The former chief of staff to second gentleman Doug Emhoff announced Tuesday that she is running in 2026 to be the first Democrat to represent Colorado’s 5th Congressional District, a Republican stronghold based in Colorado Springs.
Jessica Killin, a 51-year-old Army veteran who was raised in Colorado Springs, is seeking to dislodge U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District. Crank was first elected in 2024.
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“I believe that the people of El Paso County and this district deserve more and better than what they’re getting,” Killin said in an interview with The Colorado Sun ahead of her campaign announcement.
Killin graduated from Falcon High School and then served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of captain and deploying as part of peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. Her military career spanned from 1995 to 2003. She’s also a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center.
Before going to work for Emhoff in 2023, Killin had been chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez and then-U.S. Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Donna Shalala. She also served as an aide for then-U.S. Sens. Bill Nelson and Tom Carper and was a lobbyist for USAA.
During her White House tenure, Killin’s title included deputy assistant to President Joe Biden.
The 5th District, which Killin returned to in June, has been reliably Republican since it was created in the early 1970s. But Democrats believe it is trending toward becoming a battleground district.
Recent election results in the district suggest as much.
In 2016, then-U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn won the district by 31 percentage points. By 2022, his margin of victory had shrunk to 16 percentage points.
In 2024, Crank, running to succeed Lamborn after his retirement, won by 14 percentage points over Democrat River Gassen.
While the trend favors Democrats, winning the district next year will still be a steep hill for the party to climb. Killin, who has been teasing her bid for about a month, acknowledges the political challenges, but she’s unfazed.
“Who I am at my core and my authentic self is pretty much a middle-of-the-road centrist, almost center right, Democrat,” she said. “I think so many of our politics have gotten so extreme on both the left and the right. I’m focused on actual real, pragmatic solutions and listening to people and engaging with people where they are.”
Killin said she believes in abortion rights and thinks Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing abortion access across the nation, should be restored. Nevertheless, she says she wouldn’t choose to have an abortion.
On health care, Killin thinks more people should be covered by insurance, but she doesn’t support Medicare for all. She thinks government intervention in prescription drug prices is one way to drive down costs and expand access.
When it comes to immigration, Killin said she thinks the Biden administration was too slow to close the border. She thinks Trump has gotten it right in shutting down the U.S.-Mexico border, but she called his deportation measures “immoral and, in my mind, illegal.”
A few other Democrats have filed to run in the district next year. They include Zurit Horowitz, an occupational therapist, and Joe Reagan, an Army veteran who is the director of business outreach at the Mt. Carmel Veterans Service Center in Colorado Springs.