PLATTEVILLE — A few days after President Donald Trump launched his war against Iran, sending gasoline costs on a sharp rise, the face of the Trump administration’s growing fuel-fueled political crisis made a stop in Colorado.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright was honest about the situation: Higher prices at the pump could last a long time.
“That hurts American citizens, consumers,” Wright said in early March while standing beside a natural-gas-powered Xcel Energy facility in Platteville. “We are doing everything we can to alleviate that.”
A few feet away — in the frame of television cameras and well within the political blast radius — was Republican U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, who is running for reelection this year in one of the nation’s most competitive congressional districts.
When Evans narrowly won his 8th Congressional District seat in 2024, many wondered how he would navigate Trump’s second term. The expectation was that the former state representative from Fort Lupton would keep the White House somewhat, if not mostly, at arm’s length.
But the reality is, since taking office in early 2025, Evans has never shied away from Trump or the Trump administration — or its closest congressional allies. Evans is there when a Trump cabinet member makes a stop in the 8th District, which spans Denver’s northeastern suburbs into Greeley. If a congressional Republican tied closely to the White House comes to Colorado, Evans’ presence is a safe bet.
In the past week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and a right-hand man of the president, visited Colorado on Evans’ behalf and sat with him for a long local TV interview.
Even so, Evans, whose win or loss this year against Democratic state Rep. Manny Rutinel could determine whether Republicans maintain control of Congress, says he’s not totally aligned with Trump.
“I don’t think it’s a fair characterization to say that I march in lockstep with the administration,” he said in an interview. “I look at policies. If it’s a good policy for my district, I support the policy. And if it’s a bad policy, then I support the people in the district” and push back.
However, he’s tacked close enough to the president that he’s created an easy line of attack for Democrats, who will do everything they can heading into November to make Evans and Trump appear inextricable and to capitalize on the president’s unpopularity.
“Gabe Evans is placing his bet on Donald Trump’s popularity, which has never been lower,” said Shad Murib, chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party.
Trump won the district in 2016, 2024
Past election results may help explain why Evans doesn’t view the president as the same kind of albatross he’s been in competitive congressional races in other parts of Colorado and across the nation.
Trump is deeply unpopular statewide, and his national popularity has entered a freefall. But that hasn’t historically been the case in the 8th District.
In 2016, Trump won the district by 2 percentage points. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won by 5 points, according to an analysis by The Downballot. And in 2024, Trump again won by 2 points — a larger margin of victory than Evans’, who unseated Democrat Yadira Caraveo by less than a percentage point.
Simply put: About half the electorate in the 8th District has historically liked Trump while the other half has rejected him.
“The 2024 House margin held about even with 2022, but at the presidential level the district has moved roughly six points toward Republicans since 2020,” Evans’ campaign wrote in a memo to supporters this summer.
But Evans’ strategy still comes with risk.
First, the pattern may not hold. Second, there’s a graveyard of Colorado political careers filled with Republican congressional candidates who couldn’t successfully navigate Trump. See: U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, who went all-in on the president; U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, who tried to keep Trump at a distance; and 2022 U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea, who did just about everything he could to separate himself from the White House.
“I don’t see it as as much of a binary (for Evans) as it was for us in 2022,” said Zack Roday, who managed O’Dea’s campaign.
Running statewide and running in the 8th District are very different. And Roday said Trump’s victory in 2024 was the result of the broad coalition he built, including among blue-collar voters, Hispanics and traditional conservatives — a coalition that looks a lot like the people who live in the 8th District. Roday thinks it makes sense for Evans to align himself with Trump because the president’s policies are what helped him secure another White House term.
But Roday said even though Evans has a lot going for him, the standard challenge of any midterm election is the pull against the party in power — in this case, Republicans.
“Anything that the electorate is frustrated with gets put on the people in power,” he said.
Where he splits with Trump
If you ask Evans about his White House connections, he’ss quick to list off the places where he has differed from Trump.
The congressman, in an interview with The Sun, highlighted how he spoke out last year when the Trump administration planned to increase imports of beef from Argentina. He pointed to his push to maintain wind and solar tax credits created under President Joe Biden (though he ultimately voted for the bill unwinding them after a two-year extension). And he talked about a letter he wrote encouraging federal immigration officials to target criminals for deportation.
“Go after the cartels, go after the criminals,” he told The Sun, “but don’t waste resources on people that have been in the country for a long time, (are) not causing other problems — (are) not living off federal welfare.”
Evans says when it comes to his views on how Trump’s second term has gone, “you can’t paint with an overly broad brush.”
