Morgan Carroll’s trademark stubborn determination isn’t something she developed during the political career that led up to her run for Congress. She’s always had it.

She used it as an attorney fighting on behalf of injured workers who were denied medical coverage. And at the state legislature, she wielded it in stare-downs aimed at getting fellow senators to vote in line when she led the chamber.

As Carroll focused on fiercely defending the positions she holds dear, her demeanor as Senate majority leader and then president, during the 2014 session, could at times be off-putting to other legislators — and especially to lobbyists who grew used to receiving a cold shoulder from her, according to accounts from political insiders.

But she said her intensive focus was shaped early on by lessons from a path-breaking mother who was an attorney, always on the lookout for injustices to fight. When she was 10 or 11, Morgan tagged along on a trip to what was then the Soviet Union, where her mother, who spoke Russian, joined a Boulder organization in aiding persecuted Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate.

“It never really occurred to her, once she started to lock in on something, to just say ‘Oh, well, that’s someone else’s problem,’ ” recalled Carroll, now 44, who has represented Aurora-based districts in the House and Senate since 2005.

If nothing else, it made for an unusual upbringing. But such stories also have become useful as Carroll, an ardent Democrat and lawyer, defends herself against attempts by Republicans to disparage her political and legal career — one she frames as fighting for people against well-heeled interests — as that of an ambulance chaser-turned-liberal firebrand.

Now Carroll is adopting as her own a big problem that has bedeviled fellow Democrats: the party’s failure in the last two election cycles to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman.

His redrawn suburban Denver congressional district is one that, at least on paper, should be a tossup. Coffman squeaked by with a 2-percentage-point victory in 2012. But two years later, in an off-year election that favored Republicans more, he walloped well-financed Democrat Andrew Romanoff by 9 percentage points.

Democrats hope this seemingly upside-down election year, which has more Democrat-leaning voters paying attention, might be the one that finally breaks Coffman’s hold on the seat. And they’re looking to the tenacious Carroll for the job.

Carroll, who is term-limited in the state Senate, said that if elected to Congress, she would focus on real-world issues that have seen little movement, including changes to policies toward immigrants who are in the country illegally and reform to make student loan debt more affordable.

Her platform notably doesn’t include a couple left-leaning positions on which she’s been vocal in the past — gun control and single-payer health care. Instead, she argues for Congress to fix parts of the Affordable Care Act that aren’t working.

During the campaign, she has leaned heavily on an unwitting helper, Donald Trump. She has made a barrage of comparisons in ads between the populist and misstep-prone GOP presidential candidate and Coffman — ultimately aimed at persuading voters that Coffman is out of step with the increasingly diverse district. She says that internal polling of baseline party support in the 6th Congressional District, which arcs from Denver’s south suburbs through Aurora and up to Brighton, has ticked several points in Democrats’ favor because of Trump.

On Friday, after a recording was released in which Trump made vulgar comments about women in 2005, Carroll hammered Coffman, saying “his silence is deafening.” Coffman issued a statement later condemning Trump and calling for him to “step aside” as presidential nominee, and Carroll then blasted the congressman again, calling his statement “political posturing.”

But some observers see the strategy as risky. Trump’s fortunes against Democrat Hillary Clinton have fluctuated in the polls in Colorado lately. And Coffman has gone further than most of his Republican peers to distance himself publicly from Trump, while continuing to emphasize more moderate positions he has adopted in recent years.

“That makes it even tougher to figure this race out,” said Floyd Ciruli, a political analyst and pollster.

He says Carroll is a candidate full of potential, while Coffman is an incumbent whose shrewd policy shifts have made him an aggressive fighter.

“If this is a battleground state,” he said, “that’s the battleground district.”

And a battle it has become, drawing millions in ad buys from national party committees and political action groups. As Carroll spoke about her mother and dug into a breakfast burrito last weekend at an East Colfax restaurant in Denver, a fellow diner approached the table.

“Morgan? I hope you kick his (expletive),” the woman said, slapping a $20 bill on the table. “I don’t live in your district and I can’t vote for you, but this is for your campaign.”

Shaping her worldview

Carroll, who spent most of her childhood in Boulder, talks on the campaign trail of moving to Aurora after she graduated from high school and about other experiences that shaped her world view.

She worked low-wage jobs as gas station and video store clerks and as an office secretary, putting herself through college and then law school. She racked up $70,000 in student loan debt.

She is the daughter of attorneys. Growing up, she watched her father, John Carroll, a former state legislator, deteriorate over two decades as he succumbed to Parkinson’s disease. It drained his savings, she said, and he died when she was in her second year at the University of Colorado School of Law.

