When state Sen. Morgan Carroll addressed Arapahoe County Democrats the night of Sept. 24 at a fundraising dinner in Aurora, she sounded the alarm over the stakes of the upcoming election and struck an optimistic note about her chances to defeat U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, the incumbent Republican who has represented the battleground seat for four terms.

“We’ve got some really good news,” Carroll said, jabbing the air as her expression took on an urgent cast. “Things look great for us in the Colorado 6th. This is the right time, this is the right year – we are leaning Democratic, we are up by 5 points!”

The crowd erupted, drowning out her words – she went on to extoll the virtues of getting out the vote – but Carroll probably should have added a caveat to her claim. The polling she cited, which was conducted this summer, doesn’t show her beating Coffman by a 5-point margin but instead shows a generic Democrat would prevail over a generic Republican in the suburban congressional district. At best, it represents an opportunity rather than a snapshot of the race.

The Carroll campaign admits the Aurora Democrat’s name identification significantly lags Coffman’s, but argues that name ID is something she can build with advertising and canvassing. So far, there’s been more than $12 million in advertising spent by all sides blanketing the district. While Carroll’s name ID is currently behind the better-known Coffman’s, the incumbent congressman faces a challenging hurdle at the top of the ticket to surmount – perhaps the most difficult he has ever faced.

And as ballots arrive in district mailboxes this week, divisive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump appears to be threatening down-ballot Republicans, according to polls in districts across the country with makeups similar to the 6th CD – even candidates like Coffman who have denounced Trump and have their own distinct, longstanding identities with voters.

This month, for the first time since lines were redrawn after the last census, Democrats and Republicans count nearly identical numbers of active voters in the 6th CD, which encompasses Aurora and Arapahoe and Douglas County suburbs to the south, and Adams County suburbs to the north. Republicans had previously held an edge, although unaffiliated voters outnumber partisans on both sides by a few points.

Democrats maintain that 2016 is the year they can finally dislodge Coffman, who has been winning elections since 1988, when the former state lawmaker, state treasurer and secretary of state scored the first of his 11 unbroken victories at the ballot box. Some have been squeakers – he won races for treasurer and secretary of state by around 2 points, the same margin that sent him back to Congress in 2012 when he faced a little-known Denver Democrat – but the Army and Marine veteran nonetheless has been confounding Democrats for decades.

In one of the most contested congressional races in the country in 2014, former House Speaker Andrew Romanoff lost in an effective landslide to Coffman by 9 points. Democrats point out that the electorate this year is decidedly different. About one quarter of Democratic voters didn’t vote in the 2014 midterm, when Republicans romped statewide. Carroll supporters tack on the argument that Trump repels married women, the district’s key swing voters, like no other candidate in memory.

Carroll and her allies have been lashing Coffman to Trump for months, using a campaign spokeswoman’s comment in February that Coffman would “obviously” support the Republican nominee as ammunition. They have also been pounding Coffman with his own statements and votes Democrats argue demonstrate he shares positions with Trump.

Coffman counters that he supported Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for the nomination and never endorsed Trump before explicitly saying last week that he won’t vote for the nominee and calling on Trump to drop out of the race.

Coffman was the first congressional Republican to distance himself from Trump in a TV ad – “Honestly, I don’t care for him much,” Coffman says before vowing to “stand up” to whoever wins the presidency, Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton – but Democrats aren’t giving him any credit and are instead crying “too little, too late” with ads that compare statements by Coffman and Trump on immigration, reproductive choice and whether President Barack Obama is an American.

It’s no secret why that’s the Democrats’ strategy. Private polling shows Clinton leading Trump among district voters by double digits, as much as 14 points in recent polling, although that doesn’t reflect recent fallout from a videotape that showed Trump bragging that he could get away with inappropriately touching women because he was a star.

“Those Clinton coattails are legitimate,” said Carroll spokesman Drew Godinich, who pointed out that polling show Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet poised to swamp Republican challenger Darryl Glenn by an even wider margin.

“If people are voting for Clinton and voting for Bennet at the top of the ticket, it isn’t a heavy ask to get people to support Morgan,” said Carroll campaign manager Jennifer Donovan, adding, “Our job is much easier. We don’t have to talk any Trump voters into voting for Morgan, but Mike Coffman has to get a lot of Hillary voters to pull the lever for him.”

Still, with the election less than a month away, strategists on both sides speaking to The Statesman on the condition of anonymity say Coffman leads Carroll in private polling, although polls conducted by Coffman supporters show a wider lead – as much as 10 points – compared with polling done for Carroll allies, which shows a margin about half that. Partisans on both sides acknowledge that her lower name ID accounts for some of that gap but disagree whether she can make it up in time.

A national Democratic operative argued this week that Coffman faces a dilemma common to Republicans as the election nears. If Coffman makes more of a point of distancing himself from Trump, he risks turning off the nominee’s fervent supporters, but if he doesn’t, polling shows he could lose support among independents. “It’s a gamble,” the Democrat said. “There are such strong headwinds.”

But Coffman’s camp is confident the Aurora Republican can count on decades of familiarity and goodwill with voters – he’s lived in the city for more than 50 years, and district voters have been handing him wins for nearly 30 years – as well as one of the strongest independent field operations in the state.

On top of that, the powerhouse conservative group Americans for Prosperity is pouring massive resources into defeating Carroll.

“We started early with a very robust ground effort very early and it’s paying off,” said Coffman campaign manager Cinamon Watson. “I don’t think there’s anybody who knows Mike Coffman that would argue he isn’t the hardest working guy on the campaign trail you’ve ever met. They know he is Marine-tough, he fights for his constituents, and that’s what we keep hearing.” She added that the campaign isn’t finding that Trump could be dragging Coffman down. “People know Mike Coffman, and they appreciate his position. We’re running a race focused on the 6th Congressional District.”

