DENVER — Manny Rutinel‘s campaign for a northern Colorado congressional seat can be distilled into two sentences: Gabe Evans is Donald Trump. And Rutinel is not Gabe Evans.

In the Democratic former state lawmaker’s recent hourlong debate with Evans, the Republican congressman he is seeking to unseat, Rutinel mentioned Evans and President Trump in the same sentence nearly two dozen times. He blasted the president’s “corrupt, chaotic” tariff policies and the “billionaire” donors he said were backing Evans nearly a dozen times more.

And he fully ignored Evans’ jabs about the activism that colored Rutinel’s career prior to entering the 8th Congressional District race 18 months ago.

“We have, I think, successfully made the case and are making the case that Donald Trump and Gabe Evans are making life more expensive for hardworking Coloradans across this district,” Rutinel, 31, said in an interview at campaign headquarters near Thornton earlier this month.

The debate was emblematic of a race that has been a relentless exercise in messaging, beamed to TV screens and social media feeds with the help of roughly $20 million in outside spending. Rutinel has embraced a pitch familiar to Democratic candidates and voters across the country: Hammer rising costs, tie his opponent to Trump and expect that the president’s sagging approval ratings will act as a millstone around Evans’ neck.

But as he seeks to represent a swing district heavy with agriculture, Rutinel has sanitized the animal-rights activism that was once his most defining political belief. He’s elevated other parts of his backstory that highlight his working-class roots, while dismissing as a side job his time directing a startup nonprofit that sought to address the climate crisis through changes to the food system — a position listed on financial disclosures until this year.

He has also loosened or dropped progressive positions on healthcare and fracking that he’d taken earlier in the campaign, and he has removed other liberal positions from his campaign website.

In a midterm election year when Trump is deeply unpopular and nationwide polling gives congressional Democrats an 11-percentage-point edge, that may be all that’s needed to win. Rutinel is trying to harness a national environment that is “toxic” to Republicans, said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver.

“That’s the Democratic strategy writ large: It doesn’t matter all that much what they say they’re going to do, as long as they can tie their Republican opponent to Trump,” Masket said. “And that seems to be the most salient thing in this race.”

During his three years in the state House, Rutinel was a reliable — if rank-and-file — progressive vote. As a congressional candidate in Colorado’s only reliably toss-up district, he has steered clear of taking controversial positions and instead has promised a firmly mainstream Democratic platform.

He would vote against the Iran war, oppose the president's tariffs, and vote to restore funding to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. He says he wants "the wealthy to pay their fair share," though not necessarily through a wealth tax. He has dropped his support for "Medicare for All" -- preferring a public option plan for health insurance -- and his past support for a ban on fracking, instead embracing a more industry-friendly "all-of-the-above energy solution."

Once a self-described environmentalist, Rutinel declined in a recent interview with the Colorado Sun to say if the U.S. should ever move away from carbon-based energy sources.

He opposes dark-money spending and congressional stock trading, and he wants to reform U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while securing the U.S.-Mexico border. He said he supported Amendment 87, the graduated income tax proposal on the state's Nov. 3 ballot, and he told the Sun that he backed military aid for Israel. He said he had no opinion on whether Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries should be House speaker if Democrats retake the lower chamber, and he was noncommittal about whether Democrats should try to impeach Trump.

Overall, he promises not to be Evans -- who, despite the occasional gesture to the contrary, has proven a reliable supporter of the president's immigration, economic and foreign policy agenda.

"People are pretty motivated to get Gabe Evans out," Tommy Butler, a former Greeley city councilman running for the state legislature, said when asked what was motivating voters in the district. "But I think that we have a great candidate -- Manny -- that will actually fight for people and will make sure we have good representation again."

Putting focus on background -- but only some parts

After graduating from Yale, Rutinel moved into the 8th District in 2022, roughly a year after it was created and just before voters sent the 8th's first lawmaker to Congress. He'd worked for U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper's campaign in 2020, which was his introduction to the district. He has worked to learn it since he moved to Commerce City four years ago, veteran Democratic officials in the area said.

The district is 40% Latino and stretches from the north suburbs of Denver into the agricultural and oil fields of Weld County. It covers Thornton, where the median family income is $103,000, and Greeley, where the average family brings in less than $70,000.

The district is the most battleground seat in Colorado: In its only two elections, the winner has been decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. It has been among the most expensive House races anywhere in America this year, a contest so tight that the presence of a Libertarian candidate-- in the form of Dave Wood this year -- could decide its winner.

The 8th District "is the center of the political universe, as far as the fate of the House of Representatives is concerned," U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat who represents Boulder, declared at a recent campaign event in Greeley.

In the district's short life, Republicans and Democrats have taken far different approaches to winning and holding it.

To the puzzlement of political experts, Evans has left little daylight between himself and Trump. In contrast, the district's first representative, Democrat Yadira Caraveo, lost her bid for reelection against Evans in 2024 after she pulled toward the political center, particularly on immigration, and amid broader issues within her campaign.

After cruising past the more moderate Shannon Bird in the Democratic primary in June, Rutinel has undertaken his own pivot.

His support for animal-rights causes had represented a consistent throughline in his adult life. He was once a vegan, a lawyer for Earthjustice and the director of the plant-focused nonprofit. In 2021, a year before he moved to Colorado, he testified in front of a legislative committee to blast factory farms and the meat industry. In law school, he was part of a program that focused on animals.

