In the 2022 election for Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, the margin between winner and loser was a mere 1,632 votes. Advantage: Democrat.
Two years later, that margin landed at a still-slender 2,449 votes. Advantage: Republican.
Political watchers expect another close call in November, given the politically competitive makeup of the four-year-old district that stretches from Denver’s northern suburbs to Greeley and Larimer County. But who will end up victorious in the 8th District, which , is where people are laying their bets.
“It’s in the top 10 pickup opportunities for Democrats,” said Erin Covey, the U.S. House editor for the Cook Political Report. “Democrats only need to flip three seats to take control of the House. This is going to be on the front lines of the Republican defense.”
Three Democratic challengers have emerged from a field that just a few months ago was twice as large. They are state Rep. Manny Rutinel, attorney and former state Rep. Shannon Bird, and Evan Munsing, a former U.S. Marine and an investment firm adviser.
They must battle it out amongst themselves in the June 30 primary before one of them goes on to face freshman Rep. Gabe Evans in the Nov. 3 general election.
On paper, things look tough for Evans, a former state lawmaker himself.
Historically, midterm elections have gone poorly for the party that occupies the White House. Democratic victories in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey last November — and — may be a harbinger of things to come.
“It should be a good cycle for Democrats,” Covey said.
Add to that mix a polarizing president with , an uncertain economy and chaotic recent scenes from Minneapolis, where two protesters were fatally shot by federal agents last month during an immigration crackdown.
The main strategy for the Democratic field in the 8th District is clear: Make it about Trump.
“Gabe Evans has a track record of doing what Donald Trump wants, even if it hurts our district,” Bird said. “We have a current representative who is rolling over for this administration.”
Rutinel said Evans is “just interested in going along.”
“Trump says jump, and Gabe Evans says how high,” he said.
Evans said that’s not true. He points to a letter he and other GOP members of Congress sent to President Trump in October from Argentina. He has also advocated a different approach from the administration to dealing with migrants who are in the country illegally.
Democratic hopefuls in the race would be wise to restrain their most progressive impulses, said Robert Pruehs, a political science professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Elections in Colorado’s 8th District have very much turned on candidates successfully wooing independents, the district’s largest voting bloc.
“You need to have a broad coalition in this kind of district,” he said. “The unaffiliated voters in the general election are going to demand some moderation.”
Rutinel, who has lived in Commerce City for five years, says the race is “personal for me.” He was brought up by a single mother in a house that was foreclosed on during the Great Recession. At 31, he is the youngest candidate in the race. He sees a piece of himself in the district’s working-class voters.
Of the Democratic contenders, Bird, 56, has had by far the longest tenure — 25 years — in what became the 8th District, Colorado’s newest seat in Congress, when it was drawn following the 2020 census. A former Westminster city councilwoman and a state lawmaker since 2019 — she resigned last month to focus fully on her congressional campaign — Bird was also brought up by a single mom. Tips from her grandmother’s casino dealer job in Reno, Nevada, sustained the family, she said.
As the only Democratic candidate with military experience, Munsing said he would be the best choice to take on Evans, a former Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot who served in the Middle East. Munsing, 37, was deployed to Afghanistan in 2013.
“If we want to go toe-to-toe with him, we need a veteran and a businessman,” said Munsing, who has lived in the district for about a year.
Covey, with the Cook Political Report, said the frontrunner position in the Democratic race is as yet unfilled. Rutinel , but there’s still a long way to go until the end of June, she said.
“I would say this race is pretty wide open,” Covey said.
Immigration at the crux
Immigration policy will likely be one of the more salient issues in the 8th Congressional District race.
The district has the highest proportion of Latinos among Colorado’s eight congressional districts, with about 40% of the population identifying as such when it was created. Weld County is home to numerous large farms and food production businesses that hire immigrant workers — including the U.S. headquarters of JBS, part of the world’s largest meatpacking company.
“The real issue is, how is Gabe Evans going to respond to ICE activity over the next eight months?” Pruehs said. “The onus is on the Evans campaign to distance him from the Trump administration.”
