It’s been five months since the most recent election, and the Democratic campaign to unseat U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman in the next one already has begun.

In an exclusive interview with The Denver Post, attorney Jason Crow on Monday announced plans to run for Congress in 2018 against Coffman, the fifth-term Republican who repeatedly has cruised to comfortable victories in Colorado’s 6th District despite its Democrat-friendly demographics.

An Army veteran, the 38-year-old Crow served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, first as a paratrooper and then as a Ranger, before returning to Colorado for law school. Today, he’s a partner at the Denver law firm Holland and Hart, where he advises businesses on compliance issues involving government regulations.

Calling the country’s politics broken, Crow said he wants to focus on the issues that matter to working families and to break through the divisive partisanship that increasingly has come to define Congress and Washington.

Recalling the people he served with in the military, Crow said, “I can’t tell you to this day what the political affiliations of most of those people are — and it doesn’t matter. We served together. We were Americans first.”

It’ll be Crow’s first bid at elected office, although he’s dabbled in political advocacy in the past. He spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2012 and led a veterans committee that helped secure funding for the Denver Veterans Medical Center in Aurora — a facility that has since been beset with delays and cost overruns.

As a representative of the Truman National Security Project — a group of post-9/11 veterans — he also stumped in support of the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015, something that Republicans seized on Tuesday in an attempt to cast him as a partisan Democrat.

Crow doesn’t live in the district — his family lives five blocks from it, he said in the interview — but he said they plan to move inside the district’s boundaries, which includes Aurora, and parts of Adams and Douglas counties.

In his campaign kickoff, he offered few specific policy proposals but hinted at how he hopes to defeat the formidable Coffman — tying him to President Donald Trump, who lost to Hillary Clinton by a wide margin among the district’s voters.

“(Coffman) told the people in this district in one of his top TV commercials that he was going to stand up to Trump,” Crow said. “And since that time, he’s voted 96 percent in favor of Paul Ryan and Trump’s agenda.

“There is not much that Donald Trump has done and proposed to do that I agree with. Actually there’s been nothing,” he added.

Crow singled out Coffman’s vote for the Republican health care plan for particular criticism and pledged repeatedly to listen to his constituents — a pointed swipe at Coffman leaving a town hall meeting this year before it was scheduled to end. On the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Crow called it a “good foundation” but said he wanted to listen to voters before outlining specific plans to change the nation’s health care system.

“There is nobody who’s an expert on all issues,” he said. “But the main job of an elected official is to have an open door, to welcome people, to listen to the people who you represent and to have an ongoing conversation.”

Republicans greeted his candidacy on Tuesday with statements characterizing Crow as a “predictable partisan.”

“(House Democratic Leader) Nancy Pelosi has an unhealthy obsession with beating Mike Coffman — but give her this much credit, she always raises a lot of money and Pelosi always recruits a quality challenger,” said Tyler Sandberg, a Coffman campaign adviser, who said Crow showed “conspicuously bad judgment” in his support of the Iran nuclear deal.

Democrats have long viewed the 6th District seat as the one that got away. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district, and both Clinton and Barack Obama won there.

But in practice, Coffman has proven to have wide crossover appeal with both Democrats and independents, shrugging off consecutive, well-funded challenges by former Senate President Morgan Carroll and former House Speaker Andrew Romanoff by about 9 percentage points each.

Democrats’ best chance may lie not in a particular candidate, but in national factors. Voter backlash is common when one political party rules both branches of Congress and the presidency, as Republicans do now. And Trump has energized liberals in a way not seen in years.

But Kyle Saunders, an associate professor of political science at Colorado State University, said the conventional wisdom on a backlash against an unpopular president is bumping up against another trend in recent years — Republicans have been turning out in bigger numbers than Democrats in midterm elections.

“The down-ballot effect of a Trump approval rating in the high 30s — usually we would say that’s not good for the candidates of that party,” Saunders said. “But I don’t think we know in this kind of new era that we’re in how much that down ballot effect is actually going to manifest itself.”