None of that experience is listed on Rutinel's campaign website. Instead, his work with Earthjustice is described as time spent "defend(ing) our communities against large corporations breaking the law"; the group itself is not named. On his Denver Post candidate questionnaire, he included in his experience only a high school job at McDonald's, his time working as an economist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and his tenure in the legislature.

To distance himself from his prior veganism, he organized a campaign stop in late August where he ate a meat taco; he later told The Post's editorial board that voters "don't care what's on my plate."

Asked in the recent interview why he shelved an issue that had seemed so central to him, he pivoted back to McDonald's and the Corps of Engineers, donating plasma and working as an economist. He said that background fits the district, which has a strong agricultural imprint and is home to a massive meat-processing facility.

He explained: "Those are the backgrounds that ... reflect my emphasis in this election -- to make sure that folks understand that I understand what an economy looks like when it works for working people." And he added that his story also shows "my background as someone who understands the struggles of working families, and my background as someone who understands how an economy should work when it works for working families."

His campaign has focused in part on a personal appeal. He was raised by a single mother, spent part of his childhood in the Dominican Republic, worked his way through high school and eventually earned three degrees, including a law degree from Yale. His ads and videos show him boxing, working out or playing baseball -- and ripping into Evans and Trump.

Jeri Shepherd, the chair of the Weld County Democratic Party, said she wanted someone to hold Evans accountable. The issues facing the district are serious, she said, and she doesn't care if Rutinel is labeled as moderate or progressive.

"He’s told us his backstory, and I think his story is the embodiment of the American Dream," she said. "And that American Dream is becoming harder and harder for people to reach because of choices made by some of our elected officials."

State Rep. Lorena Garcia, a Democrat from unincorporated Adams County, said she appreciated that Rutinel was leaning into his background. But she noted that Evans had a humble personal history, too, and she didn't think that Rutinel needed to run as a moderate.

She argued that affordability pressures facing the district's residents should be met head-on, with substantive policy proposals; that mattered more than anything else.

"(If) you want to be a good candidate in CD8, in Weld and Adams County, the first thing that people look for is authenticity," said Joe Salazar, who previously represented part of the district in the state House and was approached about running for the congressional seat. "They don't want ... to see you tracking anywhere because of the way the wind blows. ... People want someone who’s authentic and is ready to be a changemaker in Congress."

He blamed national Democratic consultants for Rutinel's shift and said he wasn't "thrilled" with the strategy. While Shepherd praised Rutinel for working to learn the district, she said she wanted him to listen to local voices, not any outside consultant who may try to steer his campaign.

"I know Manny well enough to know he’s a good-intentioned person, and he’s a genuinely nice guy," she said. "What I'd like to see him do is not worry about what the consultants say -- worry about what the people in our district need, the people who are unemployed or underemployed."

Aiming to connect, against a barrage of attacks

Voters facing $6-per-gallon diesel or surging healthcare costs may not know -- or care -- about Rutinel's past support for replacing meat with plant-based protein, or that he was a lawyer for an environmental group.

But Evans and outside groups backing him have done what they can to make voters care, running ads hammering Rutinel's past activism and positions.

"If you send a radical activist whose entire adult life has been dedicated to fighting against farmers and ranchers and fighting against oil and gas to Congress, your gas prices are going to go up to California-style levels, and they are never going to come down," Evans said at the recent debate, the only one in the fall campaign. He was responding to a question about his support for the war in Iran, which has sent gas and diesel prices surging.

Other Democrats in the district said Rutinel was focused on the most important issues now, like mass immigration arrests and the continuing pressure on Coloradans' finances. Butler, the former Greeley councilman, highlighted Evans' healthcare record -- voting to cut Medicaid and opposing an extension of tax credits for the Affordable Care Act -- as core issues for the district's residents.

"You can have good intentions and ideas about direction, but right now, it really is, 'What are people talking about at their kitchen table?' And that has to be groceries and gas. That's what voters will bring up at the doors," said Rhonda Solis, a Greeley resident and former member of the State Board of Education.

People are being arrested by ICE in her community, she said, and that should be a primary focus.

"I think (Rutinel) was very progressive, which was what was attractive, and there's a reality of where we are right now -- and what do voters need to talk about, and what are the options to try to change some of these issues."

It's likely wise to stick, doggedly, to affordability and the Trump attacks that Rutinel's campaign clearly thinks will resonate, said Kyle Saunders, a political scientist at Colorado State University. The messaging from both candidates -- Rutinel chaining Evans to Trump, Evans castigating Rutinel as a radical -- reveals what they think will win over undecided voters.

"What matters is, are you connecting with the 5% to 10% of the electorate that they've identified can be persuaded?" Saunders said. "If you know your opponent’s party's leader is sitting at 35% approval and you can bang that over and over again, you're going to."

To win over those undecided voters, Rutinel's and Evans' campaigns have spent roughly $11 million on the race in all, and outside groups have poured in at least $19 million more since the June 30 primary -- and that may be a low estimate, by some counts. Much of that has gone to ceaseless ads that have swallowed up TV commercial breaks to hammer the message, again and again.

There's Gabe Evans leaning against a truck, listening to four men criticize Rutinel as elitist. There's the Adams County district attorney, accusing Evans of opposing the release of the Epstein files.

And, in an ad that's been in heavy rotation, there's a sweating Manny Rutinel, jerking his thumb toward an empty chair in a boxing ring, accusing Evans of being in Trump's corner.

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