LAST CHANCE, Colorado — Fleeing a tough re-election campaign in her home district, Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert is moving from the mountains to the plains, hoping to find conservative pastures green enough to save her place in Congress.
To win, he will have to convince a new swath of voters that his brand of white-hot, far-right political activism, built on divisive phrases and partisan ferocity in the U.S. House of Representatives, is more needed in Washington than at home. adult Republicans he now faces in the primaries.
While Boebert’s new district voted for President Donald Trump by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points in 2020, more than double the margin of her old district, and some Republican voters are already fans, others greet her with skepticism.
“She feels like she’s a better candidate than we have,” said Robin Varhelman, sitting behind a desk at the livestock auction he owns in Brush. “She’ll have to explain to people why.”
Varhelman, flanked by the enormous head of a bull named Big Red that she used to rope, with a cap that said “USA Trump” hanging from her right ear, said she wasn’t sure if Boebert made the change for the good of the state or their own survival.
After Boebert eked out a victory by just 546 votes in 2022, her home district went from Republican-leaning to a toss-up in 2024, threatening the GOP’s already threadbare control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The narrow margin in Congress leaves the two major parties fighting fiercely for every open seat in 2024. Boebert’s move to the new district, where she will face at least nine other Republicans for her party’s nomination, will likely give the Republican Party a better opportunity. to win both.
That’s part of her reason for switching, she said in a phone interview, but she gave another reason for jumping into a race already considered safe as a Republican: “My voice in Congress is needed.”
After attacking the Democrat who almost upset her in 2022 as a beneficiary of outside money, Boebert has become the outsider and will have to forget about the “adventurer” label that her new opponents are already throwing at her.
Boebert’s abdication came after video surfaced last year of the congresswoman vaping and groping a date at a Denver theater, shocking even her devoted followers as she headed toward an election rematch against Adam Frisch. The Democrat she nearly lost to in 2022 had received triple her campaign donations in this year’s race, benefiting tangibly from her disruptive profile, which attracted donors far beyond state and district lines. .
“I can read tea leaves,” Boebert said. “I don’t want the left to have the opportunity to buy our seat and his only argument is me.”
Number crunchers, political pundits and the National Republican Campaign Committee generally agree that Boebert’s exodus will give Republicans a better chance of holding that district, although newly elected NRCC chairman Rep. Richard Hudson said that the organization had nothing to do with the decision.
Frisch said he is “taking a little victory lap” after Boebert’s withdrawal, and is moving forward with the same bipartisan platform, buoyed by at least $7.7 million in his campaign coffers. Frisch is expected to face Jeff Hurd, a mild-mannered conservative in the old Republican tradition, who said his goal is “to make local headlines, not national headlines.”
In Boebert’s new district, House Speaker Mike Johnson has endorsed her candidacy and the NRCC is treating her as an incumbent. Less happy with the change is Republican state Rep. Richard Holtorf, now one of his opponents.
“By shopping in Lauren Boebert’s district and becoming a braggart so she can keep her office in DC, she has now become part of the swamp,” he said.
It is not yet clear whether Boebert will join the ranks of American politicians who have moved on and won.
That path is littered with many who “could never quite convince voters that they were in this for anything other than their own ambition,” said Christopher Galdieri, a politics professor at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire who wrote a book about American politicians who have picked up and moved careers.
Boebert has a few things going for her: She won’t abandon Colorado, she’s a well-known conservative gladiator on national issues like immigration and reducing the national debt, and she’s a dedicated acolyte of Trump, whose popularity among rural Republicans remains high.
Rancher Dawn Whitney, who attended one of Varhelman’s recent auctions, said the fact that Boebert carries the banner of conservative, Christian and agrarian values is enough to earn her vote.
“Cattlemen and farmers are pretty much the same everywhere,” Whitney said, his calloused hands busy solving a word search as the auctioneer sang.
“As long as she’s connected to the country, I think she’ll be fine,” said Whitney, who cited a well-known reason voters cling to Boebert: Rural residents often feel their political power fading and see Boebert as a an open defender.
“She doesn’t back down,” he said.
Still, Boebert joins a race that virtually guarantees the election of a Republican anyway, Galdieri said. In effect, that means he is abandoning “local options” to run in a safer district.
“Voters notice it,” he said.
While some voters, even if irritated by Boebert’s style, weren’t all that upset that she changed districts, the June Republican primary is where her opponents can do the most damage. Along with Holtorf, she will face Mike Lynch, minority leader in the Colorado House of Representatives.
“I was a Lauren Boebert fan when she first got there,” he said. “And then I think, for lack of a better term, she drank the Kool-Aid and became what she was fighting for.”
Boebert’s response is unwavering.
“If there’s anyone facing the swamp, it’s me,” he said. “I’m the only candidate in this race who has actually done the work.”
Pointing to some of the challenge ahead, she added, “I’m excited to meet people and learn more about essential local issues.”
While a segment of the new district’s voters is in a more urban center south of Denver, the region stretches across the Colorado prairies east of the Rocky Mountains, where some people’s great-grandparents dined under tablecloths. during the Dust Bowl. Half a century ago, grandparents were wrestling their calves out of the winter cold, just as their descendants were doing this week, and as their own children will do as long as things remain stable.
While Boebert may be escaping difficult electoral odds, voters in the new district are clinging to traditional values born of that history — the same values that Boebert trampled in the groping episode at a musical production of “Beetlejuice” in Denver.
That embarrassment was memorable enough to transcend district lines.
“I don’t really care what she does, but she definitely needs to clean up a little bit, get kicked out of a theater,” said Mark Moorman, a Republican who bid at auction on a bull the size and weight of a small car.
Before switching districts, Boebert had apologized throughout Colorado’s 3rd District as part of her latest strategy against Frisch. He had held a local press tour and grassroots training camps aimed at emphasizing his work on local issues.
Now, in new territory, “that’s totally out of line,” said Seth Masket, director of the American Policy Center in Denver. “She is the candidate of national politics. That is her weakness; That’s her strength. “She has no choice.”
It’s the difference between Republican voter Debbie Spear: “She’ll have the same target on her back wherever she goes, here, there, Texas. “We don’t need that, what is she going to bring other than the candidates we have?” – and the passerby at a nearby livestock store, who shouted: “Rifle girl? Hell yeah.” ___
Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.