What A Day - Will Voters Flip A Colorado House Seat Back To Blue?

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, Republicans are working to keep voters who showed up for President Donald Trump in 2024 engaged in down-ballot races. One key battleground is Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, where freshman Republican Rep. Gabe Evans faces Democratic challenger Manny Rutinel. Rutinel joins Jane to discuss his campaign and why he believes voters should send him to Congress.Show Notes: Check out Manny's campaign – www.mannyforcolorado.com Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

Gabe Evans and Donald Trump are just focused on finding new ways to torment immigrants. And if they spent as much time thinking about fixing our economy, as opposed to thinking about new ways to torment immigrants, our economy would be in a much better shape. It's Friday, October 9th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is what a day. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today to South African Human Rights Judge and lawyer Navi Palais. She won the prize for her efforts to promote international law as it comes. under attack, which means that President Donald Trump once again did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. Sad! Palais did, however, give the president a shoutout.

Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump. Pallet is a former UN human rights chief. Her career has spanned from defending the rights of an imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a panel that found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. The firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nadal Malik Hassan will be live streamed. The Pentagon announced

the stunning revelation on Thursday after defense secretary Pete Higgsath had described it as being, quote, public. Hegzath told conservative TV outlet, real America's voice on Wednesday, quote, will make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public.

According to official Pentagon regulations for army executions, quote, no person under the age of 18 shall witness the execution. So, besides the barbarism and insanity, live streaming and execution would be illegal. Federal immigration officers shot a Dominican man in New York Thursday evening. ICE alleges that the man drove his car into officers' vehicles, and they believed their lives were in danger. The 28-year-old man was shot in the neck as ICE officers attempted to arrest him, according to ICE. The man had a five-year-old boy in the car with him when the shooting happened, officials said.

But let's get into the highly contested congressional race for Colorado's 8th District. Joining me is Manny Routanel. He's the Democratic candidate. Manny Routanel, welcome to Wadetta. Thank you so much for having me. So why are you running for Congress? Well, I'm running because it's a really personal fight for me. I'm the son of a single mom who immigrated to America in search of that American dream. And my mom is the most loving, kind, generous, hardworking person on the planet.

But we still struggled. and I remember being 10 years old when I started filling out boot stamp and Medicaid forms, and those are the same programs that Donald Trump and Gabe Evans are destroying to give tax breaks to their billionaire donors. And around that time, I was working at McDonald's. I was selling my blood at a plasma center over 100 times, the point where I've got a scar on my arm because of it. Eventually, I became an economist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And as a state legislator shortly after that, I learned a really important lesson. and that is that poverty is a policy choice.

And I can prove it because when I was a legislator, my first legislative session, I introduced an expansion to the earned income tax credit, tax credit that goes directly to working people. And because of that bill, we cut childhood poverty by 40% overnight in Colorado. So that's the kind of leadership that I think we need in Congress, folks who understand the struggles of working people and have a track record of fighting for them. You are not from Colorado originally. I know that's something the Republicans have brought up. How have you responded?

and what does it mean to you to be running for office for the state of Colorado? Yeah, well, it's the best state in the union. As soon as I stepped foot in Colorado, I fell in love with it. I grew up with a single mom, and she was always bopping around different cities looking for a better job. That's kind of the reality for a lot of the folks who live in Colorado, especially in my district, where it's 40% Latino. There's a lot of immigrant families there. And, you know, as a state legislator, I have had multiple terms there.

I've been able to work alongside folks. I've been welcomed into the community. I've been able to listen, hold roundtables, town halls. I've been going to so many town halls that I've gone to so many that my congressman refuses to go to because he's scared of his own constituents. And I've learned a lot along the way. And I'm able to use that to be able to best represent the folks in the district. So your opponent, you've mentioned him, Gabe Evans. He flipped the seat you're running for back in 2024 by less than one percentage point. What went wrong? And why is 2026 different? There are a lot of dark money groups that are funneling so much money and spreading misinformation in these campaigns. And now I'm on the other side of that. You know, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are spending millions and millions of dollars to try to prevent me from being able to win this election. On our side, we have a grassroots army of over 100,000 folks that have gone to Mani for Colorado.com and shipped an average of 26 bucks. So we're a real grassroots campaign.

I think that that's something that we bring to the table that a lot of campaigns, across the country don't get to benefit from. It's just a really strong grassroots campaign of over a thousand volunteers that are knocking doors, making phone calls to try to fight back against these super PACs that are spreading lies and misinformation. What is Gabe Evans' worst decision while in office? Oof, that's a tough question because he's got so many bad ones. I think, can I give you three? Yes, absolutely. So he has voted seven times to send us into this Forever War in Iran that is raising gas and diesel prices back at home.

