Crank and Killin Answer Our Questions

Every voting precinct in the Tri-Lakes sits in Colorado’s Fifth Congressional District, where first-term Republican Jeff Crank faces Democrat Jessica Killin on November 3. Crank carried the district by 13.8 points two years ago. Last month one national handicapper moved the race from Likely Republican to Lean Republican. The Independent read the roll calls, the campaign finance filings, both candidates’ financial disclosures and the state’s own Medicaid implementation plans, and checked four claims the challenger makes about the incumbent’s record alongside four the incumbent makes about his own. Both candidates have since answered the same five questions, and their answers are published in full separately.

The Fifth District lies entirely inside El Paso County. The reverse is not true: of the county’s 339 voting precincts, 331 are in the Fifth, seven on the eastern plains are in the Fourth, and one in the western mountains is in the Seventh. All seventeen precincts that take in Monument, Palmer Lake and the land immediately around them are in the Fifth, so every Tri-Lakes voter is deciding this race.

Crank won the seat in 2024 after Doug Lamborn retired, taking 197,924 votes to Democrat River Gassen’s 147,972 — 54.66 percent to 40.87 percent, a margin of 49,952 votes on 65.87 percent turnout. He ran unopposed in this year’s Republican primary, drawing 76,547 votes. Killin won the Democratic primary on June 30 with 45,511 votes to Joe Reagan’s 28,864, or 61.2 percent to 38.8 percent.

Who they are

Neither candidate held elected office before this cycle, and both built careers in Washington before running here.

Jeff Crank (R)

Jessica Killin (D)

How the district has been moving

The Independent’s own precinct analysis, published September 10, found a steady drift in the Tri-Lakes. Across the thirteen local precincts with results in all three of the last presidential elections, the Republican margin ran R+44.1 in 2016, R+30.1 in 2020 and R+26.4 in 2024 — a 17.6-point move toward Democrats, of which 13.9 points arrived between 2016 and 2020. The area still votes Republican by a wide margin.

National handicappers have taken note. On August 26, Inside Elections moved the Fifth District from Likely Republican to Lean Republican, one of seven House races it shifted toward Democrats that day. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added the district to its target list in February and placed Killin in its Red to Blue program in May.

What Crank has done in one term

Crank has sponsored eleven measures in the 119th Congress. None has become law. One resolution, condemning socialism, was adopted by the House on September 1. One of his amendments — establishing a presumption of approval for service members and Defense Department civilians seeking to carry personal firearms on military installations — was adopted on July 21 by a single vote, 215 to 214.

Two of his bills bear directly on this region. The Fire Weather Development Act, introduced in June 2025, was referred to the Science, Space and Technology Committee and has not moved. The Public Lands Access Restoration Act, introduced in March 2026, had a subcommittee hearing that month. He has also introduced a first-time homebuyer bill and a House rules change barring members from relationships with House employees.

On the Air Force Academy, which sits at the southern edge of this readership, Crank has worked across the aisle. On March 6 he and Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper — both members of the Academy’s Board of Visitors — wrote jointly to Air Force Secretary Troy Meink about reported plans to eliminate up to 140 positions, 52 of them faculty and staff, and a reported $10 million shortfall in civilian compensation. They asked Meink to reprogram $10 million in unobligated funds. “We do not question the need for prudent resource management or responsiveness to fiscal constraints,” they wrote. “But we caution that sweeping civilian staff cuts, implemented on abbreviated timelines, risk disrupting academic continuity, increasing class sizes, shrinking course offerings, eroding accreditation in technical disciplines, and undermining cadet learning outcomes.”

Crank also says he secured a provision in the defense authorization bill “that prevents the closure of the 70th Flight Training Squadron at the Academy,” a reserve unit that supports cadet flight training. The provision exists, as section 529B of the House-passed bill, and it does less than that description implies: it bars the Air Force from eliminating, shrinking or defunding the squadron until October 2031 or until 90 days after it submits a report to Congress, whichever comes first. It is a delay with conditions rather than a prohibition. The measure has not become law, and no matching provision appears in the Senate’s version. The unit’s formal name is the 70th Flying Training Squadron.

