Colorado voters on Tuesday are projected to soundly defeat a measure that would have created a single-payer healthcare system in the state.

The measure would have fulfilled a hope from Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, but in only one state, rather than nationwide.

{mosads}Sanders campaigned in Colorado in favor of the ballot question. 

However, the measure was long expected to fail. Top Democrats in the state, including Sen. Michael Bennet and Gov. John Hickenlooper, opposed the measure.

They made an argument similar to the one made by Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries: that the state should not completely scrap its current system, and should instead build on it.

“What [ColoradoCare] does is create one system for everybody in this state and I think what we ought to be doing is implementing the Affordable Care Act and improving it rather than making that dramatic a change,” Bennet told 9 News in Colorado in April. 

The measure would have set up a government-run healthcare system called ColoradoCare, which proponents argued would have provided coverage for people who are currently uninsured and would have given better-quality coverage to people who have insurance now but faced high deductibles and out of pocket costs nonetheless. 

Opponents pointed to the expanding government role and the new taxes that would have been implemented to pay for the system. The system would have created a new 10 percent payroll tax. 

Proponents of the measure argued that no longer having to pay for private insurance would help offset the cost of the new taxes. 

The measure was down in the polls, though, before its defeat on Tuesday.