By JESSE BEDAYN

DENVER (AP) — The stage at a recent rally for presidential candidate Donald Trump in Colorado was designed with a pointed message in mind: poster-sized mugshots of Hispanic men in prison-orange loomed from the stage as speaker after speaker preceding Trump stoked fear over violent crimes they associated with illegal immigration.

“These illegal aliens, they do deserve one thing,” shouted Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert to raucous applause. “They deserve a one-way ticket home!”

A glaring exception in the lineup was Gabe Evans, a Republican running in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District. Evans said Democrats “opened our borders” but left any direct mention of immigration at that, bypassing the easy applause lines.

As Evans tries to win a district that’s nearly 40% Latino and could be pivotal in determining which party controls Congress, he’s balancing the need to sound tough on immigration without tipping into menacing language.

Evans’ rhetorical tiptoeing — which took place before a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that was laced with racist rhetoric from multiple speakers supporting Trump — has been matched with similar caution by Rep. Yadira Caraveo, the incumbent Democrat defending the seat. The 43-year-old pediatrician has taken a stronger stance on border security at a time when views on immigration are increasingly nuanced, including among Latinos.

The caution from the two candidates, both Hispanic, makes the 8th District something of a testing ground for efforts by both sides to appeal to Latino voters. In places like this, the candidates walk a line between the pitfalls of overheated rhetoric and the perils of seeming lax on border security.

“In an electorate that by many other measures is very polarized — people have chosen their corners and it’s all a game of inches,” said Carlos Odio, co-founder of the Latino-focused polling group, Equis. “There is just a big portion of the Latino electorate that remains swingy. The risk would be not competing for it.”

A nuanced appeal

At the center of both candidates’ outreach is a recognition that Latino voters aren’t a monolith and can’t be waved away as invariably blue votes. While polling has shown them to be more supportive of Democrats overall, Trump made gains among Hispanic voters, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of surveys of validated voters conducted in 2016 and 2020.

The “why” of all that has induced fervent debates among pundits and strategists, especially given the sometimes demeaning rhetoric used by Trump and some Republicans. If those arguments are ever settled, it won’t be by Nov. 5.

What has crystallized this year is an urgency among Democrats to retain voters who’ve long helped deliver them victories, and a sense among Republicans that there could be a real opportunity here.

The delicate drama played out vividly at a recent 8th District debate when moderator Kyle Clark asked Evans, an Army veteran and former police officer, what he thinks when “Trump says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.”

“I’ve always condemned any sort of racist statements,” said Evans, who was endorsed by Trump.

“Are you willing to say that Donald Trump’s statements are racist?” asked Clark.

“I’ve always condemned racist statements,” Evans repeated.

Asked whether he supported Trump’s mass deportation proposal for all immigrants in the U.S. illegally, including using the National Guard to do so, Evans sidestepped again.

He gave more direct answers in an interview, rejecting the use of the National Guard to round up immigrants.

“I was in the National Guard,” he said. “No. There’s so many different issues associated with doing that.”

The debate moderator turned to Caraveo, citing her previous call to divest from border enforcement agencies and asking if she would still vote to do so.

“My constituents do not believe that, and so I would vote against that,” said Caraveo.

“Is it still your position?” asked Clark.

“My job is to represent the 8th Congressional District,” Caraveo said with a sidestep of her own.

In an interview, Caraveo gave another reason for her middle-ground approach: “People are upset that they’ve been here for 30 or 40 years and they haven’t had the ability to legalize their status. And they think, you know, they see it as people jumping ahead of them in line.”

A new approach

Caraveo and Evans are clear-eyed that some Latino voters still need convincing.

“I think that this has been a very good and very important wake-up call to say, ‘You can’t just talk to us about immigration,’” said Caraveo, who narrowly defeated Republican Barbara Kirkmeyer in 2022. “‘You can’t just take us for granted as being a blue vote for you. You have to include us in all of the decision-making processes.’”

When Evans showed up to a Hispanic forum in Denver recently, someone told him he was the first Republican who’d ever attended. “And I said, ‘That’s a crying shame,’ because that’s the work that we need to be doing.”

Evans says Latino voters were sold false hope.

“It’s that level of disconnect from the Democrat Party that’s starting to drive this shift in the Hispanic community,” he said. “They’re not able to get the American prosperity. They’re not able to get generational wealth. They’re not able to pass on a better quality of life to their kids.”

Voters are listening

Caraveo’s balancing act plays well with Tanya Trujillo-Martinez, 47, a Democrat who says representing the district’s voters is “truly what her job is, it’s not to go with her party.”

“For so long we’ve heard the rhetoric and ‘We want to hear your voice, bring your voice to the table,’” said Trujillo-Martinez, who attended a Latino forum in Greeley recently. “But as soon as we got to the table, the amplifier was shut off.”

Trump, she said, went wrong in “not engaging Latinos with respect, but engaging them as a tool.” She took note, for example, when he recently referred to popular male Latin singer Nicky Jam as “she.”

Evans’ rhetoric has landed with some Latino voters, too.

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Desiree Serna, 33, a Latina whose family has been in the U.S. for many generations, said at a voter registration picnic that she cast a ballot for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and will likely support him again in 2024 after years of mostly backing Democrats.

“It almost, like, it feels like a betrayal, but at the same time (Trump) knows what he wants and how he wants to do it,” said Serna.

And yet there’s ambivalence there. She described Trump’s allegations, offered without evidence, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets as “very ignorant,” and doesn’t support his proposal to oust everyone in the U.S. illegally — though she would like to see much stricter border security.

Serna was sitting with her husband, Juan Hernandez, who remains undecided in the presidential race. He asked Evans about rising homelessness.

Evans linked the issue to drug use, which he connected to Democratic policies that he said hamstrung Colorado police officers. “I couldn’t call immigration customs and say, ‘Come get your drug dealer.’”

“What if that person was white?” asked Hernandez, a 32-year-old construction worker.

Evans pivoted slightly, saying that Democratic policies impede law enforcement’s ability to stop crime regardless of immigration status..

Hernandez nodded. Evans, he said, would get his vote.

Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.