The Ex-Vegan Looking to Unseat a Republican Cattle Rancher in Congress

Manny Rutinel’s victory this week in Colorado’s primaries has set up a once-unthinkable scenario: This November, in one of the most crucial swing races in the country, a former vegan activist will face off against a cattle rancher in a district dominated by meat processing giant JBS.

Rutinel, a 31-year-old member of the Colorado House of Representatives, beat his more moderate opponent, Shannon Bird, earlier this week in yet another victory for insurgent progressives. But as he now pivots to the general election, he’ll be facing Republican Gabe Evans, and an onslaught of attacks over his past statements on animal rights and meat consumption.

The eighth district, created in 2021 by the state’s independent redistricting commission, is Colorado’s only swing district, and swingy it is—voters in the district elected a Democrat in 2022 by less than 1,600 votes and Evans in 2024 by less than 2,500 votes.

“It’s reasonable to think that [the district] will just switch back and forth with whatever party is having a good year that year,” said Seth Masket, professor of political science at the University of Denver. “Given what we’ve seen in other elections this year, I think there’s a very good chance it swings to the Democrats.”

The district, which includes the northern suburbs of Denver and stretches north into more rural communities, is a major agricultural region. JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, is one of the district’s biggest employers. Evans himself owns a small cattle herd and is a self-described beef producer.

As a student at Yale Law School, Rutinel gave an interview to a campus publication calling animal agriculture “a horrific, exploitive industry.” That same year, he told a legislative committee in Connecticut that “the globe must dramatically shift away from animal products and toward fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and nuts.”

Since running for Congress, Rutinel has backtracked , saying that he is no longer a vegan, and that “it’s important for me to be able to enjoy the delicious products that Colorado ranchers make.” He’s also stopped calling for Medicare for All and a ban on fracking.

Republicans are already jumping onto Rutinel’s vegan past. After Rutinel won his primary, the regional press secretary for the National Republican Campaign Committee posted a photo on X of Rutinel as a college student, shirtless and carrying a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sign. “He is a far-left vegan activist who wants to end animal agriculture,” the post reads.

Meat occupies an almost sacred space in American politics—and a particular obsession with it on the right is nothing new. Already this cycle, Republicans have attacked Texas Senate candidate James Talarico over his past comments about reducing meat consumption: “this freak wants to BAN BBQ,” Sen. Ted Cruz wrote in an X post. In response, Talarico leaned into meat eating, posing for a photo in a Texas flag shirt while eating barbecue. At an event, he said “I deny all accusations of veganism.”

“Republicans will just be working to portray him as out of step, as too far left for Colorado. That is to some extent what they’re trying to do now with going after vegetarianism,” Masket said about Rutinel. But he’s not terribly worried that Rutinel’s vegan past will hurt his campaign. Unlike in Texas, Masket said, vegetarianism and veganism are well-established and understood in Colorado, and the more important dynamic in this election will be voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump, he said.

“November is going to be, particularly at the congressional district level, a referendum on the Trump administration,” agreed Robert Preuhs, the chair of the political science department at Metropolitan State University of Denver. The outcome in the eighth district in particular, he added, will “depend to some extent on what the Trump administration does between here and November and the extent to which Dave Evans feels comfortable endorsing those actions.”

Rutinel has established himself as a forceful critic of the Trump administration, campaigning adamantly against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and criticizing Bird for her committee vote against a bill that would prohibit local law enforcement from collaborating with ICE.

Rutinel also took a strong stance on artificial intelligence (AI). In 2025, he was a sponsor of a bill that would protect whistleblowers who sought to disclose AI safety issues. Public First Action, an AI-safety PAC, covertly supported Rutinel by giving $2 million to Latino Victory Fund, Transformer reported on Wednesday. A PAC funded by Chris Larsen, a billionaire cryptocurrency firm founder, also spent $980,000 on the race in favor of Rutinel.

Analysts say Rutinel now faces a difficult balancing act: moderating his positions enough to appeal to swing voters, while also keeping his base energized. He’ll have help: the Democratic Party is expected to spend heavily to try to flip this district. The race may wind up being a test of whether culture war issues—like Rutinel’s past veganism—will matter more to swing voters than ICE and Trump’s record.

“This is Citizens United 2.0,” Representative Greg Casar said Tuesday about the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing political party campaign committees to coordinate directly with campaigns without a cap on spending. Republicans praised the decision, while Democrats issued dire warnings about the fate of democracy.

