Gabe Evans on his record, his opponent and a race inside the margin

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Gabe Evans still tells the story of his first annual review as a cop.

His sergeant sat him down and said he’d had a great year. Forty-one arrests, putting him in the top half of the shift. More than 1,800 calls for service.

“If you do the math, that means less than 2% of the time I’m there to actually criminally charge someone as a cop,” Evans told RMV. “98% of the time, I’m involving non-criminal issues in the community. I’m de-escalating a problem or connecting someone to resources.”

Evans said that job shaped how he works in Washington, along with growing up around cattle and 12 years in the military. He said service runs in the family. His mother’s father, he said, “was born in Mexico, came to the United States, and he got his citizenship with two Purple Hearts fighting in Patton’s Third Army in World War II.”

Evans is a first-term Republican. 

He flipped Colorado’s 8th Congressional District in 2024, unseating Democrat Yadira Caraveo, by about 2,500 votes. 

On Nov. 3 he faces Democrat Manny Rutinel, a former state representative, in one of the nation’s most competitive House races. 

In a 30-minute interview, Evans laid out his record, his plans, and a contrast he returned to again and again. “Common sense versus crazy.”

Data centers and your power bill

The bill Evans is proudest of right now is the Ratepayer Protection Act. It cleared committee 52-0 in July, then passed the House 417-3 on Sept. 16.

“Three really simple concepts,” Evans said. “Data centers pay for all of their energy costs. They can’t pass those on to anyone else.” He said the bill also requires data centers to be financially secure and gives local communities a say.

It works through state utility regulators, and states must consider a federal standard for data centers drawing 100 megawatts or more. Evans said that is more than a suggestion. “They have to have a public hearing. They have to issue their decision in writing, and there has to be public input.”

Then he made the national security case. “Because if we don’t build it, the Chinese will. And they’ll control everybody’s information.”

Wildfire smoke and red tape

Evans’ other signature bill is the FIRE Act. 

He said it does two things: keeps wildfire smoke from outside Colorado from counting against the state under certain Clean Air Act rules, and gives wildfire-mitigation work like clearing dead timber similar treatment. “Out of state or out of country wildfire smoke should not punish Colorado jobs,” he said.

The bill passed the House 220-198 in April, with eight Democrats voting yes. Evans said it is “on the five-yard line” in the Senate.

He called it part of a larger push on permitting reform. “Building anything in this country takes years to decades to get through all of the government tape.”

His example was I-270 through Commerce City, where the Colorado Department of Transportation’s final plan adds one express lane in each direction alongside two free lanes. 

“You get taxed once to make the roads, and then … you have to pay a fee, a toll, a second time to drive on the road,” Evans said.

Health care costs

Asked what he would do for people priced out of health insurance, Evans went first to Medicaid spending.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, where Evans sits, cited reports of more than $25 million in fraudulent billing in Colorado’s non-emergency medical transportation program. A federal audit found $77.8 million in improper payments for autism therapy.

“I can get you hundreds of millions more dollars into health care if we just cut out fraud, waste and abuse and if we stop paying for people who are illegally present in the country to have taxpayer funded health care,” Evans said. “You do that, that’s going to bring down premiums. That’s going to make it more affordable.”

He also credited Republicans with falling drug prices. 

Prescription drug prices fell 3.1% over the 12 months ending in July, the steepest drop since 1963. 

He said he voted for pharmacy benefit manager reforms that were signed in February. “That’s a result of Republican policies,” he added.

Fentanyl

Evans’ Stop Pills That Kill Act passed the House this month. The Senate sent it to Judiciary on Sept. 16.

The bill closes what Evans calls a sentencing loophole. 

Federal drug law already carries added penalties tied to methamphetamine, and his bill adds fentanyl, its analogues, and fentanyl-related substances alongside it. It also requires pill press machines and their critical parts to carry permanent serial numbers, and gives the Drug Enforcement Administration 180 days to establish a plan for counterfeit pills.

From December 2024 to August 2025, synthetic opioid overdose deaths fell 21% nationally but rose 17% in Colorado, the third-fastest increase in the country, according to a March report from the Common Sense Institute. Colorado was one of only five states where those deaths went up, RMV reported earlier this year.

“Every 15 days under the Biden administration, more Americans died from drug overdoses than were killed in the entirety of the September 11th terrorist attacks,” Evans told RMV.

Congress has to do two things, he said. “We need to continue to crack down on fentanyl. But we also need to continue to work with our state and our local law enforcement to make sure that they have access to the tools and the resources that they need.”

“My opponent is crazy”

Evans framed the race as a choice between his record and Rutinel’s, and he didn’t soften it. “My opponent is crazy,” he said. 

“He called to ban oil and gas in Colorado.” Rutinel “calls for higher taxes on meat, dairy, and eggs, calls farmers and ranchers horrific,” Evans said. He “tried to shut down Superior Farms,” the Denver lamb plant, and “voted to re-tax overtime.” He “votes with the Democrat socialists over 99% of the time.” And, in Evans’ words, “He wants big government to control every aspect of your life.”

Rutinel’s record on those points goes back years. 

He supported a fracking ban in a July 2025 interview with the Working Families Party. As a Yale Law student, he called animal agriculture “a horrific, exploitive industry” in a school Q&A. Climate Refarm, the nonprofit 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, Rutinel called the proposed Denver measure to ban slaughterhouses “really awesome,” The Colorado Sun reported. It would have closed Superior Farms and its 160 jobs before voters rejected it in 2024.

His votes at the Capitol follow the same line. 

Rutinel voted for HB25-1296, which requires Coloradans to add the new federal deduction for overtime pay back into their state taxable income, and for HB25B-1001, which made permanent a similar add-back of the federal deduction for business income. 

He voted to require warning labels on gas stoves, a law a federal judge blocked in December on First Amendment grounds. 

And 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. The group’s Northern Colorado chapter endorsed him.

Much of that record Rutinel now disowns. 

He told the Sun in May that he opposes a fracking ban, and he has said he doesn’t agree with every sentence in the letters Climate Refarm signed. “The views that I put in those posts when I was 22 are not my views today,” he told the Sun about old Reddit posts supporting animal liberation. 

At a June primary debate, he put it more simply. “I’m not a vegan.”

Rutinel’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The pitch to independents

Evans won his seat in a state where unaffiliated voters cast nearly 45% of the ballots in 2024, more than either party. 

More voters know who he is. In a September survey of likely voters in the district by Republican polling firm McLaughlin & Associates, 3% said they had never heard of Evans. For Rutinel, it was 18%.

His answer for the rest is to run on how he legislates as much as on what he passes. 

Two-thirds of his bills were bipartisan in the Colorado House, where Republicans held 19 of 65 seats, he said, and two-thirds are bipartisan now that he’s in the majority in Washington. 

As he put it, “I’m working every day to deliver results for everybody in my community.”

Whether that’s enough is the question in front of a district that has flipped once already and was drawn to flip again. 

Caraveo won it in 2022 by seven-tenths of a point, 1,632 votes out of more than 236,000. Evans took it back by about 2,500 votes in 2024. 

The money has followed. 

Through June 30, Evans had raised $5.4 million to Rutinel’s $4.3 million, with $3.9 million in the bank to Rutinel’s $600,000. 

And the McLaughlin survey of 400 likely voters, taken Sept. 16 and 17 for a group called Enhancing American Competitiveness, put Evans at 48% and Rutinel at 46%, a gap well inside its margin of error of 4.9 points. Neither side has found a margin here bigger than a rounding error. 

Nov. 3 decides who gets the next two years.