November 03, 2025 11:54 AM UTC

Amie Baca-Oehlert Drops Out of Race in CO-08

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• by: Colorado Pols

The field of candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in CO-08 is starting to thin.

As Ernest Luning reports for the publication formerly known as the Colorado Statesman:

Calling the political system “rigged against working-class people,” Democrat Amie Baca-Oehlert, a former president of Colorado’s largest teachers union, on Friday ended her bid to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans in the state’s most competitive congressional district…

…“When I look at Congress, I don’t see people who look like me,” Baca-Oehlert said late Friday in an email to supporters. “What I do see is a broken system made up of the wealthy and well connected who are looking out for their wealthy donors, rather than the everyday people they are meant to serve.”

Saying she’d hoped to provide a “real alternative,” Baca-Oehlert described the campaign fundraising requirements she encountered in her run as “incredibly eye-popping.”

“Running for Congress demands an astronomical amount of resources, and the influence of money and special interests casts a long shadow over the entire process,” she said. [Pols emphasis]

Uh…no shit.

This is a sad ending in many ways for a candidate who touted her strong labor union connections and experience as the former president of the Colorado Education Association (CEA). If Baca-Oehlert was truly surprised to learn that you need to raise a lot of money to be a viable candidate for Congress, then she shouldn’t have been running in the first place. We say this all the time: Candidates who expect that donors will write checks just because they filled out paperwork to run for office are completely out-of-touch with reality. Fundraising is difficult, but you don’t need to be wealthy to be successful; you just need a good team, a good strategy, and most importantly, be willing to grind away at the process.

Even in a crowded Democratic Primary race, Democrats such as Manny Rutinel, Shannon Bird, and Evan Munsing were able to raise competitive sums of money. Here’s how the numbers looked in the Q3 fundraising period:

RAISED/SPENT/COH:

Manny Rutinel: $493k; $298k; $1.06 million

Shannon Bird: $387k; $200k; $560k

Evan Munsing: $261k; $86k; $174k

Dave Young: $89k; $100k; $61k

Amie Baca-Oehlert: $72k; $51k; $51k

As you can see, Baca-Oehlert’s campaign wasn’t good at raising money or at maintaining a reasonable burn rate. Indeed, the campaign must have run out of cash pretty suddenly, as Luning continues:

Colorado Politics’ attempts to reach Baca-Oehlert after her announcement were unsuccessful, as her campaign cell phone, email and website were inoperative late Friday afternoon.

Baca-Oehlert may yet have a role in the Democratic Primary if her endorsement of another candidate helps transfer labor union support as well. Both Shannon Bird and Dave Young were quick to praise Baca-Oehlert following her campaign-ending announcement (though Young’s campaign is hanging on by a thread after posting similarly-poor fundraising numbers in Q3).