Former fry-cook challenges GOP incumbent in Colorado's swing district on affordability

In Colorado’s 8th congressional district, Democrat Manny Rutinel, who grew up with a single-mother immigrant family and once worked the fry line at a McDonald’s, is seeking to flip the seat held by Republican Gabe Evans, the narrow 2024 victor. Rutinel’s campaign centers on the “affordability crisis,” drawing on personal experience of selling plasma, filing food-stamp forms as a child, and later earning an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s, a master’s from Johns Hopkins University, and a law degree from Yale after serving as an economist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

As a Colorado state legislator he co-sponsored over 400 bills that expanded the earned-income tax credit and created a family affordability tax credit, helping reduce the state’s child-poverty rate by almost 40 percent. He criticizes Donald Trump’s inflation promises and accuses Evans of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporate PACs, reneging on promises to meat-packing workers, and avoiding in-person town halls. Rutinel emphasizes his grassroots campaign’s refusal of corporate PAC money and argues that voters need representatives with lived experience of working-class hardships.