Jason Crow
Democrat leans on experience as a father and a veteran
Jason Crow came home from the grocery store late one night in early 2017 and sat on the couch beside his wife.
For weeks the couple had been debating the pros and cons of Crow running for office.
The veteran Army Ranger felt compelled to serve his country again, but the point that kept sticking was whether they wanted to put their kids, then 6 and 3, through a campaign and potentially a life where their father was away during the week.
“We have a partnership,” Deserai Crow said. “Jason reads bedtime stories and does bath time.”
His spaghetti sauce has become a postskiing dinner tradition. They’re things the couple didn’t want to lose.
But that night in early March, Jason Crow told his wife he’d watched a woman cleaning the store’s empty aisles.
He wondered whether her family struggled with fear and uncertainty since President Donald Trump set a deadline for ending DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. They talked about how even with their steady jobs and advanced degrees they didn’t always have enough money for things such as family vacations.
“If we’re having those problems, everyone is having those problems,” Deserai Crow said. “It feels stressful, but we have choices.”
A few weeks later Jason Crow announced he was running to be the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 6th Congressional District — one of the most competitive seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
On paper the suburban Denver district looks favorable to Democrats.
It includes the diverse city of Aurora, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, and voters favored both Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama.
But Rep. Mike Coffman, Raurora, has foiled every Democratic plan to unseat him.
The fiveterm congressman tirelessly works to build a coalition of Ethiopian, Korean, Chinese and Hispanic voters while portraying himself as a moderate, independent voice.
“We don’t underestimate Mike Coffman,” Crow said. “But we live in a very different world than we did two years ago.”
Crow was an attorney at a Denver law firm in early 2016, and he wasn’t thinking about running for office until Trump became president.
The road to Colorado
Crow had what he describes as a workingclass upbringing in Wisconsin. He worked construction jobs and enlisted in the National Guard to help pay for college.
“Something really interesting happened to me on those National Guard weekends,” Crow said. “I absolutely loved the way it felt. I realized I had a passion for public service.”
But he didn’t plan to make a fulltime commitment to the military until the morning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“I knew I couldn’t ask others to do my fighting for me,” Crow said.
He enlisted in the Army and soon found himself in Iraq, where he led a platoon of paratroopers during the 2003 invasion. Crow earned a Bronze Star for heroic service.
The Army then sent Crow to North Carolina, where he met a fourthgeneration Coloradan who would become his wife.
A few months later, Crow joined the Joint Special Operations Task Force and relocated to Tacoma, Wash. He deployed to Afghanistan two times before the couple married in 2005.
Crow left the Army as a captain in 2006 and attended the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law.
“Having served in place in the world where there is no rule of law and seeing the desperation and lack of equal protection in Iraq and Afghanistan, I realized how special it is,” Crow said. “I wanted to be a part of that.”
Republicans see a different story in Crow’s legal career.
They point to his years of work defending whitecollar criminals who defrauded employee pensions, school districts and nonprofits.
He taught a seminar on “virtually all aspects of business crimes, internal investigations, and general whitecollar issues” for his alma mater in 2011, and Colorado Super Lawyers recognized him as a rising star in whitecollar criminal defense every year from 2013 through 2017.
Crow doesn’t deny that work experience, but he said voters shouldn’t walk away thinking it’s all he’s done with his legal career.
He’s also helped small and mediumsized businesses sift through federal regulations and donated thousands of hours to charity.
The Colorado Bar Association named Crow its volunteer lawyer of the year in 2010 — highlighting legal assistance he gave to families of soldiers stationed in Colorado.
On the campaign trail
Crow spends most of his weekdays and nights talking to voters. On a cool night in September, he held his daughter on his hip and joked about the “candidate uniform” of jeans and a suit jacket at a backyard barbecue in Centennial.
“I’ve been told if I get elected, I get upgraded to slacks,” Crow said.
Centennial is nestled squarely in the red part of the 6th Congressional District, and it’s a place Crow hopes to make inroads — especially with women. Crow’s the first parent to run against Coffman, and he talks openly about the need for laws that allow law enforcement to intervene when a gun owner is having a mental health crisis.
“Every parent, I think, views the world in part through the eyes of their children,” Crow said.
It was difficult to hear his daughter came home from preschool talking about having to hide in a closet during a “bad guy drill.”
“How do you explain to a 4yearold girl that there are bad guys,” Crow asked the crowd, which sipped drinks and ate Crowthemed sugar cookies while dozens of kids ran through the grass.
Several women nodded their heads in response.
Former Colorado GOP chair and current Republican strategist Dick Wadhams says picking a military veteran without a long political record was a smart move by Democrats.
“The past two elections, they looked for highprofile legislative leaders and that didn’t work,” Wadhams said. “He might be able to cut into that margin of uppermiddleclass suburban voters.”
But in order to win, Crow has to convince voters — particularly those Democrats who voted for Coffman last time — that a fresh face is what Washington, D.C., needs from Colorado.
Crow describes Coffman as a career politician who says whatever he thinks voters want to hear in order to keep his job.
He attacks Coffman’s positions on immigration, gun control and how his voting record aligns with the president’s agenda. It’s a strategy, however, that has proved unsuccessful for the congressman’s past challengers.
“Mike used to be one of the most conservative members of Congress,” said Joe Miklosi, the first Democrat to take on Coffman after redistricting. “I exploited all of that in the 2012 race, but Mike still splits tickets. He’s one of the best campaigners I’ve ever seen.”
Voter opinions about whether a Republican is the best choice to stand up to the White House appear to be shifting.
Trump’s approval rating in the 6th is consistently lower than national polls, and a majority of the people in Coffman’s district who disapprove of Trump tell posters they strongly disagree with the president.
“If Crow wins this election, it’s going to be national trends that swept Mike out,” Wadhams said. “You can’t look at Jason Crow and say he’s not a good candidate. Ultimately, that’s not enough. He’s got to have the winds behind him to knock Coffman out.”
Crow supporters sense they have those winds behind them.
More than 300 people showed up to canvas for Crow and other downballot Democrats on a Saturday afternoon in September, including Coloradans such as Ann Sutton who live outside the district. Like Crow, Sutton described the 2016 election as a wakeup call. She didn’t volunteer or canvass or door knock when Clinton ran because she “didn’t even think it would be close.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Sutton said. “Lesson learned.”
It’s a theme repeated by dozens of Democrats interviewed by The Denver Post. They sat back in 2016 and found themselves surprised and saddened as the results trickled in on election night. Each one of them said their goal is to flip control of the House, and that means electing Crow.