October 30, 2014 11:39 AM UTC

Andrew Romanoff and Mike Coffman are the Hardest-Working House Candidates in the Country

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• by: Colorado Pols

Partisan bickering is at its highest point as we approach Election Day, so it's refreshing to take a little break and recognize the hard work being done by candidates across Colorado.

As National Journal reports, our own CD-6 is home to the two hardest-working U.S. House candidates in the entire country:

Romanoff has arguably been the most impressive and hard-working Democratic candidate in America in 2014—and Coffman has met the challenge. Together, the two campaigners have been running a grueling two-year marathon in a district like no other in the country, leaving their young staffers equal parts impressed and sprinting to keep up…

…Both candidates have excelled in another, quantifiable area of political preparedness. Romanoff raised more money (around $5 million) than any other House challenger in the country in 2013 and 2014, a particularly impressive feat considering that he didn't accept funds from political action committees. And Coffman, who was not a particularly good fundraiser in his first few years in Congress, kept close behind his opponent. Given how gobs of outside money flock to the few competitive House races these days, that cash has proven necessary for both candidates to get their own messages out this fall.

On the ground, Democrats have been executing a massive field program in Colorado to try to get unlikely voters to cast ballots this fall, and Romanoff has been personally knocking on doors for months as part of that effort. But the GOP has a smaller cohort of "drop-off" voters too, and Coffman has executed a labor-intensive strategy to get their help in a district President Obama carried twice.