David Zalubowski/AP Photo
State Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D-Thornton) at the Colorado State Capitol, June 15, 2020, in Denver
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.
According to polling from UnidosUS, 74 percent of Latino voters in Colorado believe abortion should remain legal regardless of their personal beliefs.
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.”
