Meet Matt
Americans are fed up with two broken parties that can’t get anything done. As a lifelong Independent with a 25-year record of military service, Matt will take on the extremes in both parties to restore common sense and Congress’s proper role.
Matt Cavanaugh, PhD, is a combat veteran, West Point graduate, retired lieutenant colonel and US Army Strategist who deployed to Iraq out of Fort Carson and earned two Bronze Star Medals and the Combat Action Badge while fighting with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. Over the course of his military career, Matt served on all five military installations in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District.
A proud living kidney donor, Matt donated at Walter Reed in 2021 to a stranger in Seattle, kick-starting a chain of donations that helped save another 7 lives, the final kidney coming back to a service-person at Walter Reed—an experience that led to his most recent role as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Kidney Donation Organization, the country’s largest living donor organization.
Matt co-founded the Modern War Institute at West Point, has been the youngest recipient of the Army Strategist Association’s professional award—the Order of Saint Gabriel the Archangel, earned acclaim as the top professor at West Point, and was once named the US Army Athlete of the Year.
He holds the record as the fastest American ever to race the 4 Deserts Grand Slam series—twice named by Time as one of the world’s toughest endurance races, alongside the Tour de France—and he won The Last Desert, the longest ultramarathon across Antarctica, in 2022, a feat accomplished not long after his kidney donation.
He and his former spouse live in Manitou Springs where together they’re raising two amazing daughters.
