Lauren Boebert’s Big Political Gambit Just Might Work Out—This Time

It hasn’t been the easiest couple of years for Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert.

Her image as an attention-seeking conspiracy theorist nearly cost Boebert her congressional seat in the 2022 midterms. She won reelection in a Republican district that year by a mere 546 votes. To avoid a rematch and spare her career, she relocated to a new, even redder district on the other side of the Continental Divide for 2024. In her personal life, she got divorced, a process that wasn’t pretty, and her eldest son was arrested not long after making Boebert a grandmother. Boebert’s postdivorce dating life made its own set of headlines after a particularly handsy outing to the Beetlejuice musical.

But Boebert may just get away with it all. If the polling is anywhere near correct, she’s set to cruise to a primary win on Tuesday night on her new turf.

How did we get here?

Boebert’s days were numbered in her old district. After coming out of nowhere to nearly defeat her in 2022, Democrat Adam Frisch had announced that he would challenge her again in Colorado’s 3^rd District, covering the state’s Western Slope and extending east along its southern border. Frisch would not suffer from a lack of funds as he tried once again to take out an MSNBC archvillain. He has raised more than $13 million this cycle, an unfathomable amount for a former Aspen City Council member in an R+7 district. Boebert, with her own national profile, was raising a fair share in her own right, but Frisch was blowing her numbers out of the water quarter after quarter in 2023.

Facing this tidal wave of cash, Boebert announced late last year that she would swap mountains for plains and run in Colorado’s 4^th District, on the other side of the state, in an open seat vacated by retiring Rep. Ken Buck. She described this act of moving to a safer Republican district as a matter of self-sacrifice.

“Since the first day I ran for public office, I promised I would do whatever it takes to stop the socialists and the communists from taking over our country,” she said in a Dec. 27 Facebook video. “That means staying in the fight. But it also means not allowing Hollywood elites and progressive money groups to buy the 3^rd District, a seat that they have no business owning. I will not allow dark money that is directed at destroying me personally to steal this seat. It’s not fair to the 3^rd District and the conservatives there who have fought so hard for our victories.”

Saying that she’d become too toxic to keep the 3^rd District for Republicans was a reasonable explanation for why she wouldn’t run for reelection there. Her explanation that moving to a new part of the state would give her and her children a “fresh start” following a difficult year too made sense. What she would have to find a way to explain, though, was why she deserved to represent this new part of the state—an entirely separate biome—in Congress, aside from paycheck continuity.

Given that Buck had already announced his plan not to run again a couple of months before Boebert’s switch, the race was already full of candidates who were ready and eager to slam Boebert’s carpetbagging. Among them were state House Minority Leader Mike Lynch, County Commissioner and former state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, conservative talk radio host Deborah Flora, state Rep. Richard Holtorf, and former state Rep. Ted Harvey.

Despite Boebert’s own unserious reputation, though, her competitors had problems of their own. Lynch had to quit his leadership post in the Statehouse after a 2022 drunk driving arrest surfaced. Harvey was under scrutiny for allegations of having run a “scam PAC” that had spent an unusually high amount of its funds raised on “operating expenses.” Holtorf, who once was in such a hurry to cast a vote against abortion rights that he dropped his gun on the Capitol’s marble floor, revealed that he had once paid for a girlfriend’s abortion. (He also said that he had once “had another beautiful woman” whom he’d impregnated but that the child had been put up for adoption.) In a January debate, six of nine candidates raised their hands when asked whether they’d been arrested, and Boebert and Lynch gave each other a high-five. In other words, groping a date at Beetlejuice: The Musical wasn’t that atypical of a Sunday night by the field’s standards.

Boebert had a few other notable advantages over her competitors. Her fundraising numbers, which were a pittance compared to Frisch’s in the old district, were well above those of the primary competition in the new district. Donald Trump endorsed her. And she won the prized top line on the ballot at a local GOP assembly in April.

At least as importantly as all that, though, is that the field never consolidated around a single candidate with the best chance to take on Boebert. The prime opportunity for that came in March, after Buck announced that he would be leaving Congress early instead of at the end of the year. This triggered a special election, also to be held this Tuesday, for the remainder of Buck’s term. Boebert opted not to run in that special election and instead to finish out her term in the 3^rd District. That gave the other candidates a shot to earn a leg up in the primary by appearing on the ballot as both a primary candidate and the special election candidate. Instead, local party officials selected a placeholder candidate, Greg Lopez, for the special election. Sonnenberg came in a narrow second.

And so the polling in the six-way field looks the way that it does. A survey from earlier this month from Kaplan Strategies found Boebert at 40 percent, with no other candidate above 5 percent and many more undecided. It’s the celebrity vs. the unidentifiable blob.

Boebert had switched to this more conservative district believing she’d finally be free of general election worries and the avalanche of money from “Hollywood elites” and the “socialists and communists.” But there is no escaping from the libs’ cash. While Frisch’s fundraising numbers have slowed since Boebert left the 3^rd District, Democrats in the 4^th District—who are not supposed to have any chance whatsoever—have seen theirs rise. Just one Democratic primary contender, retired Marine Ike McCorkle, raised $462,000 between April and mid-June. He outraised Boebert by more than $100,000.

McCorkle was Democrats’ nominee in the 4^th District the past two cycles, and in neither case did he come within 20 points of Ken Buck. Now, Lauren Boebert is no Ken Buck. Since unseating an incumbent in the 2020 Republican primary, she hasn’t stopped making headlines for her antics. Minutes into her first term, she made a video about why she’d carry her Glock into the Capitol. She repeatedly cracked a joke about Rep. Ilhan Omar being a terrorist. She obviously was all over QAnon. And yet, even for all of the embarrassment she courts, her district’s GOP lean should be enough to carry her.

But if this one is also too close for comfort in the end? There won’t be a redder place in Colorado for Boebert to turn to.