Gabe Evans unseated after one term as Rutinel takes Colorado’s 8th 

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

The bill Gabe Evans said he was proudest of passed the U.S. House 417-3.

Seven weeks later he lost the seat. He trails by 32,919 votes in a count that is not finished.

In the Secretary of State’s unofficial returns, last updated at 4:02 a.m. Wednesday, Democrat Manny Rutinel had 124,631 votes to Evans’ 91,712. That is 55.47% to 40.82%, with Libertarian Dave Wood at 3.72% and 224,699 ballots counted in the race.

Every figure in this piece comes from that posting. Counties are still counting and the numbers will keep moving through the day.

The race has been called. The Associated Press projected it for Rutinel on Tuesday night, and Decision Desk HQ called it with 78% of the expected vote reported.

Colorado’s 8th was created after the 2020 census and has been among the country’s closest House races ever since. Democrat Yadira Caraveo took it in 2022 by 1,632 votes. Evans flipped it in 2024 by about 2,500.

What the district did Tuesday was trade a first-term Republican who passed bipartisan bills for a Democrat who spent much of the year walking away from his own record.

What Evans built in one term

The Ratepayer Protection Act was his. He introduced it with Democrat Kathy Castor of Florida, it cleared the Energy and Commerce Committee 52-0, and it passed the full House in September. All three no votes came from Democrats.

The bill would write a federal standard into the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. Under that standard, a data center with peak demand of 100 megawatts or more at a single site or campus would pay the full incremental cost of the generation, transmission and distribution upgrades built to serve it, and would have to post financial assurances before the utility breaks ground.

It would not force any state to adopt that. State regulators and nonregulated utilities would have to take the standard up and rule on it, within a year to begin and two years to finish.

The bill is before the Senate and has not become law.

“We cannot accelerate this growth on the back of Americans working hard to pay for electric bills at the end of the month,” Evans said on the House floor.

His FIRE Act passed the House 220-198 in April and went to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where it has sat since. It would change what counts as an exceptional event under the Clean Air Act and require the Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite its rules on exceptional events and on work done to cut wildfire risk. Evans described the effect as keeping out-of-state wildfire smoke from being counted against Colorado.

His Stop Pills That Kill Act cleared House Energy and Commerce 43-6, his office said, and passed the House in September. It would amend the Controlled Substances Act to cover counterfeit substances marked to resemble other products, and would give the Drug Enforcement Administration 180 days after enactment to stand up an operation and response plan against them. It is also before the Senate.

Two-thirds of his bills were bipartisan in the Colorado House, where Republicans held 19 of 65 seats, Evans said in September, and two-thirds were bipartisan in Washington.

He sits on Energy and Commerce and on Homeland Security, and belongs to the Problem Solvers Caucus and the Republican Governance Group.

The record Rutinel spent the year leaving behind

Rutinel supported a fracking ban in a July 2025 interview with the Working Families Party. By May of this year he told the Colorado Sun he opposed one. Oil and gas is a big industry in the district, which runs north through Weld County to Greeley.

As a Yale Law student he called animal agriculture “a horrific, exploitive industry” in a school Q&A. Climate Refarm, the public benefit corporation he cofounded and led, signed a 2022 letter urging cities to “consider taxing meat, dairy and eggs.”

In a 2023 speech to University of Denver law students he called a proposed Denver measure to ban slaughterhouses “really awesome,” the Sun reported. It would have closed the Superior Farms lamb plant and its 160 jobs. Voters rejected it in 2024.

Over his time in the legislature he voted for 263 of 265 bills supported by the Democratic Socialists of America, according to a Townhall analysis, and the group’s Northern Colorado chapter endorsed him. Rutinel is not a member of the organization, CPR reported.

He has disowned much of it. On old Reddit posts supporting animal liberation he told the Sun, “The views that I put in those posts when I was 22 are not my views today.” At a June primary debate he put it plainly, “I’m not a vegan.”

During the campaign he also reversed himself on Medicare for All and now opposes it, without saying why.

His campaign did not respond to a request for comment in September.

The refinery in his own district

Rutinel was a prime sponsor of HB24-1338, the 2024 law that required the state health department to hire a petroleum refinery regulation expert to examine whether Colorado should adopt refinery control rules. The same law required the state’s refinery to begin sending real-time emissions data to regulators after Jan. 1, 2025.

Colorado has one petroleum refinery. It is Suncor, in Commerce City, inside the state House district Rutinel representeduntil he resigned on Sept. 4.

The contractor the state hired measured Suncor against refineries in California, Texas and Indiana and found gaps across several emissions categories. The refinery processes about 98,000 barrels of crude a day. Suncor says it contributes $2.5 billion a year to Colorado’s economy.

Evans, then a state representative, voted no on the bill.

In May, ten questions went to the Rutinel campaign about the assessment, the rulemaking deadline and what tighter controls on Suncor could mean for the district’s economy. A spokesperson answered none of them.

Why it went the other way anyway

Rutinel’s campaign returned again and again to one Evans vote, for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the tax and spending law Republicans passed in 2025. One in four people in the 8th District are covered by Medicaid, according to state data reported by KJCT.

Evans defended the Medicaid changes in a June interview with Denver7. “We are working to put more money into it, to take care of the truly vulnerable folks, but to make sure the money gets where it belongs instead of disappearing into, again, one of the worst administered programs in the nation,” he said.

He was running into a headwind that took down Republicans well outside Colorado. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, taking Republican-held Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas.

About 8 in 10 voters told the AP Voter Poll that inflation had caused severe or moderate financial hardship in their households. Roughly half named the cost of living as crucial to their vote for Congress.

President Trump endorsed Evans in April 2025, calling him “an America First Patriot who is doing a fantastic job representing Colorado’s 8th Congressional District!” House Speaker Mike Johnson campaigned with him in the district in late October.

Evans has not conceded

“We are going to fight till the very end, until every single vote is counted,” Evans told supporters at his watch party in Brighton, CPR reported. “We know there’s some ground to make up.”

The remaining count does not cover that ground. Sixty-one of Colorado’s 64 counties had finished election-night reporting when that posting went up and three were partially reported. Voters have until Nov. 12 to cure a signature or supply missing identification, and that is also the last day military and overseas ballots can arrive and still count.

State law requires a recount when the gap between the top two candidates is less than or equal to one half of one percent of the highest vote cast in the contest. Half a percent of Rutinel’s total is 623 votes. C.R.S. 1-10.5-101 also bars any recount until the canvass board certifies the original count.

The 8th has changed hands in each of its last two elections. Evans held it for one term. Rutinel inherits the same math.