This is the first installment of Resist Hate’s new Candidate Highlight series — profiles of the people running in 2026 to stop the cruelty coming out of Washington, one district at a time.
There’s a scar on Manny Rutinel’s arm. He got it at a plasma center, where he sold his blood twice a week — hundreds of times in all — to help his mom cover the bills.
He was still in high school at the time, working the counter at McDonald’s, tutoring on the side, and stacking up community college credits so fast that he earned an associate degree a month after graduation.
On June 30, that same kid won the Democratic nomination for Colorado’s 8th Congressional District with more than 60% of the vote.
In November, he faces Republican incumbent Gabe Evans in what is expected to be one of the closest House races in the country — and one of Democrats’ best chances anywhere to flip a seat.
From Food Stamp Applications to Yale Law
Rutinel, 31, was raised by a single mother who immigrated from the Dominican Republic in search of a better life for her sons.
As a kid, he filled out the family’s food stamp and Medicaid paperwork — the same safety-net programs the Trump administration is now tearing apart.
His mother worked constantly and still faced the impossible financial decisions so many families know: rent or health care, but not both. During the Great Recession, the bank foreclosed on their home.
He kept going anyway. His first semester at the University of Florida, he slept on friends’ couches and floors because he couldn’t afford housing.
He worked as a substitute teacher to pay tuition and came out with dual degrees in microbiology and economics.
From there, he became an economist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and deployed to Puerto Rico as a first responder after Hurricane Maria.
Then came a master’s in applied economics from Johns Hopkins and a law degree from Yale.
A résumé like that is a golden ticket to corporate law. Rutinel went the other way. He became an environmental attorney at Earthjustice, taking on corporations that break the law, and co-founded Climate Refarm, a public benefit venture that paid food providers to shift toward plant-based meals.
In 2023, he was chosen to represent House District 32 — covering Commerce City, one of the most polluted communities in the country — in the Colorado legislature, and voters elected him to a full term the following year.
On his campaign site, he describes the promise he made himself at graduation: to “fight for those who have been left out, left behind, or left without a voice.”
What Manny Rutinel is Running on
Rutinel’s platform is built around three fights: lowering the cost of housing and health care, stopping ICE from terrorizing communities, and defending civil rights from the Trump administration’s attacks.
The ICE part of his platform isn’t just a vague talking point. Rutinel has laid out specific rules of accountability: no masks, no unmarked cars, judicial warrants instead of administrative shortcuts, mandatory body cameras, and real consequences for agents who break the law.
He has also pushed back on state and local coordination with federal immigration enforcement, arguing that everyone — regardless of status — should be able to report a crime without fearing they’ll be detained and deported for it.
In a district where roughly 40% of residents are Latino, and where masked federal agents have made entire neighborhoods afraid to answer the door, that’s daily life.
The Upcoming Race
Colorado’s 8th, created after the 2020 census, stretches from Denver’s northern suburbs through Adams and Weld counties up to Greeley — and it has never been decided by much.
A Democrat won it in 2022 by fewer than 1,600 votes; Evans took it in 2024 by fewer than 2,500.
The Cook Political Report rates it a toss-up. For the first time, both major-party nominees are Latino, in the district with the largest Latino population in the state.
It will be brutal. Evans enters the general election with about $5 million banked, and national Republicans went after Rutinel the night he won, with the RNC chair branding him “the face of the radical socialist takeover.”
Expect months of ads recycling his years as an environmental activist. (For the record: Rutinel says he’s no longer a vegan.)
But there’s one problem with the attack, his biography. It’s hard to paint someone as an out-of-touch radical when his origin story is food stamps, foreclosure, a McDonald’s uniform, and a scar from selling his own blood to keep the lights on.
Manny Rutinel isn’t guessing what working families are up against. He’s lived it — and he’s running so fewer kids have to.
Election Day is November 3, 2026. You can learn more about the campaign at mannyforcolorado.com.
