This Democrat Backed DSA Bills 99% of the Time

September 17, 2026

Legislative chamber filled with attendees during a formal address — Photo: Rob Crandall / Shutterstock

A voting-record percentage is only as meaningful as the list of bills used to build it — and in the case of Colorado congressional candidate Manny Rutinel, two very different lists produce two very different portraits of the same legislator.

Key Points

A Townhall analysis reports Rutinel backed Democratic Socialists of America-tagged legislation 263 of 265 times in the Colorado Assembly, a 99.2 percent alignment rate.
Colorado Sun reporting shows Rutinel explicitly walked back support for Medicare for All, a fracking ban, and blanket student debt cancellation during his 2026 primary campaign.
Independent scorecards — Conservation Colorado, Poliscore, the Progressive Voters Guide — describe him as a strong, mainstream progressive rather than a doctrinaire socialist.
Academic research on political messaging finds the “socialist” label triggers strong negative reactions but rarely changes minds on policies voters already support, such as housing supply and drug pricing.
The dispute illustrates a recurring feature of scorecard politics: which bills get tagged, and by whom, often matters more than how a legislator actually describes his own agenda.

The Statistic and Where It Comes From

The core claim, published by Townhall in September, is arithmetic: Rutinel voted in favor of bills backed by the Democratic Socialists of America 263 times out of 265 recorded votes, with one vote against and one excused absence, drawn from Colorado State Assembly voting records. That is a genuine number, and it is not disputed on its face — legislative roll calls are public, and nobody contests that Rutinel voted yes on the overwhelming majority of bills a DSA-aligned tracker chose to flag.

What the number cannot do by itself is establish that Rutinel is a socialist, because the percentage is only as reliable as the underlying tag. A scorecard built around bills a specific advocacy group has claimed credit for measures alignment with that group’s list, not a legislator’s ideology. Every ideological scorecard — from the American Conservative Union’s ratings on the right to the League of Conservation Voters on the left — works this way: someone chooses which votes count, and a high or low score reflects agreement with that particular curator’s priorities, not a neutral audit of belief.

What Rutinel Actually Said on the Record

Set against the DSA-tagged tally is a body of on-record reporting that complicates the “socialist” framing considerably. The Colorado Sun, covering the primary that pitted Rutinel against Shannon Bird, reported that his legislative record had indeed run more progressive than Bird’s on immigration and housing — but also that he “moderated his stances during the primary campaign,” specifically reversing earlier positions on banning fracking, canceling all student debt, and backing Medicare for All. In a Sun candidate guide published in May 2026, Rutinel told voters directly that he wanted “an all of the above approach” to energy rather than a fracking ban, and that on health care he favored “bring[ing] back Medicaid” and Affordable Care Act subsidies alongside a public option — a materially different policy than the single-payer, privately-insurer-eliminating model Medicare for All represents.

Those are not minor rhetorical hedges. Medicare for All, a fracking ban, and blanket student debt cancellation are among the closest things to genuinely socialist policy planks in mainstream Democratic politics — nationalized health insurance, an end to a major extractive industry, and mass debt forgiveness funded by the state. Rutinel’s explicit rejection of all three, in his own words, cuts directly against the thesis that his voting record reflects settled socialist conviction rather than conventional Democratic caucus discipline on narrower bills like landlord-fee disclosure or gun-tracing legislation.

Competing Scorecards Tell a More Familiar Story

Other groups that track Rutinel’s record describe him in terms far closer to standard-issue progressive Democrat than committed socialist. Conservation Colorado credits him with a 97 percent lifetime environmental voting score. Poliscore’s nonpartisan legislative summary describes bills making it “easier to build starter homes and apartments,” regional cooperation on homelessness, and efforts to reduce prescription drug costs for clinics and patients — pocketbook and housing-supply priorities that plenty of moderate Democrats and even some Republicans support, not planks unique to democratic socialism. The Progressive Voters Guide, for its part, simply calls him “a strong progressive”. None of these sources reach for the socialist label at all; they describe a legislator working within familiar Democratic policy lanes on housing, health costs, and the environment.

Why the Label Does So Much Work

This gap between “voted with DSA-tagged bills 99 percent of the time” and “is a socialist” is not accidental — it reflects how political labeling functions as a persuasion tool. Research on the “socialism” label finds that it provokes strong, polarized negative reactions among people already predisposed against it, but that framing popular policies — drug price caps, housing construction, minimum wage increases — as “socialist” does little to erode support for those policies once voters evaluate them on their own terms. In other words, the label is engineered to activate identity and tribal reflexes rather than to describe bill content with precision, which is consistent with broader findings that attack advertising is deliberately built to simplify a record into a repeatable, negative shorthand rather than an accurate summary.

What This Means for Voters Weighing the Record

None of this erases the fact that Rutinel’s actual votes lean firmly to the left of center; the 263-of-265 tally is real, and voters in Colorado’s Eighth District are entitled to weigh it. But the honest reading of the full record is narrower than “socialist” implies: a Democratic legislator who voted with his caucus and with progressive advocacy groups on the bills those groups chose to track, while explicitly declining, in his own words and to reporters, to endorse the specific policies — Medicare for All, a fracking ban, full debt cancellation — that would most plausibly justify that label. The more defensible characterization, backed by multiple independent scorecards and his own campaign statements, is that of a conventional progressive Democrat who moderated on his party’s furthest-left positions once a competitive general election came into view. That distinction matters far more to an accurate assessment of his governing philosophy than any single percentage drawn from one advocacy group’s bill list.