Reuters : Colorado Springs, a military town and global center for Christian evangelism, has sent a Republican to Washington every election since its US House of Representatives district was created in 1970.
Then came 2026.
The victory of Jessica Killin, an Army veteran who was among dozens of Democrats who flipped a seat this week, is one of the starkest examples of how the party built its resounding win on affordability issues, demographics and candidates, one district at a time.
In an area with five military installations, where soldiers pack fast-food restaurants at lunchtime, Killin’s triumph relied on votes of veterans, service members and their families, who represent about a third of the population, and for whom the war in Iran is personal. A soldier deployed from the city’s Fort Carson US Army base was among the first Americans to die in the conflict.
Killin, a first-time candidate, said her win was a repudiation of Republican incumbent Jeff Crank’s support for President Donald Trump and underscored voters’ frustrations with the Iran war, tariffs and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.A supporter who canvassed for her found immigration also was on the minds of Latinos in a district where the population of metropolitan Colorado Springs more than doubled to around 782,000 in the last four decades, bringing greater ethnic diversity and a younger, more highly educated electorate.
“I am resolved to make the history that really matters, combating horrific corruption and chaos that we are all honestly sick of in Washington, DC,” Killin, a former US Army paratrooper and aide to ex-second gentleman Doug Emhoff, told reporters on Thursday.
Crank had tried to portray Killin as an outsider. “We cannot let our community turn into Denver or Boulder,” Crank posted on social media last week, referring to the two Democratic-controlled cities to the north.
Killin targeted centrist and left-leaning residents in the state’s second-largest city, and her hometown, who in the past three presidential cycles abandoned both major parties, swelling unaffiliated voters by nearly half to 53% of the electorate in El Paso County, according to county data.
In a metropolitan area where more than 200 space, aerospace, cybersecurity, and defense companies employ around 111,000 people, and account for over 40% of the local economy, Killin hammered Crank’s support of Trump’s “reckless” war in Iran and argued that Congress needed to reclaim its war-powers authority.
Karl Schneider, 57, a former US special forces officer and ex-vice chairman of the El Paso Republican Party, backed Killin to rein in a presidency he sees as militarily out of control.
“Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the United States of America, our republic, and I think to the rest of the world,” said Schneider, an executive at an AI cybersecurity advisory firm who served as a US Army Green Beret.
For Republican voter Rick Wood, 67, Crank failed to help tackle high gas and grocery prices and tied himself too closely to Trump, whose approval rating is near a career low of 32%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos national poll.