But behind the partisan divide, there’s an interesting disagreement about what, exactly, the ruling will do: Some analysts say this decision could weaken the power PACs have over elections, making political parties the dominant spending force. Unfortunately for Democrats, though, the decision will probably heighten a fundraising advantage Republicans already have this year.

Then-Senator JD Vance, then-Representative Steve Chabot, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC, first brought National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission to federal court in 2022. They argued that the court should overrule its 2001 decision restricting the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates—particularly via committees like the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, or House and Senate campaign committees. The petitioners argued that these limits violated the First Amendment.

Due to Tuesday’s ruling in favor of Vance and his associates, political parties can now both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds—giving them an advantage over PACs, which can raise unlimited funds but cannot coordinate directly with candidates.

Super PACs have become a dominant force in campaign spending since 2010, when the Supreme Court struck down caps on independent spending by corporations in Citizens United. That decision gave corporations immense power to influence elections, but with the important caveat that super PACs aren’t able to coordinate with campaigns. (Campaigns have found creative ways to get around this, namely by putting “red boxes” on their websites that instruct PACs how to spend their money without directly communicating with them.) Super PACs will remain important forces in elections. But after Tuesday’s decision, political parties may once again have an advantage over super PACs.

Democrats are concerned about both the short- and long-term impacts of the decision. In the short term, they say, this could deal a blow to vulnerable House and Senate candidates, since the RNC has a major fundraising advantage over the DNC. At the end of May, the RNC reported its highest-ever cash-on-hand total, $125 million. In comparison, the DNC had just $14.4 million on hand and was $18 million in debt.

On the Senate side, candidates in competitive races like Mary Peltola in Alaska and Sherrod Brown in Ohio may face better-funded opponents this fall. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “frontline” candidates, incumbents running in swing districts, could face a similar challenge from their Republican opponents. The ruling could throw a wrench into the Democratic Party’s confidence that they will be able to retake the House, and perhaps the Senate, this fall.

In a statement, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, Chair Suzan DelBene, and DNC Chair Ken Martin downplayed the threat to Democratic candidates. “In November, voters will reject Republicans’ toxic agenda and efforts to rig the system and weaken our democracy by electing a Democratic House and Senate majority,” they wrote.

In the long term, Democrats say the ruling will make elections more corrupt and flooded with dark money. Casar called the decision an example of the “hyperpartisan donor-purchased Supreme Court” reversing one of the landmark campaign finance wins of the post-Watergate era. “It’s essentially legalizing corruption in our political system,” he said.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, had a similar view. “Republicans would get laughed out of Congress if they tried to repeal the few remaining guardrails against dark money and special interest influence,” he wrote in a statement. “So instead, Republicans run to their captured Supreme Court to do the democracy-damaging work for them.”

On Monday night, the House passed a weaker version of the Senate’s Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, aimed at regulating the tech industry and protecting children online. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on whom you ask.

House leaders have taken four years to reach a compromise on their own version of KOSA, which the Senate passed in 2022. The House version, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety, or KIDS, Act, passed by 267–117 on Monday night.

Representative Frank Pallone Jr., the Democratic co-sponsor of the KIDS Act, lauded it as an example of bipartisan cooperation last week. “This agreement proves Congress can come together to deliver real online protections for our nation’s young people,” he said in a statement.

But Senate Democrats have suggested that they won’t advance the House version. “We’re not going to go with some weak standard,” said Senator Maria Cantwell on Friday. “We are going to go with a law that can be enforced and accountability, and we’re not going with a study, we’re going on with something that holds them accountable.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a co-sponsor of KOSA, even suggested that passing the weaker House version could give tech lobbyists ammunition to “exploit the kind of misunderstandings that can occur” between the two chambers and kill provisions they don’t like. “We need to stop this bill in the House and we need to prevent the White House from forming an alliance with Big Tech,” Blumenthal said.

Cantwell, Blumenthal, and their allies say the KIDS Act doesn’t include the strongest parts of KOSA, like the “duty of care” provision, which makes tech companies legally responsible for the well-being of children on their platforms, or the stipulation that KOSA doesn’t preempt states, allowing them to pass stricter measures in the future. The KIDS Act, on the other hand, includes federal preemption language that opponents say could harm states’ ability to enforce tech regulations themselves. In late May, 44 state attorneys general sent a letter to Congress opposing the KIDS Act on the grounds that it would preempt their legislative and legal efforts.

