Justine Sandoval is running for the Democratic nomination for state House District 5 in the 2026 primaries.
House District 5 represents central Denver in the Colorado state legislature. The seat is currently held by Democratic state Rep. Alex Valdez, who is term-limited.
Sandoval and two other Democratic candidates have announced their campaigns for the seat. Denverite plans to profile candidates in this and other local statehouse races.
Also registered in the Democratic primary are Rayna King and Thaddeus Clayton.
Who is Justine Sandoval?
Sandoval, 39, is a fourth-generation Denverite who has been working in local politics and community work for 20 years.
She takes after her family, who were heavily involved in the Chicano Rights Movement in Denver. Academia Ana Marie Sandoval Elementary School in North Denver is named after her grandmother, Ana Marie Sandoval.
“For a long time, everyone was always encouraging me to run for office, and I always thought, yeah, that's the goal,” Sandoval said. “But as I've spent years working in the political world, I was like, I don't know if that sounds like the dream job that people think it is. But lately, with the political climate, Colorado is facing a lot of big issues within our state, specifically. I feel a sense of duty.”
Sandoval said there are a lot of issues she feels would be a priority if she were elected, but she listed housing, transportation and the budget as her main concerns.
What’s her experience?
Sandoval started working on her first campaign in high school. She advocated against Colorado Amendment 31, a 2002 statewide ballot measure that would have required public schools to only teach in English. The campaign Sandoval worked on was successful in defeating the measure.
“We defeated it, and I was hooked,” Sandoval said.
In college, she helped run different groups on campus to get students involved in voting, including a Denver chapter of “Hip Hop Congress” in 2008.
Sandoval says the chapter registered thousands of voters on the Auraria campus, and members were invited to the Democratic National Convention.
She went on to work for the Colorado Democratic Party on elections before moving into abortion rights advocacy with the nonprofit Cobalt.
“I was like, this is it. This is where I should have been working all this time,” Sandoval said. “ And I spent almost a decade there helping to fight off some really terrible anti-abortion ballot measures and making sure that we passed some really great policies.”
She briefly returned to Cobalt last year to be the field director for the campaign that passed Amendment 79, which enshrined abortion rights in the state's constitution.
She has also been the political director for Congresswoman Diana DeGette's campaign going on four years now. She is also a political — and green chile — correspondent for the podcast City Cast Denver.
Sandoval's take on the state and national Democratic party
“Well, it's so hard right now because, basically, on the federal level, we have no power at the moment,” she said. “We need to stop the bleeding from our party and fix things in the midterm.”
As for the local level, Sandoval pointed to a lot of in-party fighting that needs to be fixed.
“We don't have a cohesive message. People are increasingly leaving the party to vote independent in Colorado. We know that. Ultimately, I think that we haven't been working together,” she said. “We need to get on the same page and show some force and convince people that we can be the leaders that they need.”
Her campaign:
Sandoval’s campaign website launched recently.
She will announce endorsements at an upcoming launch party, she said.
She first announced that she was running on LinkedIn in September.
