During his presidential campaign in October 2024, Donald Trump staged a photo op at a McDonald’s franchise in Pennsylvania, where he was briefly taught how to work the fryer and drive-thru window at the closed restaurant, while making several unsubstantiated claims about Kamala Harris’s past summer job at McDonald’s.
The posturing around McDonald’s garnered significant publicity, as Trump and Republicans capitalized on an affordability crisis triggered by high inflation that occurred globally due to the Covid pandemic.
Now, as Trump’s promises to “end inflation” and bring down prices have fallen flat, a real former fry cook is hoping affordability will help him flip Colorado’s eighth congressional district, a swing district narrowly won by the Republican Gabe Evans in 2024. The district is rated a toss-up by the Cook Partisan Index, and affordability is front and center in Democratic nominee Manny Rutinel’s congressional campaign.
Rutinel was raised by a single mother, an immigrant, and his family was one of millions who lost their homes to foreclosure in the 2008 economic recession.
When Rutinel graduated high school, he was also finishing his second year working at McDonald’s.
He worked multiple jobs through college, taking community college courses, having to sell his own blood plasma so frequently it has left a scar on his arm.
“I’m the son of a single mom who came to America in search of that American dream, and we worked hard every single day for this country, but we still struggled,” Rutinel told the Guardian. “I remember being 10 years old the first time I started filling out food stamp and Medicaid forms, and those are the same programs that Donald Trump and my congressman Gabe Evans are destroying right now to get tax breaks to their billionaire buddies.”
He worked through his associate’s degree to a bachelor’s degree, then worked as an economist for the US army corps of engineers and obtained a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University before attending Yale Law School.
He currently serves as a representative in Colorado’s state legislature, where he has “co-sponsored over 400 laws to fight for an affordable economy, make sure that folks have good-paying jobs”.
Those bills include expanding the earned income tax credit, and establishing a family affordability tax credit and child tax credit in Colorado, which collectively reduced child poverty in Colorado by nearly 40%, making Colorado the state with the lowest childhood poverty rate in the US.
“I think that’s the kind of leadership that we need right now in Congress, folks that understand the struggles of working people deep in their bones,” added Rutinel. “Sometimes you hear politicians talk about the affordability crisis, like they just read it in a memo somewhere. But for me, it’s deeply personal.”
His opponent has faced scrutiny over whether he received an endorsement from Trump in 2024 after claiming that questions on whether the 2020 election was stolen “aren’t yes-no questions”.
Earlier this year, the UFCW local 7 president, Kim Cordova, accused Evans of privately claiming he would stand by meatpacking workers in the district, only to renege on the promise when they went out on strike and remain silent.
He has also not held any in-person town halls in his district since winning his election by roughly 2,500 votes in 2024.
Rutinel has consistently held in-person town halls throughout the district, where he says he hears from constituents who feel as though they have been lied to by Trump and Evans over promises to address affordability.
“I think folks feel like they’ve been lied to, and what they’re looking for are leaders who have the lived experience of working people, understand their struggles, and have a track record of fighting for them,” said Rutinel.
He cited a family of four that is now faced with health insurance premiums of $2,000 a month compared to $500 a month in 2025 for the exact same plan, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are going to lose Medicaid coverage due to cuts in Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill, plus several hospitals in Colorado that are at risk of service cuts or closures due to the cuts.
“We’re real grassroots campaign, and we have never accepted a single penny from corporate Pacs,” said Rutinel.
“Meanwhile, Gabe Evans has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the same corporate Pacs that are now driving up the costs of our groceries, our healthcare, our gas, and so there’s a big difference in our approaches, our policies, and the sort of things that we’ll be doing for this district when we get to Congress.”
The Evans campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
