A Good Candidate After the DCCC Treatment

Yadira Caraveo's CO-8 defeat and new campaign is a cautionary tale

Author

mister mix
May 02, 2025

Yadira Caraveo is a dream candidate. She's the daughter of undocumented immigrants, born in Denver, who became a pediatrician, a member of the Colorado House, and then the person representing CO-8 in the United States Congress. CO-8 is rated EVEN by the Cook Political Report. She won in 2022 and was beat by Gabe Evans in 2024.

Reader S sent me these not-so-good clips from her interview with Kyle Clark, who’s probably the best journalist in Colorado (and, maybe, in the nation). It did not go well:

Fmr Dem Rep Caraveo says the GOP’s Laken Riley Act focused on “the supposed criminality of immigrants” and was “designed just to win districts.” Yet Caraveo voted for it.

Fmr Dem Rep Caraveo voted with the GOP to allow the incoming Trump administration to strip nonprofits of their tax status, declaring them supporters of terrorism. Caraveo said she liked another provision in the bill and backed it because she knew Biden wouldn’t sign it into law.

Fmr Dem Rep Caraveo acknowledges she voted for GOP messaging bills and priorities that she says would have been harmful if they became law. Despite her efforts to craft a moderate image in her swing district, she still lost. I asked her if it was worth it.

Caraveo, who had a progressive record in the state legislature, says her newfound centrism in Congress was an effort to vote her district’s values, not her own. She declined to provide a specific example of when she voted against her own values.

Caraveo has launched her campaign for CO-8 without endorsements from any of Colorado’s top Democrats who worked with her in Congress and the state legislature. Caraveo says she hasn’t sought public endorsements.

Caraveo faces State Rep Manny Rutinel in a Democratic primary to determine who will face GOP Rep Gabe Evans. Rutinel has committed to appearing on Next in May after the state legislative session. Evans has not yet accepted an open invitation for an interview.

I watched the interview on YouTube. She’s smart, candid about her depression (she checked herself into Walter Reed during her term in Congress, good for her) and has huge potential as a candidate. Her record in the Colorado House was pretty good. But, as you can see above, Clark has her dancing because she fucked up on immigration. She took some bad votes in the House, and Clark goes at her hard about those.

Her defense is that those were “messaging votes” not real votes, and she knew that Biden wouldn’t sign them into law. Well, maybe that made sense when the DCCC-approved consultants were urging her to take those votes, but it looks pretty fucking stupid right now. (The reason I think that DCCC consultants advised her is that an EVEN district is where the DCCC is more than willing to invest money in a promising candidate.)

Again, she’s smart and, obviously, she cares. So I’m giving her a small benefit of the doubt by saying that consultants told her to take those votes. (By “small” I mean that I think she wouldn’t have done it without outside pressure.) No matter, her interview is 20 minutes of trying to explain her dumb votes. For example:

Clark: […] this is the second time we’ve run into this. This is the second time you’ve said, well, you’ve voted for something even though it was a bad idea because I knew it wasn’t going to become law. Is that what folks send you to Washington to do?

Caraveo: I think that they send you to do all of the calculations on legislation, to weigh all of the risks and benefits, like you do when you go to the doctor, you say, ‘hey I have cancer, should I have chemotherapy or not?’ Chemotherapy might help with some issues and it might make others difficult. It’s a constant calculation that you have to do in the same way as a legislator…

If there was a more clear example of “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” than this, I don’t know what it is.

Caraveo has a primary challenger and, frankly, I hope that person beats her. My bet is that anyone with a D after their name can win CO-8 in 2026, and if we’re going to hold CO-8 after that, we need someone who has the sense to articulate and vote on their own deeply held beliefs.

There are so many other ways a hispanic woman with Caraveo’s life history could have handled the immigration issue. She could have voted no on these messaging bills, because, as she explained, the votes were meaningless, so why not use that as a justification? She could have talked about her history as a child of undocumented, and I’m sure hard-working immigrants, and how she wants to make the US a place safe for people like her (I believe those kinds of appeals to personal experience win elections, consultants might think they’re cringe).

But she had to raise $8 million, so instead she took the advice of DCCC-approved consultants. Instead of leveraging her life history, she ran away from it. Instead of being a genuine person, she spends 20 minutes with Kyle Clark spouting the most uninspiring, lame justifications for stupid actions that I’ve heard in a long time. There’s some kind of deep moral failing in someone who doesn’t have the inner strength to build an image and campaign that’s uniquely her own. Clark sensed that, dug in deep, and this interview should end her campaign.

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