Killin was asked the same question, and what she would do differently or in addition. She credited the bipartisan effort that restored the 26 positions, then turned it into an argument for replacing him: “having to fight to restore those positions shows why we need a member of Congress who will be vigilant about protecting the Academy.” Her two specific additions were military construction money, “so Guardians aren’t training in outdated, Air Force-era facilities,” and making sure “the Academy’s pipeline into Space Force is fully resourced, not treated as an afterthought to its Air Force programs.” Crank’s answer committed to modernizing facilities and equipping “our future Airmen and Guardians,” but did not mention the pipeline.

What Killin says she would do

Killin’s platform sets out seven priorities: lowering household costs, government ethics, veterans’ care, health care costs, fiscal responsibility, public lands and the regional space industry. The specific commitments include ending what she calls irrational tariffs, banning stock trading by members of Congress, ending congressional pay during a shutdown, increasing staffing at Veterans Affairs clinics, repealing the Medicaid changes in last year’s reconciliation law, capping insulin at $35, opposing federal land sales and protecting the Air Force Academy from further cuts.

The same yardstick applies as to the incumbent’s record. Crank has sponsored eleven measures and none has become law while his own party holds the House; a first-term member of the minority would have less. Most of this list requires a majority, and whether she would have one is decided nationally rather than here. The commitments with a near-term path are the ones needing no new law — oversight, committee pressure, and the appropriations requests she describes in her water and Academy answers.

Three of the commitments need qualifying. The $35 insulin cap already exists for people on Medicare, where it took effect in January 2023 under the Inflation Reduction Act; a version covering commercial insurance was proposed and dropped from that law before passage. Her commitment is an extension of that cap to people with private coverage, a larger measure than the phrasing suggests. And repealing the Medicaid changes sits awkwardly beside the fiscal-responsibility plank she lists three lines earlier: the Congressional Budget Office scored the enacted law as reducing direct spending by $1.1 trillion over ten years, and a repeal would give part of that back. Ending the tariffs, similarly, would mean Congress reclaiming authority it has delegated to the president rather than a vote a single member can force.

The commitment with the most local content is the Medicaid repeal. The claims table below attaches a district figure to it: 23,616 people.

Both candidates told the August 27 debate audience they support a congressional stock trading ban and term and upper-age limits for members of Congress.

Claims from both campaigns, checked against the record

Killin’s platform makes four specific assertions about Crank’s record. Crank’s answers to us, and his public account of what he has delivered, make four that can be checked the same way. The Independent opened the roll calls, the amendment text, the enacted law, both chambers’ versions of the 2027 defense authorization bill and Colorado’s own guidance on the Medicaid work requirements.

Crank makes one claim of his own about Killin that bears checking. At the debate he called the race “a choice between a middle class neighbor who shares your struggles and someone who spent the last 25 years in Washington, D.C.” The span he names begins in 2001, and the record does not quite fit it at either end. Killin was on active duty in the Army until 2003, deploying to the Balkans, and she moved back to the Fifth District in June 2025, a month before announcing. Between those points she was in Washington: law school at Georgetown, more than a decade lobbying for USAA, Senate and House staff jobs, four years as a congressional chief of staff and two in the Biden White House. The substance of Crank’s charge — that his opponent built her career in Washington rather than here — is fair. The number is about four years long at the front and overlooks the last fifteen months. Crank worked in Washington himself from 1991 to 1998, as an aide to Rep. Joel Hefley.

What the Medicaid changes mean here

El Paso County had 163,982 Medicaid members in the quarter ending July 31, according to the state’s county caseload report — 69,392 aged 20 and under and 94,590 aged 21 and over. That is 13.2 percent of the state’s 1,242,334 members, in a county with about 12 percent of Colorado’s population.

From January 2027, adults aged 19 to 64 who are not exempt must show, in a qualifying month, either 80 hours of work, school, job training or volunteering, or earnings of at least $580. Crank described the threshold at the debate as “at least 20 hours per week,” which matches the state’s figure. The exemptions are extensive: children, adults 65 and over, parents and caregivers of children 13 and under, caregivers of a person with a disability, veterans with a total and permanent service-connected disability, people on Medicare, people who are medically frail, people in substance-use or mental-health treatment, and people already complying with food-assistance work rules, among others.

Crank defends the requirements as “common-sense reforms to protect the program so it can serve the people it was designed for,” and describes their reach this way: they apply to “able-bodied adults without dependents,” while for anyone on Medicaid “because they’re disabled, elderly, or a caregiver, nothing about their coverage changes under this law.” The first half of that does not match the state’s own implementation. Colorado exempts parents and caregivers of children aged 13 and under; a working-age parent of a 14-year-old has dependents and is nonetheless subject to the requirement. He was also asked what he would tell a constituent here who loses coverage, and did not answer that part.