Evans, 39, of Fort Lupton, believes the priority should be on the apprehension of those who are in the country illegally and have committed crimes. As Trump’s mass-deportation efforts ramped up in his first few months back in the White House, Evans joined five members of the Congressional Hispanic Conference in sending a letter to ICE leadership expressing concern “that your limited resources may be stretched to pursue individuals that do not constitute an immediate threat to public safety.”
In an interview with The Denver Post last week, Evans said he has been “very consistent on immigration.”
“Secure the border, go after the bad guys and have some sort of pathway forward for the people who aren’t causing problems and are integrated into our economy,” he said.
But that’s not what’s happening, said Rutinel, who has called for impeaching Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security secretary. Her department oversees ICE.
“People voted for order, security and safety — instead they’re getting chaos and danger,” he said. “What’s happening under the Trump administration should terrify every American.”
Munsing says Evans hasn’t been nearly loud enough in highlighting the abuses committed by ICE agents and other officers involved in immigration crackdowns, including the “deeply troubling” deaths of protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month. He said ICE agents are poorly trained and have .
“We need to get rid of warrantless arrests. Racial profiling and indiscriminate arrests based on how people look and their accent has been very troubling to people here,” Munsing said. “We should fire all these people who were hired since Trump got into office and bring the (ICE) budget back to where it was in 2024.”
Evans, a former police officer, said he opposes ICE agents entering homes without a search warrant.
“I was a cop for 10 years — you got to have a search warrant to go into a house,” he said. “So I disagree with the ICE memo that says they don’t need a search warrant to go into houses.”
On the first anniversary of the start of Trump’s second term on Jan. 20, the Department of Homeland Security that 70% of those arrested by ICE were “convicted criminals or have criminal charges.” During Trump’s first year back, the agency said, ICE arrested more than 43,000 people who posed a potential national security risk and apprehended more than 1,400 known or suspected terrorists. It has made 7,000 gang arrests, according to the administration.
Earlier this month, CBS News it obtained revealed that less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in Trump’s first year had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses. Other watchdog groups and news organizations that have scrutinized ICE data have questioned the administration’s characterizations of those arrested, too.
But Evans’ said the CBS report was “100% muddying the waters,” given that offenses like distribution of child pornography, human smuggling, drug dealing, burglary and drunken driving fall into the nonviolent category.
Bird said the idea that ICE can’t adhere to the law when apprehending criminals who are in the country illegally is a “false choice.”
“ICE needs to be held to the exact same standards as every other law enforcement agency,” she said.
While immigration enforcement may be a difficult issue for Evans, the congressman might gain political traction by turning to the nation’s plummeting crime rate.
According to a January report from the , homicides were down 21% in 2025 compared to President Joe Biden’s final year in office, while there were 9% fewer aggravated assaults, 22% fewer gun assaults and 2% fewer domestic violence incidents.
Evans’ Democratic opponents say that improvement has little to do with Trump.
“Nice job for trying to take credit for something that happened at the state level,” Bird said, citing her support for bills in the state house that clamped down on auto and catalytic converter theft.
Evans scoffed at the former state lawmaker’s assertion.
“Gee, what happened across the country starting in 2025?” he said. “It’s not because under Joe Biden, blue cities forgot how to police — and then under Trump, blue cities all of a sudden started policing again. It’s because of federal law enforcement going after the known bad guys, the professional bad guys, the cartels, the drug dealers, the organized criminals.”
Prices, tariffs also in play
Perceptions of the economy’s health will undoubtedly take center stage this fall, Covey said, and Evans’ fate — and that of the party in power — will be tied to its performance.
The inflation rate has fallen sharply from its peak of 9% in 2022, and it more than some economists expected. But what matters is how voters feel about their financial situations come fall.
“The economy more broadly is going to be the driving issue,” she said. “A lot of people are dissatisfied with the way Trump is handling the economy as opposed to his first term.”
Affordability, Bird said, is the top concern she hears from voters while campaigning. That includes prices at the grocery store, but more notably a projected doubling of health insurance premiums for the 320,000 Coloradans who had been receiving now-expired enhanced pandemic-era subsidies on the individual marketplace.
Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff policies have been at the heart of the cost-of-living problem, she said.
“For our ranchers and farmers, there’s a fear of retaliatory tariffs and trade wars,” Bird said.
In a momentous decision Friday, the Supreme Court struck down the sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs the president had levied on nearly every other country last spring. The majority found that the Constitution “very clearly” gives Congress the power to impose taxes, which include tariffs.
Rutinel, who worked as an economist for the Army Corps of Engineers, said the residents of the 8th District have been paying the price for Trump’s import taxes.
“You don’t have to be a trained economist to see how tariffs are essentially a natural sales tax on all consumers and that they will bear the brunt of the costs,” Rutinel said. “What the folks in the district are telling me is they feel they’ve been lied to.”
This month, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation calculated that Trump’s tariffs of $1,000 per American household in 2025, an amount projected to increase to $1,300 this year.
While inflation has been tamed from the runaway prices under the previous administration, Munsing said the impacts of the White House’s tariffs are still working their way through the economy. Businesses, along with farmers and ranchers in the 8th District, are having trouble planning the year out because of the uncertainty, he said.
“They’re getting to the point where they have to pass these costs along,” Munsing said. “They survived COVID, they survived supply chain disruptions — and they are hearing from customers who are worried about prices going up.”
For Evans, Covey thinks he had a “potentially missed opportunity to separate himself from the president.” He chose not to join fellow Colorado Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, who — along with five GOP House members — that Trump has used as the basis for imposing tariffs on Canada.
Evans said that while tariffs are challenging for the agriculture and ranching sectors, lopsided trade arrangements that hurt American producers are no better.
“So yeah, long term, big picture: I’m totally a free trade guy, but free trade has to be fair trade,” he said.
June 30 primary comes first
Before a Democrat can face off against Evans this November, they have to face off against each other in June.
Rutinel, who was first to jump into the race at the beginning of 2025, has raised the most money of the three — with $2.5 million taken in as of the end of 2025. Bird has raised $1.2 million and Munsing has collected nearly $500,000.
The race has gelled in recent months as other candidates have dropped out, including Colorado Treasurer Dave Young; Amie Baca-Oehlert, the former president of the state’s largest teachers union; and former U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo, the first person to hold the seat.
Evans has one challenge from his own party. But that candidate, Adam Derito, has raised less than $30,000 to Evans’ more than $3 million haul.
Among the Democrats, Munsing fired the first big campaign salvo this month.
He accused Bird of being too soft on ICE by voting against a 2025 bill in the state House. Senate Bill 276 attempted to further curtail federal immigration authorities’ access to public spaces in Colorado — from government buildings to libraries to public schools — and limited local governments’ ability to share information with those authorities.
“Shannon Bird continues to bury her head in the sand and hope that voters are not going to pay attention to the vote that even perplexed her colleagues in the state legislature,” his campaign wrote in a Feb. 12 news release.
Last week, Rutinel weighed in on SB-276 too, saying he co-sponsored the law “to protect our immigrant neighbors from ICE brutality.” He said he and his Democratic colleagues were “severely disappointed that Shannon Bird was the only House Democrat to vote against it.”
Bird said her “no” vote on SB-276 happened during a committee hearing on the bill. She thought the bill needed improvement before getting her support, she said. When the bill came up for a vote on the full floor of the House a few weeks later, she was absent due to a family medical emergency.
“It was one of the few votes I missed, and I regret that,” Bird said.
She said she would have voted yes on the final go-around.
With Rutinel having been elected to the state House only once and Munsing having no experience in public office, Bird said she is the most viable candidate to defeat Evans in November.
“I’m the only one in this race to win a contested election and to do it five times,” she said.
Pruehs, the political science professor, said the Democratic candidates can stake out positions on the left up until the primary election. Then, in a district so evenly divided along partisan lines, they will need to artfully and nimbly steer to the political middle as November draws closer.
“There is a need to make sure your message isn’t so far afield that you can’t attract more moderate voters,” he said.
