among the early names floated for the new 8th CD, which covered areas north of Denver.

As it turned out, though, the 2022 election ultimately yielded few surprises, since — spoiler — every congressional and statewide incumbent who sought reelection won another term, leaving Colorado’s lineup of top elected official unchanged, except for Perlmutter’s departure and the addition of Pettersen and Caraveo.