In the only congressional race in the country where AFP is active, the right-leaning organization has been hammering the district with door-knocks and phone calls aimed at painting Carroll as “too extreme” for voters, focusing on her positions on health care, energy and government spending in general, said AFP state director Michael Fields.

“People are flooded with TV ads, so we’re going to show up to the door. We get out there right away and keep going with an ‘every day’s Election Day’ approach through Nov. 8,” Fields said. “We’ve been doing it for months now, having those discussions, educating voters about her record.”

“We’ve never been more confident that Morgan Carroll will win,” said Tyler Law, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is spending millions of dollars on TV ads, including one that ran recently linking Coffman to Trump. “Donald Trump has completely bottomed out here and Congressman Coffman is far too conservative and partisan for the district. Despite his best attempts to spin a dire situation, Coffman has exposed himself as lacking political courage and moral conviction. That’s a big problem when you’re running against Carroll – someone who is known for being politically courageous and winning the tough fights.”

But even as Democrats hope Trump’s gravitational pull is enough to pull Coffman into an unshakable orbit, Coffman is waging some attacks of his own against Carroll. He seldom refers to his challenger – a trial lawyer who’s worked at two of the metro area’s most prominent personal injury firms – as anything other than “ambulance chaser Morgan Carroll.”

A Coffman ad in heavy rotation blasts Carroll for her vote on a legislative committee Coffman claims demonstrates a conflict of interest for Carroll by making it “easier to sue” doctors and small businesses, even nurses, putting her own shady interests first.” Carroll – backed up by media fact-checkers – rejects the charge, and her campaign believes her own first TV ad might have inoculated her against such attacks.

The Carroll ad describes her father’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease and the medical bills that eventually wiped out his retirement savings. “It’s why I’ve dedicated my career to fighting for people with disabilities, helping people stay in their homes and receive the care they need,” she says.

“This is one we’re not going to back down from,” Watson said. “Morgan Carroll has consistently voted with members of the trail lawyers’ lobby to pass legislation that was notoriously anti-small business. That’s something voters deserve to know.”

Both campaigns said they have internal polling that shows their candidate fares better with voters on their signature attacks: The Coffman camp said Carroll’s occupation as a trial lawyer has much higher negatives than Coffman’s affiliation with the same party as Trump, while Carroll’s camp said its polling shows the opposite.

Carroll has been stressing proposals to ease the burden of college debt – a key issue for undecided millenials, who make up a larger portion of the 6th CD, which is the youngest in the state – as well as making health care more affordable and doing away with “dark money” in politics. She’s also refusing to cede ground to Coffman on veterans’ issues and the scandal surrounding construction of the Aurora VA hospital, which is more than $1 billion over budget, Donovan said.

“Look, Morgan has done a lot for veterans’ families,” Donovan said, pointing to legislative accomplishments such as the Military Family Relief Act and work establishing housing at Buckley Air Force Base, “things that have really impacted people’s lives.”

Coffman, she acknowledged, has subpoenaed records and called for criminal prosecution in the VA hospital scandal, “but that’s not impacting people’s lives. He’s willing to assign blame to the VA but isn’t willing to say Congress messed up. What can we do to move the ball forward? How do we cut wait times, how does finding someone to blame hire providers, how does it get more mental health funding?”

Watson agreed that the VA hospital is a top priority in the race, too, and scoffed at the notion Carroll can gain anything even approaching an advantage on the issue.

“Mike feels passionately about reforming the VA,” she said. “He has been a leading critic of the VA in Congress. While our opponent has said it’s time to stop playing the blame game but she didn’t argue with Hillary Clinton when it counted. Mike has fought mightily for reform, and he’s achieved success and results, and I don’t think that’s going to stop.” She added, “I think people care about the fact Mike Coffman is fighting for them as taxpayers. He’s holding the VA accountable for their waste of taxpayer dollars. He’s trying to clean up a mess that needs cleaning up.”

In addition, Watson said, Coffman has championed legislation to help first-time homebuyers, worked to investigate human rights abuses in Ethiopia on behalf of a large population of Ethiopian immigrants in the district, backed legislation to expedite stem cell research and to provide pregnant workers with employment protection.

In fundraising number for the 3rd Quarter released last week, Carroll edged Coffman for the first time, reporting she raised $800,371 to the incumbent’s $735,769. Carroll’s campaign said she had $315,580 cash on hand for the period, which ended Sept. 30. Coffman had just over $1 million. The Carroll campaign maintained that the Coffman cash advantage was less than it appeared because the Colorado Democratic Party has been picking up half the cost of some of Carroll’s TV ads, effectively doubling her spending power.

In addition to Watson, who serves as Coffman’s communications director in addition to managing the campaign, she said key consultants on the Coffman campaign include political director JD Key, general consultant Josh Penry of EIS Solutions, the Starboard Group’s Kristin Strohm heading fundraising, the Tarrance Group’s Dave Sackett in charge of polling, and Patchwork Creative handling media. “And a whole bunch of volunteers,” Watson added.

The Carroll campaign handles much of its operations in-house, Godinich said, although it employs GBA Strategies for polling, Ann Weston as a media consultant and the Strategy Group for direct mail.

He also pointed out that the Carroll campaign counts 26 paid organizers and five field offices – in Brighton, Lone Tree, Centennial and two in Aurora – in addition to its Aurora headquarters.

Watson said the Coffman campaign has multiple “volunteer spots,” rather than paying rent for field offices. “We’ve run a very lean campaign, making sure we can put every dollar into voter contact,” she said.