Best of the West (Grand Junction Daily Sentinel): How Voting Works & How to Win

A 26-year-old regional ballot that still runs on town identity

Best of the West is not a new digital poll bolted onto a newspaper site. The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel ran its 26th annual edition in 2025, and it pulled in more than 85,000 votes across 162 categories grouped into 8 category groups. That's a program with a quarter-century of reader habit behind it, at gjsentinel.com/bestofthewest.

The Western Slope isn't one market. It's a string of towns, Grand Junction, Fruita, Palisade, Clifton, Orchard Mesa, Redlands, that each have their own retail strip and their own sense of who belongs to whom. Best of the West puts all of them on one ballot. A Palisade fruit stand and a Grand Junction chain outlet can end up in the same category, and that's the whole tension of the program: regional reach, local loyalty.

Don't confuse the scale here with a statewide contest. Best of Fort Collins and Best of Pueblo run separate ballots for their own cities. This one belongs to Mesa County and the towns around it, and nothing else. For other Colorado readers-choice and fan-vote programs, the Colorado contest hub lists what else is running statewide.

What the category groups reveal about who actually competes

Eight category groups hold the 162 categories: dining, shopping, services, and several more. New for 2025: Specialty Drink (Non-alcoholic), Outdoor Flooring, IT Services, and Tattoo Removal. Four fresh lanes in a 26-year-old program is a meaningful shift, not a rounding error.

Category fit decides more than the vote count does

Picking a category isn't cosmetic. A business that lists itself under a broad group when a specific category exists is asking supporters to hunt through the wrong section of a 162-line ballot. The Western Slope's town-first identity makes this worse if the category is vague, because a Fruita customer voting from memory needs the exact label, not an approximate one.

A Grand Junction dining nominee and a Palisade specialty-drink nominee are not playing the same game, even on the same ballot. See restaurant vote campaigns for dining-specific outreach ideas, or the broader best business award voting guide for category strategy that applies regardless of lane.

The gala and the magazine, not the vote count, decide what's "official"

August 21 is the date that matters more than any single day of voting. That's when the 2025 winners gala happened at the Grand Junction Convention Center. Two days later, on August 23, the results ran in the Sentinel's print winners magazine. No voting-open date for the next cycle is public yet.

So plan backward from the gala, not forward from an assumed start date. A category card printed in June is wasted if the ballot doesn't open until midsummer.

Businesses staging a multi-week push before the gala can borrow pacing ideas from the general award vote campaign approach, adapted to this specific two-date structure.

One ballot, several towns that don't think of themselves as one market

Grand Junction anchors the ballot, but Fruita, Palisade, Clifton, Orchard Mesa, and Redlands each carry their own customer base, and further out, Delta, Montrose, and Rifle extend the Sentinel's reach without sharing Grand Junction's retail density.

Palisade is the clearest case. It's agritourism and food-and-drink country, small enough that word of a category win travels through direct conversation faster than through any social post. Grand Junction is the opposite: more categories, more competitors per category, and a win there proves survival in a crowded field rather than name recognition across a small town.

A structurally similar regional ballot runs in New Jersey; see Best of New Jersey for how a different state handles the same multi-town tension, and Best of Brooklyn for a single-borough contrast at a different scale.

Getting the exact category label in front of the right town

With 162 categories on one ballot, the single biggest failure mode isn't low turnout. It's a supporter voting in the wrong category because a text message said "vote for us" without naming the group. Repeat the category group, the category, and the business name every time. Nothing else needs repeating.

A workable cadence: one message when voting opens, one at the midpoint, one tighter reminder as the close approaches. If a business serves more than one Western Slope town, split the message by town but keep the ballot instruction word-for-word identical across all versions.

Real outreach beats manufactured traffic here specifically because Best of the West results get printed with names attached. A Redlands service business borrowing a Palisade winery's marketing language would be caught by any reader who's seen the actual magazine. If a business wants help turning its real customer list into organized, on-schedule reminders, that's a legitimate use of outside help. Manufacturing fake traffic on a named, published ballot is a different risk entirely; see real voter acquisition and the broader buy votes online overview for what ethical promotion actually covers, and a Western Slope creator with genuine local reach can extend that same message, not replace it (influencer vote campaigns).

No winners list lives on this page, on purpose

This page doesn't publish a Best of the West winners roster. Old PDFs, plaques, and reseller pages circulate results that may not match the current year. The only source that counts is the Sentinel's own winners magazine, printed August 23 for the 2025 cycle.

Checking a competitor's claim? Get the exact award year and category from the magazine itself, not from a storefront sticker that could be five years old. Promoting your own result? "Best of the West 2025 winner, Specialty Drink (Non-alcoholic)" holds up. "Western Slope's favorite" does not, and a reader who checks will find the gap.

That standard holds for paid promotion too. Reminders, landing pages, and QR instructions can support a real campaign. None of it should imply a guaranteed result on a contest this program has run, honestly, for 26 years without one.