Killin’s answer did not supply a source for the “hundreds of thousands” in her platform. The most specific public estimate The Independent could find for this district comes from the Senate Joint Economic Committee’s minority staff, which in June 2025 used the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis to estimate coverage losses by congressional district. Its figure for the Fifth District is 23,616 people — 8,400 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 15,216 losing Medicaid. Across Colorado’s eight districts the same document totals 225,488. Neither campaign has cited the district number.

Two provisions land in Colorado’s favor. The law’s cost-sharing requirement, effective October 2028, affects no one here because the state already complies. And the law created a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, for which Colorado has received funding. The state’s larger financial concern is a different provision: reductions to the hospital provider fee beginning in October 2027, which the department estimates could cost Colorado between $900 million and $2.5 billion a year by federal fiscal 2032.

Space Command, and what is actually leaving

President Trump announced on September 2, 2025 that U.S. Space Command‘s headquarters would move from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama, and said in the same remarks that Colorado’s all-mail voting “played a big factor.” Colorado’s attorney general sued in October. The entire congressional delegation, Crank included, opposed the move.

Asked what a member of the House can still do, Crank did not address the efforts to slow the move that he had described to KOAA a year ago. He answered instead with what he says he has won since: a “$250 million Space Force Operations Facility” at Schriever Space Force Base “that will support 2,500 civilian jobs,” the relocation of the Space Force’s Infrastructure Portfolio Acquisition Executive to Peterson with “a $4 billion acquisition portfolio, hundreds of jobs,” and a Space Force budget “going to double in the next few years.”

Those are real projects described in the present tense before they are final; the claims table above sets out what is enacted and what is not. Two details it does not carry: the budget doubling is a request by the Air Force secretary rather than an enacted figure, and Congress is operating on a stopgap spending measure through December 11. The Space Force’s own published figure for the officer training course at Peterson is an increase of roughly 275 percent to more than 1,350 officers next fiscal year, which is close to what he describes.

Killin’s answer was that opposition on paper was not enough. “Signing onto a letter is not enough,” she wrote. “I would have made a clear case for our national security, used my votes as leverage, and actually stood up to Trump to keep it here.” She named the vote she would have used: Crank “should have told the President that he would vote for the OBBB only if Space Command stayed in Colorado.” The Colorado Sun reported in September 2025 that Crank “appears to be choosing flight over fight,” after he had told KOAA in January that “the fight is going to be on if that happens.”

Estimates of what the region loses vary and should be read carefully. Colorado’s Republican members said in September 2025 the figure was closer to 1,000 positions than the 1,700 first reported. Bill Craighead, who directs the UCCS Economic Forum, put the command’s own jobs at between one and two thousand and told KOAA the broader effect would be limited: “I don’t see this as something that is devastating to us or going to dramatically change the course of our economy. But it is a bit of a bummer, to be sure.” His concern was what defense contractors decide, not the headquarters itself.

What both would do about water

The Independent asked both candidates the same question, in the same words, about the Denver Basin aquifer and the federal role in the Tri-Lakes’ move to renewable supply. It is the question this newsroom’s readers raise most often and the one the race has otherwise ignored. Both answered it, and they largely agree.

Both began by saying water is primarily a state and local matter. Crank: “Colorado should remain in control of its water rights and allocation decisions. But there is a meaningful federal role in helping communities make the investments necessary to secure reliable water supplies.” Killin: “This is ultimately a matter of state and local water management, but the federal government still has an important role.”

Both then named the same agency. Crank pointed to “great programs at the EPA and Bureau of Reclamation” that finance water supply and infrastructure through low-cost loans, and said he has supported them in the appropriations process and that his office “stands ready to help support project proposals at the federal level.” Killin said the Bureau “already has programs that provide grants and cost-sharing for water recycling, conservation, and water-supply infrastructure,” and that she would make sure Colorado communities “are competing for every dollar available,” naming infrastructure, reuse, conservation and groundwater monitoring. She added that she would “listen to the people who actually manage our water here.”

The difference is one of instrument rather than direction: Crank emphasizes loans and appropriations for programs that already exist, Killin emphasizes competing for grants and cost-sharing. Neither committed to a specific project or dollar figure for the Tri-Lakes.