Gas is 420 a gallon, diesel is 620 a gallon in my neck of the woods. He has voted time and time again with Donald Trump to gut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. And a family of four has come up to me and they said, Manny, in 2025, we paid $500 a month. And in 26, we had to pay $2,000 a month for the exact same health insurance. And then the third decision is that he has time and time again voted for these corrupt chaotic tariff policies that are making our groceries and our housing more expensive. So he votes with Donald Trump 100% of the time. And come November, folks are going to respond by voting him out. So during your debate, I was struck by how Evans and he's not alone has been going with that GOP line of common sense versus crazy.

And it's a framing a lot of Republicans are using. He kept calling you a radical who wants to open the borders. because and eat tofu or something like that. How do you combat that? Because it seems to be something we're hearing a lot from Republicans, which is not stand up for our own policies. It's, uh, Democrats are just too crazy. Yeah, I mean, I think his strategy is to distract as much as possible.

He knows that the economy is in a really tough spot, that gas and diesel prices are through the roof, that our grocery prices are through the roof, that our health care prices are through the roof. And he's trying to find any way possible to try, to divide and conquer. Just, you know, blame everything on, you know, either the single mom on food stamps or the immigrant kid or some other vulnerable group and try to cast Democrats as, you know, only caring about X, Y, or Z when I think our message is pretty clear that we want to lower cost

for all hardworking Colorans across this district and beyond. And what he is doing time and time again is finding new ways to basically give tax breaks to the. the most wealthy people on the planet at the expense of the hardworking folks. So we try to stay on message. He tries to distract and divide. We'll get back to my conversation with Manny Rutinell in just a moment. Whataday is brought to you by Bookshop.org. Would you be surprised to learn that we're living in a resurgence of independent

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Right now, I'm reading God's Chinese Sun, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hongshu Kwan, and I got it from bookshop.org. Use code wad to get 10% off your next order at bookshop.org. That's 10% off at bookshop.org with code wad. What a day is brought to you by dose. If you're constantly feeling low energy, dragging through the afternoon, or hitting a wall by 2 or 3 p.m. That fatigue could have more to do with your liver than you realize. Your liver is your body's primary metabolic regulator, storing and releasing glucose to help maintain

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And dose gets real results, with two double-blind placebo-controlled studies showing its positive impact on liver enzyme levels, plus it's clinically backed to reduce fatigue and bloating. Ready to give your liver the support it deserves? Head to dosedaily.com slash wad or enter code Wad to get 35% off your for a subscription. Your body does so much for you. Let's do something for it. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y. dot CO slash WOD for 35% off your first month subscription. Try it for three months and see how you feel. Let's get back to my conversation with Manny Routanel. Why are you the best fit for voters in your district? Your district is interesting. It's, as you mentioned, 40% Latino. It combines two areas,

one that's more rural. Why do you think that you're the best fit for the people who are looking for to vote for. Yeah, well, I think that what I'm hearing on the ground is that folks are really excited about our campaign because for me, it's deeply personal, you know, a lot of politicians, they talk about the affordability crisis, like a consultant just handed them a memo and said, hey, read here. For me, it's something that I can bring my personal lived experience on, you know, working at McDonald's, losing our home during the Great Recession, relying on Medicaid and food stamps many months, and allowing those programs to allow us to survive. And, you know, those are the same programs that Gabe Evans is destroying right now.

So for me, when folks hear about my story, they see someone who cares deeply about these issues, not because a consultant told them to care about it, but because it's deeply personal for me. And I think that's been resonating a lot with folks, with our 1,000 volunteers, our 100,000 grassroots donors that have gone to ManningforColada.com to sign up to volunteer and to donate. Those are the folks that are really inspired by the message that we're bringing. May I ask, how old are you? I'm 31. Okay. So during the Great Recession, you know, 2008, 2009, you mentioned losing your home.

So you were basically a kid kind of like. There's a team. Yeah. Yeah. I know how much that moment impacted me. I was in college then. I had a host of people who I knew who thought that they were going to have these great jobs after graduation and didn't. I wound up having an internship and then being not so fun employed for a year living in St. Louis.

How do you think that your experience of the Great Recession? which mirrors, I think, the experience of millions of Americans that we've never really quite gotten over. How has that influenced your policy making and your policy views? Yeah, I mean, it makes me think about, you know, the person that's going to the gas pump right now and seeing that, you know, their prices have gone 50%. I remember when I was working at McDonald's, I would, at red lights, I would turn off my car and I would never put on my AC because I wanted to be able to save gas money because I didn't know how I was going to make ends meet otherwise.

I remember, you know, filling out those food stamp and Medicaid forms. And I remember at the beginning of the month when the food stamp card was at its fullest, we would be able to get our groceries easy. And those would be our biggest gets. And then towards the end of the month, you sort of run out of those resources and things are a little bit trickier. So, you know, it allows me to think about those kids right now that are suffering the consequences of, you know, Donald Trump and Gabe Evans literally taking food out of the mouths of children, literally taking food out of the mouths of children, literally taking health care from families.