“You have to ask a question about the particular policies,” he said. “Crime, border security? Yeah, I think the administration’s done a fantastic job. The way that ICE says that they can go into houses without a warrant? Disagree with it.”
Evans, a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, also likes to tout his work with Democrats. Recently he’s worked on bipartisan bills regulating data centers and artificial intelligence chatbots.
“Ten of my 16 bills are bipartisan,” he said in response to a question about where he’s split from the president.
Even Speaker Johnson, in his recent interview with Evans on CBS Colorado, was trying to help put some space between the congressman and Trump, saying he thinks Evans “will be evaluated on (his) own merit.”
But Evans is still supportive enough of Trump that if the president wanted to come to Colorado to campaign for him, he’d almost certainly welcome it.
“I’m sure I probably would,” he told The Sun. “I’d have to think about it, but I don’t think I would have to think very hard.”
Redirecting the conversation
Another way Evans has sought to avoid Trump on the campaign trail is by trying to pivot the conversation to state issues.
At the Platteville event with Wright, for example, he attacked state Democrats’ energy policies.
“The state of Colorado has declared war on oil, gas and coal,” he said, arguing that state Democrats have adopted a “radical leftist ideology” when it comes to energy policy.
Evans also complained during the event about state regulations being tough on businesses.
On social media, many of Evans’ posts are about local issues. A recent sample includes one about Denver homicides and another about the city being unsafe for tourists. He also posted about vacant commercial real estate in Denver, which is not in the 8th District.
Evans told CBS Colorado that problems his constituents are facing are a result of Democratic policies on the state level — despite, for instance, gasoline prices rising across the globe because of the war in Iran.
“The Democrat socialists who rule the state of Colorado have uniquely messed things up,” he said.
Evans, in his interview with The Sun, defended his focus on state and local issues as stemming from concern about how Colorado is spending federal dollars.
“A third to half of the budget for most of the departments in the state of Colorado come from the feds,” he said, “so we do have a direct nexus to how the state is using and interacting with federal programs.”
When he talks about staffing cuts at the National Laboratory of the Rockies, formerly the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Evans frames them as part of a response to state-level energy policies pushed by Democrats.
“We’ve seen the failures of how energy policy has been managed here in Colorado by state Democrats to the point where they have to turn off the power multiple times when the wind blows,” he said, referencing electricity shutoffs done proactively by utilities to prevent their equipment from causing wildfires. “I think what you’re seeing down at the National Lab of the Rockies is a realignment back to safety, affordability and reliability.”
Where Evans has tacked closely to the president
Evans has been aligned with the president on many of the biggest issues since being elected to Congress.
For instance, he voted “yes” on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE America Act. The bill, a Trump priority, would require people to show proof of citizenship to register and vote in federal elections, along with imposing other voter ID requirements.
Evans opposed a Democratic effort to unwind Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports. The resolution was backed by fellow Colorado Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction, who said the president was wielding too much trade power and faced fierce Trump blowback as a result.
Evans also voted against a resolution seeking to force Trump to end the war in Iran and another measure that would have sent billions in new aid to Ukraine. Both passed the House but have stalled in the Senate.
The biggest, and arguably most impactful, place where Evans aligned with Trump was on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the massive Republican tax and spending measure passed by Congress in mid-2025.
Evans voted “yes” on the legislation, which cut planned federal spending on Medicaid and other welfare programs to pay for tax cuts that mostly benefit higher earners. Because Colorado’s tax code mirrors the federal tax code, the measure also wreaked havoc on the state budget.
KFF, a health policy research group, estimates that the bill will reduce federal Medicaid spending in Colorado by 16%, or about $14 billion, by 2034. The reductions will mostly stem from new work requirements, which advocates say will cause qualified people to lose coverage because of the added paperwork required to stay enrolled.
The measure, also known as H.R. 1, will also reduce federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps, spending in Colorado and increase administrative burdens for those seeking help under the initiative. Enrollment has already dropped by tens of thousands of people in Colorado in the wake of H.R. 1’s passage.
Democrats have made Evans’ vote for the bill a centerpiece of their campaign to unseat him this year. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently began running ads in the 8th District attacking Evans for supporting the measure.
Evans has defended his vote by pointing to the benefits of the tax cuts in H.R. 1. He’s also claimed that Medicaid spending is not being cut because the total federal dollars being spent on the program is still increasing — even if it’s not by as much as it was slated to.
The congressman recently refused to answer a question about how many of the roughly 91,000 SNAP recipients in his district could lose coverage because of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Instead, he pivoted to criticizing how Colorado’s last two governors ran the program.