Colorado’s new congressional district attracts Hispanic candidates

Adams County Commissioner Chaz Tedesco, a Democrat, on Monday announced his campaign to run for Colorado’s new House seat, becoming the second Hispanic to announce a campaign in the newly-created district.

Colorado gained a seat following results of the 2020 Census, and Colorado’s Independent Redistricting Commission carved out one north of Denver’s core urban districts that’s expected to be the most competitive and most diverse in the state.

The district could have as high as a 40-percent Hispanic population, depending on its final borders.

Tedesco, a Navy veteran and former labor union leader, launched his run with a video highlighting his life from a childhood in foster care, to managing the pandemic response in Adams County.

He joins Yadira Caraveo, a Colorado House of Representatives member and pediatrician, who in August announced her run for the new district.

According to local station KDVR, the Democratic-Republican split in election results and voter registrations in the new district favors Democrats by just 1.3 percent.

That’s despite Colorado yielding increasing gains for Democrats at the statewide level — Republicans are all but certain to maintain control of three districts and two, including the 8th, will likely remain competitive.

Tedesco said the new district’s political division is similar to the political split he faced as a union leader, and the new district will be defined more by its working class leanings than its national political affiliations.

“I believe in our community, though, with our Hispanic population, the focus is that we have a worker population. This isn’t a tech center area, this isn’t the master’s degrees or those types of things. These are people who go out and work every day and run businesses,” Tedesco told The Hill.

Tedesco considers himself a progressive and said he would fight to implement some of the social safety net measures Democrats are currently trying to get through Congress.

“My mother never drove, and she worked prior to adopting us but then was stay-at-home and worked even harder at home just to raise us,” said Tedesco.

“We knew, and I knew, the issue of child care and what that meant because my mother was never able to afford child care, so it was always her. That’s why she couldn’t go to work, it was an offset,” he added.

Tedesco is running with the support of Nuestro PAC, a super PAC launched by political consultant Chuck Rocha, who successfully implemented Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Latino outreach strategy in the 2020 Democratic primaries.