A Democratic super PAC quietly working to flip Colorados Eighth Congressional District is being fueled by a longtime ally of Saikat Chakrabarti, the hard-left strategist who helped launch Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad into national prominence.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, the group, called the Trust Brigade, began operations last year and is focused exclusively on door-to-door canvassing in Colorados Eighth District, one of the most competitive House seats in the country. The PAC targets voters who would otherwise not vote in 2026 and, unlike traditional outside groups, is legally permitted to coordinate directly with Democrat Manny Rutinels campaign while also working alongside other progressive outfits determined to unseat Republican incumbent Rep. Gabe Evans.
The Trust Brigades funding and personnel reveal deep roots in the Democratic Partys far-left wing, despite Rutinels recent efforts to rebrand himself as a moderate. Campaign finance records show that more than a third of the PACs nearly $408,000 in receipts came from Ross Boucher, a close professional and political associate of Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortezs former chief of staff.
Boucher also poured another $525,000 into the LGBTQ Connection PAC, a group dedicated to flipping swing districts for Democrats, which in turn funneled $60,000 to the Trust Brigade. That financial pipeline underscores how national progressive donors are quietly investing in what could be a decisive battleground for control of the House, even as local Democrats attempt to downplay their ideological extremism.
Boucher has long been one of Chakrabartis most loyal backers, particularly in the latters efforts to drag the Democratic Party further left on economic and cultural issues. When the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed Chakrabartis opponent in his failed primary bid earlier this year to replace former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Boucher rushed to defend his friend, writing that Chakrabarti co-founded Justice Democrats, ran the campaign that took down the No. 3 House Democrat and helped author the Green New Deal.
Boucher not only volunteered for Chakrabartis campaign but also contributed $7,000, the maximum allowed under federal law, signaling his willingness to invest heavily in candidates who share his ideological vision. His relationship with Chakrabarti dates back to 2011, when both men were among the earliest employees at Stripe, the online payments company that would later become a Silicon Valley powerhouse.
The Washington Post reported that the pair would work 70-hour weeks, eat dinner every night in the office, then go work out, a portrait of an intense partnership that later migrated from tech to politics. That bond has since manifested in a shared project to reshape the Democratic Party from within, often by targeting more moderate incumbents and pushing aggressive progressive policies.
For years, Chakrabarti has openly attacked the Democratic establishment as too centrist and insufficiently radical on issues ranging from climate policy to economic redistribution. He created two political action committees designed to move Democrats sharply to the left, only to face a federal campaign finance investigation after those entities were accused of routing nearly $1 million in donations into two of his private companies.
In May, Chakrabarti described his broader project in blunt terms, boasting that he has been leading an insurgent sort of takeover of the party. I've been leading or I've been pushing for kind of an insurgent sort of takeover of the party, not by just progressives and leftists, but just by people who aren't bought out, by people who actually want to do something, by people who want to, you know, push for real change, for these problems that people are, that most people are facing in the country, Chakrabarti told Columbia Political Review.
Bouchers giving this cycle reflects that same insurgent mindset, with hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing to far-left candidates and organizations. Among the beneficiaries are the Working Families Party and A Fight Worth Having, a group that backs progressive challengers against establishment Democrats and is led by Denver socialist congressional candidate Melat Kiros and disgraced former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, both aligned with Ocasio-Cortezs orbit.
While Boucher and his allies work to elect Rutinel and other left-wing Democrats, Rutinel himself is attempting to scrub his record as he seeks to capture a district that was decided by fewer than 2,500 votes in 2024. In 2014, Rutinel authored blog posts with titles such as What Would Jesus Do? Socialism and Why a More Socialistic Society Is Superior, and for years he advocated eliminating animal agriculture altogether.
Now, as a candidate in a district heavily dependent on ranching and animal-based agriculture, Rutinel insists he is not a socialist and claims to have abandoned his crusade against livestock farming. The shift highlights a familiar pattern in swing districts: progressive candidates tempering or disguising their ideological commitments in order to appeal to more moderate and rural voters who would likely recoil from open hostility to their livelihoods.
Rutinels ideological pedigree, however, is difficult to ignore. His father is part of a socialist political dynasty in the Dominican Republic, and before launching his congressional bid, Rutinel championed a series of left-wing causes in the Colorado legislature that placed him firmly in the progressive camp.
As a state representative, he sponsored legislation forcing health insurers to cover gender-affirming health care, including sex-change procedures, with no age restrictions, a policy that effectively removed parental and medical safeguards in the name of ideology. He also backed a bill requiring courts to consider whether a parent uses a childs preferred pronouns when deciding custody disputes, injecting radical gender politics into family law.
Rutinel further supported a program providing taxpayer-funded health care to illegal immigrant pregnant persons and children, a benefit that ultimately cost seven times more than projected. Such measures reflect a broader progressive agenda that prioritizes expansive government entitlements for noncitizens and the redefinition of basic biological terms, often at the expense of fiscal responsibility and traditional norms.
Despite his attempts to pivot toward the center, Rutinel has struggled to fully sever his ties to the activist left. He was scheduled to appear at an event hosted by an anti-police and anti-ICE organization alongside Arizona congressional candidate JoAnna Mendoza, who has called to defund law enforcement, but the event was abruptly canceled after the Washington Free Beacon requested comment.
Boucher, for his part, has defended his financial support for the Trust Brigade as part of a long-standing commitment to intensive, face-to-face political organizing. My contributions to Trust Brigade came before the Colorado primary even occurred, just as their worked [sic] started long before the primary, Boucher told the Free Beacon.
I have been a long time supporter of deep canvassing efforts, he added, underscoring his belief that sustained, personal outreach can move voters toward the left on contentious cultural and economic issues. That approach dovetails with the Trust Brigades strategy of targeting low-propensity voters who might otherwise sit out future elections but could be mobilized by progressive messaging.
The Trust Brigades connections to the broader left-wing infrastructure extend well beyond its donor base. An upcoming training for the PAC is being organized and promoted by Indivisible, a group funded in part by left-wing billionaire George Soros that has previously offered to pay for protests and orchestrated disruptive town hall demonstrations in Republican-leaning districts.
The PACs staff also bring rsums steeped in progressive activism, with experience at organizations such as the ACLU of Colorado, Planned Parenthood, and ACORN, the now-defunct network that became notorious after its workers were convicted of submitting fraudulent voter registrations. Its trainer and organizer, Dave Fleischer, is widely credited with pioneering deep canvassing, a technique he has used to get more voters to stand against Trump and anyone like him and to shift public opinion on transgender-related issues.
For voters in Colorados Eighth District, the picture that emerges is not of a centrist reformer but of a candidate whose campaign is intertwined with a national effort to push the Democratic Party sharply left, funded and staffed by activists who view swing districts as vehicles for ideological transformation. Whether Rutinels attempt to rebrand himself can overcome his recordand the radical pedigree of the forces backing himwill help determine not only the outcome of one House race, but also whether Colorados newest district becomes a beachhead for the progressive movements insurgent sort of takeover of American politics.
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