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**SEPTEMBER 15, 2022**

In This Colorado Swing District, the Parties Compete Over Latinos

BY JAROD FACUNDO

A Latina doctor faces off against a Republican who attempted to break
the state apart.

About ten miles north of Denver, Democratic and Republican operatives
are vying for one of the most competitive congressional districts across
the country-Colorado's Eighth
. The
newly created district is a mash-up of the solidly blue CO-07

and solidly red CO-04
,
respectively held by Reps. Ed Perlmutter and Ken Buck.

The showdown features Colorado Democratic state representative Dr.
Yadira Caraveo versus Republican state senator Barbara Kirkmeyer.
Caraveo, a pediatrician who found her political footing as a union
delegate at SEIU through her medical residency at the University of New
Mexico and volunteered for the 2008 Obama campaign, was elected to state
office in 2018. A

**Washington Post** feature

days before the previous midterms included Caraveo's campaign as part
of a series on the women running against Trump's 2016 victory.
Meanwhile, Kirkmeyer's political career started as a Weld County
commissioner from 1993 to 2000 and 2009 to 2020. In her second term in
office, she led an effort

for Weld and ten other counties to secede from Colorado. (Caraveo
currently represents Adams County just to the south.) In 2020, Kirkmeyer
entered the state Senate, beating her Democratic opponent by five
points.

Aside from the high stakes at hand, the district is also 40 percent
Latino, and both parties are eagerly courting that community.
Caraveo's campaign headquarters in Thornton (a rapidly growing Denver
suburb) is right outside a working-class Latino neighborhood called Old
Thornton. And most tellingly, the state Republican Party opened a
Hispanic Community Center

in Thornton the day after I arrived in Colorado.

A

**Roll Call** analysis

from last year showed that according to presidential election results
from 2016 and 2020, Trump would have won the district by two points
against Hillary Clinton, while Biden would've won it by four points.
That analysis seems about right-a month before Biden's approval
ratings dropped to their lowest, and two weeks before the

**Dobbs** decision, leaked

polling from the Democratic firm 314 Action showed Kirkmeyer leading by
eight points
.
Caraveo's internal polling from the beginning of August showed that
the race narrowed, but that she was still down by two points
.

When I stopped at the GOP Hispanic Community Center the day before their
first official event launch, staffers at the facility invited me for
coffee and doughnuts the following morning. The next day, surprised that
I actually showed up, the staffer offered me coffee and doughnuts but
asked that I stand outside while they introduced volunteers for the
first 30 minutes. Yet a local Colorado reporter was welcomed inside with
recording equipment. I abided by his requests and went inside at the
30-minute mark.

Inside the center, I asked Hunter Rivera, a GOP field organizer, about
what Republicans had to offer to Latinos that Democrats were missing.
His answer was quick: Conservative social values speak more to Latinos
than what liberals have offered, exacerbated by record levels of
inflation. He told me, speaking from personal experience, that in his
family, the split between Democrats and Republicans was pretty even.
Family members with ties to the pipefitters union were Democrats, while
the Native American/Mexican American side of his family were more
Republican.

Another staffer explained to me that Speaker of the House Nancy
Pelosi's (D-CA) recent visit to the state and alleged meeting with
Caraveo confirmed how competitive the race was. He pointed to polling,
and that it specifically came from the Caraveo camp showing she was
down, in addition to how polling in the past has undercounted Republican
support. The strategy is simple: Weld County is their turf and if they
can flip Adams County red, even at the slightest margins, Kirkmeyer
wins. That effort is fully under way: Once a "conservative fighter" and
literal attempted secessionist, Kirkmeyer now calls herself "Colorado
tough" and removed a video from her website where she spoke at a 2022
March for Life rally, decrying legislation that would codify

**Roe**into law. She said
,
"Taking the innocent lives of children for convenience is not and never
will be a tenet of a decent, moral, and just society. We can never stop
fighting."

According to polling from UnidosUS
,
74 percent of Latino voters in Colorado believe abortion should remain
legal regardless of their personal beliefs on the matter.

Later that same day, the Caraveo campaign was launching a canvass for
volunteers. After she gave remarks to the crowd and staffers sent
volunteers on their way, I sat down with Caraveo for an interview.