“What I take from him in everything I do is that you’re going to have critics — and that’s OK,” she said. “I know who I am, I know who I’m fighting for and why.”

She and her mom, Rebecca Bradley, started a mother-daughter law office that handled disability and family-law cases.

“I started a business with my mom to help advocate for people with disabilities,” Carroll says proudly in a campaign ad that began airing last month. But perhaps mindful of the public’s perception of lawyers, she doesn’t say that they started a law office.

The Coffman campaign and its allies have called Carroll a “personal injury lawyer” as a slur — and pointed out that Carroll often took the side of trial lawyers on bills she sponsored or supported in the legislature. Some expanded the legal avenues or damages available to wronged employees and people who were injured due to others’ actions. Among Democrats, she has fought against changes to construction-defects law that would make it more difficult for homeowners to sue condo builders.

To Carroll, such “desperate” attacks from her opponent get it backward.

“I think we have enough people in Congress who are on the side of big corporations over regular people,” she said. “That’s, at the end of the day, one of those dividing lines.”

She recalled a workers’ compensation case in which she helped a client who could not get insurance coverage for a brain injury suffered when he fell off a roof while installing insulation on the job. The insurance company relented.

“Look, if people did what they were supposed to,” Carroll said, “you wouldn’t need to hire lawyers.”

Comfortable in politics

In the General Assembly, Carroll has grown comfortable in politics. Her partner of 10 years, Mike Weissman, her one-time campaign manager, is running this year for Carroll’s old House seat, in District 36.

But that comfort came after even her own party at times resisted some of the bills she wanted to push — including reforming workers’ compensation law.

In 2012, she released a book titled “Take Back your Government: A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Change,” which explores, in part, ways regular people can influence state legislatures.

Among her successes, she cites a streamlined bill that strengthened lobbyist disclosure requirements, a requirement that health insurance companies obtain state approval for rate hikes, the reining in of homeowners’ associations, a law that allowed people to lease solar panels and an effort that highlighted the need to reform the use of solitary confinement in state prisons.

Once in Senate chamber leadership, colleagues say, Carroll reviewed bills each night. She marked them up with suggestions using her trademark purple pen, her favorite color.

Some lawmakers appreciated the attention to detail, while others didn’t.

Carroll also made a point throughout her tenure, starting during her first session in the House in 2005, of not accepting requests for sidebar conversations from lobbyists while on the floor, a common practice.

“I think most people want their elected officials to be tough and stand up for them, and that’s what Morgan does,” said Sen. Jessie Ulibarri, a Westminster Democrat. Sen. Lucía Guzmán, the current Democratic minority leader, called Carroll “a strong, progressive woman” and good leader.

“We all take on a lot. She probably had some tendencies to overdue it at times (and) overwork,” Guzman said, but that made her effective as president.

Carroll’s ascension to president, however, came after Democrats suffered the first of two major setbacks.

Spurred by the mass shootings inside an Aurora movie theater — in Carroll’s district — and inside a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, Colorado Democrats passed new gun-control laws in the 2014 session. They included limits on ammunition magazines and universal background checks.

Opponents launched recall efforts that year that ousted two senators, including President John Morse. Carroll’s colleagues then elevated her to replace him, as the Democrats’ margin of control narrowed to 18-17.

In November 2014, after Carroll’s session in charge, voters handed control of the Senate back to Republicans.

“There was a general sort of reckoning that they had gone too far to the left,” Ciruli said. “And she was part of that.”

Ryan Call, who lives in Arapahoe County in the 6th Congressional District, was chairman of the Colorado Republican Party then. He called Carroll politically savvy as president, but he questioned whether her liberal leanings make her a good fit for the wider 6th District.

“Ideologically, she is out of step,” he said. His neighbors “care about the quality of local schools, care about economic opportunities and care about quality-of-life issues. And they’re not interested in the same things as trial lawyers, and they’re not interested in pushing the interests of organized labor.”

But Carroll is campaigning hard. She says leading the state Senate, including talking to all 34 other members to figure out their priorities, was something that prepared her well for Congress, if on a much smaller scale than the sprawling national legislature.

“It was under circumstances I wouldn’t have planned or expected or asked for, but it was one of the best experiences of my life,” Carroll said. “There is nothing that will teach you the art of negotiating and finding common ground more than leading an 18-17 chamber. Because you only have two choices: You can either be ineffectual like Congress in D.C., or you can get really good at figuring out how you can work together to get things done.”

About Morgan Carroll