The war powers votes

The exchange that opened the August debate turned on Iran. Crank said the president “should come to Congress and seek approval before they commit troops to war” and that Trump “chose not to do that here. He should have.” He has also voted against every measure that would have required it. The House recorded four war powers resolutions on Iran in 2026 — April 16, May 14, June 3 and July 23. Crank voted no on all four. Two of them passed the House anyway, the June 3 resolution by 215 to 208.

Crank’s stated reason is that he will not vote to “pull the rug” out from under deployed troops. Killin’s position is that oversight is the job: “People elected him to provide oversight over the executive branch, and he’s failed to do that.”

Asked directly how he reconciles the two, Crank wrote that “Congress retains ultimate authority over war powers” and that he “will never cede that authority to any administration, regardless of party,” adding that on Iran “our military leaders believed acting unannounced was the best course of action.” That is a different explanation from the one he gave in August, when he said the president should have come to Congress and “chose not to do that here. He should have.” He was also asked whether there is a version of such a resolution he would support. He did not say.

What each answer covered

Three of the five questions were put to both candidates in identical words. Two went to each candidate’s own record and differed. The table below records what each answer covered and, where a question had a part the answer did not reach, which part. It grades nothing; both sets of answers are published in full separately, and a reader can check every line against them.

The money

Through June 30, the most recent period both committees have reported, Killin has raised more and Crank has spent less. The two campaigns are funded differently: nearly two-thirds of Killin’s receipts came from individuals and roughly a fifth from her own pocket, while Crank drew almost as much from political committees as from individuals.

What the disclosures show

Candidates for the House file financial disclosures with the Clerk, and the two filings describe very different households. The Independent read both in full.

Killin’s is a Washington financial-services household. The bulk of it belongs to her husband, Rajeev Date, whose firm Fenway Summer LLC is listed as a financial services investment and advisory business in Washington; the filing runs to dozens of venture holdings in banking, payments and compliance software. Schedule C records him as receiving board fees from Customers Bancorp and from Circle Internet Group. The same filing reports capital gains of between $100,001 and $1m on vested Customers Bancorp restricted stock in the preceding year. Under her own name: a USAA 401(k) of between $500,001 and $1m, consistent with the decade she spent there; a management trust holding municipal bonds, among them Colorado Springs Utilities revenue bonds, Colorado School of Mines, and water and stormwater bonds from Loveland, Johnstown and the Eagle River district; and a $25,000 salary from the Executive Office of the President in 2025. She discloses no liabilities. The filing does not say what funded the $632,433 she has contributed to her own campaign.

Crank’s is a Colorado property and small-business household, and a leveraged one. He reports land and rental property through four limited liability companies he serves as president of: grazing land in Custer County valued between $500,001 and $1m, rental property in Brule, Nebraska and in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and land in Teller County. He holds common and preferred stock in Let’s Go Aero, a privately held company, and is owed between $250,001 and $500,000 by Superior Properties LLC. Against that he discloses seven liabilities, more than any other item on his form: a mortgage on his personal residence, two further mortgages held through his companies, a home equity line of credit, a bank line of credit and two revolving charge accounts. His only earned income besides his House salary was $9,093.91 from Americans for Prosperity, which the form describes as residual compensation for work performed before he took office. He also lists an uncompensated seat on El Pomar Foundation’s Pikes Peak Regional Council; El Pomar was one of the four organizations that hosted the August 27 debate.

Neither filing shows the pattern a congressional stock-trading ban is aimed at. Crank’s transaction schedule for 2025 records a single reportable trade: the sale of an S&P 500 index fund on March 24, which the form describes as a rollover into the Thrift Savings Plan. Both candidates said at the debate that they support such a ban.

What happens next

Both campaigns file their next finance reports on October 15, covering July through September — the first look at what the race raised after the primary and after the Inside Elections shift.

