The day after Democrats swept this month’s voting, a group of jubilant Democratic congressional candidates gathered on Capitol Hill to listen to Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado) explain how they could triumph in next year’s midterm elections, too.
Crow, dressed in jeans, boots and an open-necked shirt, urged them to campaign next year as if they were running for mayor: Be local, be authentic, don’t listen too much to campaign consultants, he argued, and be ready to separate from an often-unpopular national Democratic Party brand.
The day after Democrats swept this month’s voting, a group of jubilant Democratic congressional candidates gathered on Capitol Hill to listen to Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado) explain how they could triumph in next year’s midterm elections, too.
Crow, dressed in jeans, boots and an open-necked shirt, urged them to campaign next year as if they were running for mayor: Be local, be authentic, don’t listen too much to campaign consultants, he argued, and be ready to separate from an often-unpopular national Democratic Party brand.
At times, Crow sounded as though he was talking to the Army paratroopers he commanded in Iraq in 2003. “Take risks. Be bold. If something doesn’t work, move on,” he said. “Be authentic. Be independent. Courage is contagious. So be the leader, and others will follow.” That had resonance because Crow has seen some of the most intense military combat of any current politician.
Crow illustrates a new approach — let’s call it the angry middle — that could dispel the sour taste many Democrats feel after this week’s retreat by Senate moderates to end the government shutdown without a win on health care. He told me this capitulation was a “massive mistake.” But at the same time, he credits President Donald Trump for connecting with working people, changing trade policies and trying to avoid no-win wars like the ones Crow fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The gathering at the National Democratic Club was a snapshot of how Crow thinks the party can return to its working-class, pro-defense roots — while also mobilizing young voters seeking change. The group arrayed around him included a farmer, a part-time waitress, an emergency room doctor and a half-dozen veterans. They all said they planned to follow Crow’s advice and focus on local issues — and they all seemed convinced that their GOP-held districts were “flippable.”
Rebecca Cooke, 38, the waitress from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, told me that the first office she ever held was president of her 4-H club. “You can’t manufacture authenticity,” she explained. “I’m not getting my talking points from the leadership. I’m getting them from listening to people.” She’s one of 30 or so candidates whom Crow plans to support with his Service First political action committee.
I’ve been spending time with Crow — we’ve done a half-dozen interviews over the past few months — because I think he should be taken more seriously as a leader in the Democratic Party, perhaps even a presidential candidate. One sign of his rising profile is that he was supported by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York) to be a co-chair of 2026 candidate recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In our conversations, he seemed like someone who might bridge the huge gap between the party’s centrist and progressive factions.
David Axelrod, who was a chief adviser to Barack Obama during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, offers this assessment: “The last House member to jump to the White House was James A. Garfield in 1880. But in a wide-open race, Crow would be an intriguing candidate.”
Axelrod argues that leaders with working-class, military backgrounds can help the party rebuild its base. “As Democrats became more urban and college-educated, they approached working people as missionaries and anthropologists,” he contends. “They need to connect with these folks, genuinely and respectfully, and challenge a system they feel is tilted against them.
“Crow feels that. He expresses it. It’s reflected in the kinds of candidates he’s trying to recruit,” he said.
Crow bluntly described this Democratic Party failure during one of our conversations: “There is a perception that Democrats talk down to certain folks in this country. There is a perception that Democrats are weak and scared of their own shadow, and you see that playing out in elections. We have lost vast swaths of rural America and working-class America, largely because of the way we’ve communicated with folks.”
Crow’s task over the next year will be helping to find candidates who can flip the roughly 35 Republican-held districts that party strategists see as winnable. He cautions that this will require intense local focus: “Folks in those districts are not going to go to the ballot box and say, ‘Wow, the Democrats are just totally crushing it right now.’ … You win by having great candidates with local messages.”
Crow’s personal story amplifies his pitch. He grew up in a working-class family in Wisconsin, the grandson of a bricklayer. He joined the National Guard to help pay for college and moved to active duty as a private after 9/11. He then became an officer, a paratrooper and a Ranger — perhaps the pinnacle of the U.S. Army — and was deployed to Iraq in 2003 with the fabled 82nd Airborne Division.
Crow was tapped to parachute into Baghdad and help seize the airport when the war started. When that mission was scrapped as too dangerous, he instead led an infantry platoon northwest from Nasiriyah to Baghdad. Along the way, his unit faced some of the most intense fighting of the invasion in the Battle of Samawah, where Saddam Hussein’s supporters were entrenched.
That battle is still hard for Crow to discuss, but here’s what he would say on the record: “It was excruciatingly difficult to tell the difference between, you know, a combatant and a civilian. And we didn’t always get it right. And that’s a really hard reality for a lot of soldiers to deal with.”
Crow took a breath and continued: “Talking about lethality and killing and blowing people up — you know, it’s usually true that people who talk like that and pound their chest are the ones that did the least. … You can’t be asked to do things like that, which are not normal parts of the human experience, and not have that weigh on you pretty heavily.” Crow was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions at Samawah.
After Iraq, Crow joined the Joint Special Operations Command, perhaps the nation’s most elite combat team, composed of Army Rangers and Delta Force operators and Navy SEALs. He deployed with JSOC twice to Afghanistan as a member of the Joint Strike Force assigned to capture or kill “high-value targets” in al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Much of his work involved intelligence missions against the Haqqani network along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
When he returned home from war, Crow went to law school. He had trouble at first getting his veteran’s benefits and realized that others had the same problem, so he began helping vets in Colorado. That gradually led him toward pro bono legal work. When Trump became president in 2017, he decided to follow his mantra to “always go where the fight is” and run for Congress. The next year, he flipped a Republican seat on the southeast edge of Denver, which had been held by a five-term incumbent, and entered the House.
Crow’s military service helped him secure seats on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees. But his experience in Iraq and Afghanistan also left him with an antipathy toward interventionist foreign policy that rivals that of Trump’s MAGA supporters. He explained in a recent speech: “Americans simply no longer trust the foreign policy establishment in this country. And they shouldn’t. Because it’s actually failed them in so many remarkable ways.”
For a Democratic Party at a crossroads, Crow offers an unusual mix: He’s a former Catholic who supports abortion rights; he has been a hunter since he was 12 but advocates gun-safety legislation. He’s a decorated warrior who’s wary of war; and perhaps most important, he sympathizes with some of Trump’s supporters but thinks the president threatens American democracy. Those might seem like contradictions, but they can be bridges, too.
When I met Crow several years ago, he described his experience on Jan. 6, 2021. He was with other members who had been moved into the House Chamber for safety. A howling mob was outside, ready to storm the room, and some members feared for their lives. Protecting them were a handful of Capitol Police officers. Crow asked one of them, who had little firearms experience, to hand him his weapon so he could try to protect the group if the worst happened.
Crow seems eager to play a larger role now in opposing Trump. In a House speech in September, he painted a dark picture: “The walls of our democracy are being disassembled, brick by brick. Federal troops are patrolling our streets to intimidate and instill fear. … They’re firing our most experienced generals and admirals who may disagree with the president.”
He closed his speech this way: “There’s a tradition in the paratroopers, that the leader of the unit jumps out of the plane first and then the others follow. I’m ready to jump.”
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