Stories like hers are common in the Latino community. She was born and
raised in Colorado, but her parents immigrated to the United States from
Mexico without official papers in the 1970s. Through President
Reagan's 1986 amnesty plan, they were granted a pathway to
citizenship, alongside three million other undocumented immigrants.

Like many recent arrivals, Caraveo's parents emphasized the importance
of an education. While in medical school, she saw pediatrics as a way to
merge child advocacy through policy and politics. As a union delegate,
she integrated organized labor, policy, politics, and medicine. During
the debates around the Affordable Care Act, Caraveo said, "I got to
speak to senators and do interviews about why it was important to have
safety net hospitals like the one that I worked at."

After five years of working as a pediatrician in Colorado and through
her involvement with the Early Childhood Partnership of Adams County
, her frustration with the medical
insurance bureaucracy and the election of Trump pushed her to run for
office. "You quickly realize that insurance companies and pharmaceutical
companies, and all the things that we have around us as we live and
grow, get in the way of taking care of patients every single day."

Variations of an alleged Reagan quote make their rounds when debates
over Latino politics enter the fray. It goes something like "Latinos are
Republicans, they just don't know it yet," citing values of hard work,
faith, family, and belief in the American dream. The quote comes from
the Republican Party operative Lionel Sosa
,
who says Reagan confided this in him. In 2016, Sosa said in a San
Antonio op-ed, "If my party winds up electing Donald Trump, I'll have
to bid farewell, hoping that one day soon, it comes to its senses." By
2020, Latino voters swung for Trump by eight points

relative to 2016.

The closest thing to this comment Reagan ever actually said was in a
September 1982 speech
he gave
celebrating Hispanic Heritage Week. "American Hispanics are bound by
strong ties of language, religion, family, and culture," he said. He
praised their work ethic, "producing things of real value, building
communities of shared values that enrich America and keep us strong and
free." He continued, "You work long and hard to own your homes, your
farms, and business enterprises-your piece of America."

Despite those remarks, the following year,

**The New York Times** reported

that 61 percent of Latino voters blamed Reagan for hard economic times,
20 points higher than the total figure, and 67 percent disapproved of
him, compared to 42 percent of all voters. The 1983 article also quotes
a Latino researcher saying that even though Reagan expanded support
among Latinos, his policy positions were not popular with the community.
"Unemployment, according to all our polls, is the major concern among
Hispanics, and if Reagan is going to have any chance of regaining
Hispanic support, the economy is going to have to turn around."

When I asked Caraveo about the supposed Reagan quote, she responded, "I
don't think that we should make assumptions about anyone." She
continued, "It's about having those real conversations with them about
what really matters-and not just making an assumption they're all
Democrats or they're really Republicans and they don't know it."

As Latino voters have drifted enough at the margins to spark a national
conversation in the media and across political operatives, the issues of
greatest concern to Latinos have not changed since the 1980s. Polling
from UnidosUS shows that for Latino voters in Colorado, the number one
concern is inflation and the rising cost of living, followed by crime
and gun violence, jobs and the economy, affordable housing and high
rent, and the environment.

In short, economic concerns are foremost in the minds of Latino voters,
even as former Obama economists Jason Furman

and Larry Summers

have called for several years of unemployment at levels beyond 5 percent
to dampen inflation. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell admitted
earlier this year in a line of questioning

to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that the Fed's tools would not address
the primary source of rising prices-namely, supply disruptions caused
by the pandemic and war in Ukraine-implying that raising interest
rates would "work" against inflation by throwing Americans out of work
and making them too poor to spend.

Toward the end of my conversation with Caraveo, I asked her about the
GOP Hispanic Community Center and what the Republican staffers had to
say about Pelosi's visit as an indication of how close the race was.
She responded, forcefully, "I think the Latino community deserves focus
for more than 67 days. I've been fighting for them my entire
life-that's why I became a doctor." And as the race narrows, she
questioned Republican sincerity. "This is my community. I decided to
leave clinic and take my experience and my voice to other venues,
instead of doing a fun opening with churros and burritos and talking
about how that's Hispanic flavor."

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