DENVER — Colorado’s 7th Congressional District, centered on suburban Jefferson County, hasn’t had a Republican in the seat since Bob Beauprez left Congress nearly 20 years ago.

But Sergei Matveyuk, an antiques repairman from Golden and the GOP contender for the seat in the Nov. 5 election, urges voters not to count him out in his battle with incumbent Brittany Pettersen. The first-term Democratic congresswoman is seeking reelection.

“People are hurting economically,” Matveyuk, 57, told The Denver Post. “They want someone who feels the pain.”

He’s running in a once-battleground district that has turned decidedly blue in the last decade or so, with Democratic former Rep. Ed Perlmutter winning election eight times running, until his retirement announcement in 2022 ushered in an open race.

Pettersen, 42, a former state lawmaker from Lakewood, won the 2022 election by 16 percentage points over Republican Army veteran Erik Aadland. The bulk of the district’s electorate calls left-leaning Jefferson and Broomfield counties home, while redder areas in the district — such as Teller, Custer and Fremont counties — simply don’t have the populations to give Matveyuk a sizable boost.

As of Sept. 30, Pettersen had raised more than $2.2 million this cycle, compared to about $35,000 collected by Matveyuk, according to campaign finance filings. There are two minor party candidates on the ballot this time: Former state lawmaker Ron Tupa is running on the Unity Party of Colorado ticket, while Patrick Bohan is running as the Libertarian candidate.

Matveyuk, a political neophyte, said that as a small-business owner, the historically high inflation of the last two years has hurt those like him who are particularly sensitive to escalating prices. But it’s his personal story that he thinks will resonate with voters in the current political climate, in which border policy has taken center stage. Matveyuk, who is of Polish descent, and his family left the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980s after experiencing life under communist rule and immigrated to the United States.

“As an immigrant myself, I know how hard it is to start a new life — but it has to be legal,” he said.

Matveyuk doesn’t echo former President Donald Trump’s calls for mass deportations but says migrants who “are hurting our people and committing crimes need to be deported, for sure.”

“We need immigration reform — 40 years ago we had a regulated border and now we have a porous border,” he said.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data through August, there have been more than 8.6 million migrant “encounters” at the southern U.S. border since President Joe Biden took office in 2021. That influx has prompted many big city mayors across the country, including Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, to cut city services to pay for migrant housing and plead for help from the federal government.

Pettersen acknowledged that the U.S. asylum system is “absolutely outdated.” But many of the arriving migrants are filling jobs that businesses in the district, like nursing homes, are desperate to staff, she said.

Making people wait years before getting work permits is an unworkable policy, Pettersen said.

“We don’t have the people in the U.S. to meet our economic needs,” she said. “We need legal pathways based on economic need.”

Though Pettersen is in the minority party in the U.S. House, a bill she sponsored was recently signed into law by Biden. It directs the federal government to study and report on illicit financing associated with synthetic drug trafficking.

Last month, she introduced a bill that seeks to incentivize more states to offer substance use treatment through Medicaid, six years after she sponsored a bill in the state House requiring Colorado to provide that care. Pettersen has often spoken publicly of the struggles her mother faced battling opioid addiction.

If reelected, she said in The Denver Post’s candidate questionnaire that she would work to protect abortion rights and to address the opioid epidemic. Her top priority would be “modernizing our tax code to rebuild the middle class.”

“We need to lower costs by reinvesting in access to affordable housing, childcare, health care, and higher education,” she wrote.

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