“This bill has no real duty of care. In other words, it has no standard to hold accountable the Big Tech companies that can drive addictive, toxic content through their algorithms and other technologies at children,” Blumenthal said in a press conference on Friday.

On Friday, nearly 100 digital- and kids-safety groups sent a letter to House leadership and the sponsors of the KIDS Act urging them to reject the bill on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough to protect children from Big Tech. In addition to the “duty of care” issue, the authors noted that the KIDS Act drops the requirement that tech platforms offer a chronological feed rather than an algorithmic, engagement-maximizing one. The authors are also concerned that the KIDS Act defines social media platforms too narrowly, leaving out apps and websites like Roblox, which has exposed some children to sexual and financial exploitation.

But others think both acts are a bad idea—that the provisions in KOSA and KIDS, instead of protecting kids, could harm their ability to engage in free speech and access resources for mental health, addiction, and other social issues. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and GLAAD say that measures meant to protect kids could push tech platforms to set age limits and push younger children off of their websites, harming LGBTQ+ kids or others who are looking for community and resources online.

“Maybe by different routes, [the bills] accomplish the same objective,” said Aaron Mackey, the deputy legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’ve pushed online services to have legal obligations to police their content and exclude kids from vital places and space.”

Tech companies have pushed against both the House and Senate versions, but have spoken more favorably about the House bill. Zach Lilly, the director of government affairs for NetChoice, a tech industry group, said that the House bill “is a real effort to improve upon the disastrous censorship regime being championed in the Senate.”

After Monday’s House vote, it remains to be seen which bill will ultimately come out on top and head to the president’s desk—and whether the tech lobby will be able to exploit the rift between House and Senate.

Abdul El-Sayed, a primary candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, released an ambitious AI policy platform Monday, joining other progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders in a push for regulation and public ownership. But El-Sayed’s proposal also goes a step further: not just public ownership, but also public governance.

Earlier this month, an AI super PAC spent millions to ensure that Alex Bores, the author of a comparatively weak New York state AI accountability law, wouldn’t make it to Congress. El-Sayed’s proposed changes to the AI industry go far further than Bores’s legislation. When asked whether he was worried about industry political action committees targeting his campaign over his new proposals, El-Sayed shrugged it off. “I’m just not afraid of them or AIPAC or any of the others. What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”

El-Sayed’s policy proposal, which he shared exclusively with The New Republic ahead of its release, has three key components: democratic governance of AI, public ownership of AI companies, and safety requirements. His proposal takes inspiration from Sanders’s American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund bill, proposed earlier this month—and like Sanders’s bill, calls for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund to distribute AI companies’ cash into Americans’ pockets. Sanders envisions establishing that via a one-time 50 percent tax on the country’s biggest AI companies, generating an estimated $7 trillion for social safety net programs, plus a yearly dividend for Americans. El-Sayed proposes using that money to fund education and job training, increase unemployment benefits, and boost small business loans.

“I love the senator’s point that we need to own the outcomes of this, in part because it is our data and our knowledge that went into creating it,” El-Sayed said about Bernie’s proposal. They both reason that, since AI has been trained on human writing, research, and collective knowledge, it is a good that belongs to all Americans. “But I think the ownership part needs to go a step further, because we also need some control,” El-Sayed added.

To get that control, he proposes democratic governance of AI companies. He proposes that frontier AI labs be chartered as public benefit corporations, legally mandating them to balance public interest with profit margins. Additionally, he suggests that a majority of board seats at these companies should be democratically elected or publicly appointed, rather than selected by shareholders. And, importantly, he calls for major tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta to divest from frontier AI companies. El-Sayed also recommends the establishment of a Food and Drug Administration–style agency to evaluate models before they’re deployed, a ban on AI-generated political media, and requiring companies to work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Federal Emergency Management Agency to protect against biosecurity breaches.

El-Sayed’s breezy response to TNR’s question about possible industry retaliation—“What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”—references the unrelated money that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has already spent on the race. Through United Democracy Project PAC, AIPAC has spent over $2 million to support one of El-Sayed’s opponents, Representative Haley Stevens, who is the Democratic establishment’s favored candidate. El-Sayed has repeatedly criticized both the Israeli government and AIPAC’s influence in politics. El-Sayed is also facing State Senator Mallory McMorrow, though polls suggest the race is largely between El-Sayed and Stevens.