I think to Donald Trump and Gabe Evans, these seem like abstractions. To me, they're like a lived experience. I still remember the sounds of my mom crying when she opened up the envelopes and found out that the bank was foreclosing on our home. Like, those are the sort of sounds that you can't get out of your head. And so I bring that with me every single time

that I went to the Capitol as a state legislator, and I'm going to bring that with me when I get to Congress. Evans has repeatedly used his past in law enforcement to support his so-called tough on crime policies. What is he missing? Well, we've got a public safety plan that outlines that we want to be able to provide the resources to law enforcement. And we want to make sure that we've got strong laws to hold folks accountable. I think from his public safety argument, he's missing a few things. He's missing, first of all, that he keeps gutting the tax base that would allow us,

to be able to fund police departments to their fullest extent. We also need to make sure that we are tough on the roots of crime to make sure that folks have the resources necessary so that they don't feel like they need to commit petty theft or things of that nature. I think a third piece is that he fails to hold the most powerful people in our government accountable and in our society accountable. And you see that because time and time again,

he tried to hide the Epstein files. And we need folks who, when they get to Congress, are going to hold anyone who violates the law, especially those who are assaulting children accountable, and that's what I'm going to do. You've mentioned to me, you've talked a lot on your campaign about being the son of a woman from the Dominican Republic. You are looking to represent a district that's 40% Latino. How have the Trump administration's actions on immigration impacted immigrant communities in your district? Yeah.

So as you mentioned, my district is 40% Latino, the most Latino in the entire state, one of the most Latino in the entire country. And these are folks that, you know, just want to provide for their families and work hard, pay their taxes, make their communities more vibrant. And everywhere they look, Donald Trump and Gabe Evans are just trying to find new ways to torment our immigrant neighbors. They're targeting people based on their skin tone or their accents, the sort of accents and skid tones that are prominent in my family. And, you know, they're also trying to fund, you know, new ways to torment immigrants with these, like, facilities. like Alligator Alcatraz. And I think what folks want, what I hear at the doors,

what I hear at the town halls is they want folks who are focused on comprehensive immigration reform. They want, of course, a secure border, allow law enforcement to have the resources to prevent drug and human trafficking across our border. They want a focus on enforcement

on violent criminals, not on separating families and children. They all, We also want to make sure that there's a pathway to citizenship for dreamers and immigrants who have been here the longest that are working hard and paying their taxes. But Gabe Evans and Donald Trump are just focused on finding new ways to torment immigrants. And if they spent as much time thinking about fixing our economy as opposed to thinking about new ways to torment immigrants, our economy would be in a much better shape. So let's say you win your election in November, you head to Congress in January. What's your to do list?

What do you want to do first and what do you think Democrats, if Democrats win the House, should be focusing on first? Yeah. So we should have a long agenda. But the first few things that I'll mention is we need to reverse the cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. We need to stop these corrupt chaotic tariff policies and we need to stop the war in Iran. And if we do all those things, we're going to lower health care prices, we're going to lower grocery prices and we're also going to lower gas and diesel costs. But we need to take things a step further, especially on the corruption side of things. I think that we need to prevent congressional stock trading. We need to make sure that we have, you know, I'm pushing for term limits personally so that we can bring power back to the people. And I think we need to ban corporate donations to politicians and reverse Citizens United.

Because those are, you know, Citizens United, I think is one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in modern American history. And it just allows folks like Elon Musk and Donald Trump to just pour in millions and millions of dollars, to try to buy an election. And, you know, in this case, I don't think it will work because we've got such a strong grassroots army of folks that are knocking doors and pitching in small dollar donations. But it really distorts our democratic process in favor of, you know, these wealthy elites like Donald Trump

and Elon Musk. We need to bring power back to the people and we need a strong anti-corruption agenda in Congress. Mani, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much, Jane. I really appreciate it. That was my conversation with Manny Routanel, Democratic Congressional candidate for Colorado's 8th District. Before we go, the countdown for Election Day is on. We are less than a month away. Votes of America's action clubs are based on the latest organizing tactics and tools that will cut through the noise.

In Club Digi, you'll boost helpful information online and get those social media algorithms working in our favor. In Club Vopro, you'll get trained on your rights and how to keep other voters safe and informed as they cast their ballots. And finally, in Club Relational, you'll learn about one of the most important organizing tactics of this era, talking to people in your life and making sure they have a plan to vote. Go to Votesaveamerica.com to get started now and bring a couple of friends with you. This message has been paid for by Votes of America. It is not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review.

Watch Georgia Democratic Senator John Alsuff, body Republican Senate nominee Mike Collins, and to all. locker and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about when you are paying more for your health insurance, when a hospital in your community is closing down, Mike Collins voted to take that money out of your pocket and out of your community and give it instead to data center developers. And that's the problem, Mike. It's not just that you've hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online. It's that you're robbing your constituents to subsidize your donors. I want to know if you will commit to voting to repeal that data center tax scam that you voted for. What's here an answer.

Like me, What Today is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston and God damn that was satisfied. What a day is a production of Cricket Media. Our show is produced by Emily 4, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Adam Lippert, Johanah, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.