Battleground: CO-08

In the latest episode of Battleground, we spend three days with Shannon Bird in Colorado's 8th congressional district.

Battleground is a series that focuses on the candidates who are in the thick of the fight for a Democratic House majority and the people behind the campaigns.

Shannon Bird doesn’t approach politics like a typical candidate. She’s running in Colorado’s 8th congressional district, one of the most closely-divided districts in the country. CO-08 has flipped parties in back-to-back cycles, and both times the winner received less than 50% of the vote.

Bird was raised by a single mom and her grandmother, and for a time they lived in a trailer. She talks openly about it on the campaign trail as a way of grounding how she approaches both governing and campaigning.

Her background isn’t in politics, but in finance and budgets. She carried that with her into the state legislature, where her focus remained on the basics like improving schools, reducing crime, protecting jobs, creating housing, and making life more affordable for Coloradans.

Some of that work is easy to miss at a distance. They’re the kinds of policy and legislative fixes that don’t always break through immediately but show up as real results over time.

In a district like this, that’s the job.

Watch our conversation with Shannon Bird below, and support her campaign here.