McMorrow released an AI policy proposal last month that focuses on creating a professional apprenticeship program funded by a token tax, which would charge by the number of tokens used (tokens are the basic units of data that AI models use). Stevens has not released an AI policy plan.

Despite a broad consensus among voters that politicians should regulate the AI industry, few bills have actually been passed. Following AI industry super PACs’ massive spending to defeat Alex Bores in retaliation for the RAISE Act, some feared politicians might become even more reluctant to try.

El-Sayed is hopeful that American voters are ready to push back against money in politics. “We live in an era right now where people are really smart to the old system of money coming in to buy elections. They see the wool being pulled over their eyes and they don’t like it,” he said.

He also doesn’t think politicians have the luxury of time when it comes to regulating AI. “We need to act yesterday,” he said, “and at best, we can act tomorrow.”

As President Trump holds a popular bipartisan bill hostage, Democrats say that the issue is out of their hands, and that the onus is on Republicans to stand up to the president and get the legislation signed.

On Wednesday Trump was set to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which had passed the Senate and House easily. On the Hill, Speaker Mike Johnson was preparing to tout the legislation. But by lunchtime, Trump had thrown a wrench into the works, announcing on Truth Social that he wouldn’t sign the bill into law until Congress passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, America Act. That afternoon, Democrats held a press conference urging Trump to pass the bill. None of their Republican colleagues joined them.

“What a mess,” Senator Tina Smith said on Thursday.

The SAVE America Act would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo ID when voting. Trump has claimed that the bill will prevent noncitizens from voting in elections (an illegal and incredibly rare phenomenon), while opponents of the bill say it would functionally disenfranchise citizens who don’t have passports or other eligible documentation. The bill passed the House in February, but has stalled indefinitely in the Senate and is widely viewed as unpassable. Senator Jon Ossoff called it a “poison pill” that sinks any legislation it’s attached to.

On Thursday, Democratic lawmakers emphasized that dealing with Trump is Republicans’ job.

“We have to just keep on pounding on the idea that you need to sign the damn bill,” Smith said. “I don’t have a lot of clout with the President, but I believe that Senator Scott does, and others who worked so hard to get this bill passed.” Republican Senator Tim Scott sponsored the bill alongside Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Reporting suggests that Johnson might be working on a solution. On Thursday afternoon, he headed to the White House to speak with Trump about the SAVE Act. “We passed the SAVE Act three times in the House. We’ll do it again. We’re working on that, and I’m going to talk with the president about these issues and how to get the agenda moving again. It’s going to be very productive,” Johnson said.

At least one Democrat, Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, expressed hope that Johnson will find a work-around and get Trump to sign the housing bill: “Mr. Johnson has a bill, he has to get it to [Trump]. I think he’s going to get it to him, and that they’re going to work it out,” she said. “I’m very optimistic.”

There’s a clock ticking in the background. When a bill passes both houses, the president has 10 days to sign it before it automatically becomes law. The 10-day countdown only starts once Johnson officially presents the bill to Trump—which on Thursday evening he said he would do, but as of early Friday it was unclear whether he had actually done so yet.

Warren says that it’s up to Republicans to officially present the bill and start the clock. “There’s plenty that the Republicans in Congress could do if they have the backbone to,” she said.

But there’s also a second complicating factor. If both chambers aren’t in session when the 10 days expire, the bill is automatically pocket vetoed. It’s legally ambiguous whether the recess in early July counts as an adjournment and would trigger a pocket veto. If it does, the bill will be killed. Congress cannot override a pocket veto, and would have to reintroduce and revote on the legislation.

When asked if they thought a pocket veto was Trump’s ultimate goal, Warren and Smith had similar answers. “You’re asking me to get in Donald Trump’s head and figure this out. Sorry, that’s a crazy place,” Warren said.

“I am so not qualified to look into this man’s mind and understand what it is that he is trying to accomplish,” Smith said. “But what he did was sabotage a bill that was strongly supported by Democrats and Republicans in some sort of a fit, because he was mad about the War Powers Act and the Reflecting Pool, and the fact that Republicans don’t support his voter suppression bill.”