With anger spreading over Iran war, Democrats hope to flip Republican seats with veterans' help

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The doorbell chimed “The Star Spangled Banner” as retired Col. Lou Christensen stepped inside the large house on the northeastern edge of Colorado Springs. The registered Republican and 28-year Air Force veteran was doing something he never expected to do — attending a party for a Democratic congressional candidate.

“The legislative branch needs to put up guardrails from President Trump,” said Christensen, 70. “We need another branch of government that stands up and says, ‘Uh, boss, that’s not constitutional.'”

Christensen is backing Jessica Killin, a fellow veteran, over first-term Republican Rep. Jeff Crank in Colorado's 5th Congressional District, a conservative stronghold that includes five military facilities. The district is a longshot for Democrats but they're investing money here for the first time in years, counting on an unpopular war with Iran and upheaval in the armed forces to put more seats in play as the party pushes for control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Democratic candidates who previously served in the military are also running in Florida, South Carolina and Virginia districts with significant veteran populations.

Although veterans hold all sorts of political beliefs, the population overall leans right — nearly 6 in 10 voted for Trump two years ago, according to AP VoteCast. Trump won Colorado's 5th by 9 percentage points that year, and nearly one out of every nine people there is a veteran, according to federal statistics, making it one of the most veteran-heavy seats in the country. The district is home to NORAD, Fort Carson and the Air Force Academy.

“I know there's a bunch of veterans in the room, so I don't have to tell you where we are with foreign policy,” Killin told more than two dozen voters who gathered on a recent Friday evening. “For the first time in history, now the global community thinks more of China than of the United States.”

One of the only comparable seats in terms of veteran population is in Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, centered in Virginia Beach and similarly dotted with military bases, with the massive Naval Station Norfolk just outside its boundaries.

Unlike Colorado's 5th, elections in Virginia's 2nd have zig-zagged back and forth over the last decade. Democrat Elaine Luria, a retired Naval Commander who deployed to the Middle East and Western Pacific and led a unit of 400 sailors over the course of her military career, ousted a Republican incumbent in 2018. She held the seat for two terms before Republican Jen Kiggans , a former Navy helicopter pilot, defeated her in 2022 .

Now Luria is back for a rematch , hammering Kiggans and Trump for the Iran war that she called “an expanding economic crisis” as well as a geopolitical blunder. In an interview, she criticized Kiggans for voting against resolutions intended to halt military action without congressional approval.

Kiggans, whose 10 years of service included two deployments to the Persian Gulf, said she hopes the war can soon be brought to a close. But she argued that Luria, through her criticism, has “chosen the side of Iran.”

“It’s like the Democrats are now siding with the Iranians and not standing with our military,” she said in an interview.

Paul Krekorian, a Navy veteran and retired grade school teacher in Virginia Beach, said he worries the war may become a “quagmire” for Trump. But he still decided to support Kiggans because Democrats “have gone socialist.”

Still, plenty of veterans were casting early ballots for Luria, citing their frustration at Trump and his administration.

“I think we are less safe, not just because of the war in Iran, but because of the leadership or the lack of leadership we have," said Phyllis Mihalas, a self-described independent and retired Army lieutenant colonel. She described Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as "an enormously incompetent man whose ego consistently gets in the way.”

Democratic veterans are trying to make that argument in other races for Republican-held seats. In South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, Democrat Nancy Lacore, a former Navy vice admiral, is running against Republican lawyer Jennifer Honeycutt. Lacore was fired by Hegseth last year.

In Florida's 13th Congressional District, retired Army Brigadier Gen. Leela Gray is challenging Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. And in Florida's 7th Congressional District, Bale Dalton, a former Navy Aviator and NASA chief of staff, is running against Ryan Elijah, a Republican and local news anchor.

In Colorado Springs, the Republican incumbent, Crank, is in his first term in Congress. Though his father and father-in-law are veterans and his son-in-law is currently in the Army, Crank has never been in the military.

A onetime aide to a longtime congressman representing the area, Crank ran the Colorado chapter of the conservative group Americans For Prosperity and then served as Colorado chairman of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. He ran for the open congressional seat against a Trump-backed candidate and won the Republican primary, sparking some suspicion among Trump supporters about whether he'd be a team player for the president.

Now Killin's campaign is airing an ad slamming Crank for voting with Trump “100% of the time.”

In an interview, Crank scoffed at the charge but said it wasn't his style to pick public fights with Trump. “I'm going to try to check the president where I think he's wrong,” Crank said, such as Trump moving U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama.

Crank said that one of the first casualties from the Iran war was stationed at Ft. Carson in Colorado Springs, and it fell to him to call the fallen soldier's father. “He basically said to me, 'Don't let it be for nothing,'” Crank said. He added: “We're reluctant to go, but once we're there, let's get the job done and go home. And I think that's how people in my district feel.”

Mike Gould, a retired lieutenant general who once ran the Air Force Academy, agreed. “What our president did, taking on Iran the way he did, was exactly the right thing to do,” said Gould, who supports Crank.

Killin grew up in Colorado Springs and quips that she was the lone Democrat in her elementary school class. She joined the Army in the late 1990s and rose to captain, serving in the Balkan war before joining USAA, the company that provides insurance and banking services to members of the military and veterans.

At the house party, Killin said she was worried about what Trump had done to the country — and that Crank wasn't trying to stop it. “I grew up in an era where the Department of Defense was apolitical and the Department of Justice was apolitical,” Killin said.

It was a theme that many other veterans sounded during the gathering, which was held in the home of an Air Force veteran and former Reagan administration official just a few miles from the Air Force Academy. One former Army Ranger worried about Hegseth's attempts to infuse the military with conservative Christian cultural ideas. A newly discharged veteran worried about how he'll find work. And Michael Stewart, a 75-year-old former Marine, made a confession about the level of his disgust over the Iran war.

“This is the first time,” Stewart said, “I've wanted to see my country lose.”

Rankin reported from Virginia Beach, Virginia.