The Independent sent both candidates the same five questions on September 13. Crank’s campaign answered on September 25, Killin’s on September 27. Both sets are published in full, with the questions as they were asked, in a companion record.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Crank and Killin, in Their Own Words: the full answers · The Changing Politics of Northern El Paso County · Six Candidates, Five Seats, One Contested Race

The candidates: Rep. Crank’s official biography · his committee assignments · his sponsored legislation · Killin’s stated priorities

The votes: Roll call 145, May 22, 2025 · roll call 190, July 3, 2025 · roll call 199, June 3, 2026 · Natural Resources recorded vote 78

Budget and health care: CBO estimate of Public Law 119-21 · CBO on debt-service effects · Colorado’s implementation summary

Candidate filings: House Clerk financial disclosures — Killin candidate reports, filing IDs 10071889 and 10075599; Crank annual report, filing ID 10077119

Elections and money: 2024 Biennial Abstract of Votes Cast · FEC bulk data · Inside Elections rating change, via Roll Call

Space Command and the Academy: the delegation’s joint statement · KOAA’s October 2025 interview with Crank · the Hickenlooper–Crank letter on Academy cuts

The debate: Sara Wilson, Colorado Newsline, August 27, 2026

Methodology

District boundaries were measured against El Paso County’s own precinct layer, which carries each precinct’s ten-digit state number; the first digit is the congressional district. Of 339 precincts, 331 are in the Fifth, seven in the Fourth and one in the Seventh; all seventeen precincts in The Independent’s Tri-Lakes set are in the Fifth. That the Fifth lies wholly within El Paso County is corroborated by the Secretary of State’s 2024 abstract, which reports the contest with a single county row.

Every vote described here was read from the House Clerk’s own roll call records rather than from secondary accounts. The public-lands finding rests on three documents: the committee’s recorded vote sheet, the full 33 pages of the Amodei amendment, and a comparison of the reported, engrossed and enrolled texts of H.R. 1. The three land-conveyance sections appear in the reported text and in neither of the later two; the same search terms return matches in the reported text, which confirms the method rather than a silent failure. The word “Colorado” does not appear in the amendment.

Campaign finance figures are from the Federal Election Commission’s candidate summary bulk file, taking both committees at the same reporting cutoff. Percentages of the vote were calculated by The Independent from the official totals; the Secretary of State’s 2026 primary abstract is a scanned document, and its figures were read by optical character recognition in two independent passes that agreed and that sum exactly to the printed total.

Killin’s biography was assembled from named-byline reporting rather than from her campaign: her service dates from The Colorado Sun, her rank, branch, military police role and Balkans deployments from Colorado Public Radio, The Gazette and The Denver Post, and her eight years of service from Colorado Public Radio. Her USAA tenure is anchored to a retirement-plan agreement dated July 2007 in her own congressional financial disclosure, which also records her Executive Office of the President salary. No source The Independent opened — four news outlets and her own campaign — names the unit she served in, so this article does not. Both candidates’ financial disclosures were read in full from the Clerk’s own filings, and figures are given as the ranges the form uses rather than as point estimates. One ambiguity is worth stating: the Customers Bancorp restricted-stock entry on Killin’s Schedule A carries no owner marking, which ordinarily denotes the filer, while Schedule C of the same filing records the Customers Bancorp board fees as her spouse’s. This article follows Schedule C and does not resolve the discrepancy. Where a characterization belongs to a campaign, a news outlet or an economist, it is attributed rather than stated in The Independent’s voice.

One asymmetry in this newspaper’s own questions should be stated. Three of the five were identical. The other two were drawn from each candidate’s own record, but they were not equivalent in weight: asking a sitting member to account for four recorded votes is a heavier request than asking a challenger about a phrase in a platform document. Readers weighing the answers against one another should hold that in mind. Neither candidate saw the other’s questions in advance, and neither was given a chance to revise after reading the other’s answers.

Claims the candidates made in their answers were checked against the underlying documents rather than reported as given. The Schriever facility, the Space Force budget increase and the 70th Flying Training Squadron provision were read in the text of the House-passed and Senate-reported versions of the 2027 defense authorization bill; none has been enacted. The job figures attached to the Schriever facility and the acquisition-office move appear in no Air Force document The Independent could obtain and are traced to the congressman’s own statements. The description of the Medicaid work requirements was checked against the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing’s published exemption list. The district-level coverage estimate is from the Senate Joint Economic Committee minority staff’s June 2025 fact sheet, retrieved and read in full by The Independent; its Colorado rows were added independently. Where an answer did not address the question put, that is recorded rather than smoothed over. The claims section carries four claims from each side, chosen because each is checkable against a document rather than because the count came out even; the challenger’s are drawn from her platform and the incumbent’s from his answers to us and his public account of what he has delivered.

Corrections and additions: [email protected].