LAST CHANCE, Colorado — Fleeing a tough re-election bid in her home district, Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert moves from the mountains to the plains, hoping to find conservative pastures green enough to save her place in Congress .
To win, she will have to convince a new group of voters that her brand of white-hot, far-right political activism — built on divisive one-liners and partisan brutality in the U.S. House of Representatives — is more needed in Washington than at home. adult Republicans she now faces in the primaries.
While Boebert’s new district voted for President Donald Trump by a nearly 20 percentage point margin in 2020, more than double the margin in her old district, and some Republican voters are already admirers, others greet her with hands-on-hip skepticism .
“She feels like she’s a better candidate than the candidates we have,” said Robin Varhelman, sitting behind a desk at the livestock auction house she owns in Brush. “She’ll have to explain to people why.”
Varhelman, flanked by the massive head of a bull named Big Red that she held by rope, with a cap on his right ear that read “USA Trump,” said she was unsure whether Boebert was making the move in the best interests of the state or in the interest of the state. her own survival.
After Boebert won by just 546 votes in 2022, her home district flipped from Republican 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 means that both major parties will compete fiercely for every available seat in 2024. Boebert’s move to the new district, where she will face at least nine other Republicans for her party’s nomination, likely gives the GOP a better chance to win both.
That’s part of her reason for switching, she said in a phone interview, but she offered another reason for jumping into a race already considered safely Republican: “There is a need for my voice in Congress. ”
After an attack on the Democrat that almost upset her in 2022 as a beneficiary of outside money, Boebert has become the outsider and will have to resign herself to the “carpet-bagger” label that her new opponents are already lobbying her way.
Boebert’s abdication came after a video surfaced last year of the congresswoman vaping and groping a date at a Denver theater, roiling even devoted supporters as she headed for an election rematch against Adam Frisch. The Democrat she nearly lost to in 2022 had tripled her campaign donations in this year’s race, tangibly benefiting from her disruptive profile, which has hurt donors far beyond state and district lines.
“I can read the tea leaves,” Boebert said. “I don’t want the left to have the opportunity to buy the seat from us, and their 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 to hold that district — though newly elected NRCC Chairman Richard Hudson said the organization won’t lend a hand had a say in the decision.
Frisch said he is “taking a bit of a victory lap” after Boebert’s retreat and moving forward with the same bipartisan platform, backed by at least $7.7 million in his campaign coffers. Frisch is expected to run against Jeff Hurd — a soft-spoken conservative in the old Republican tradition who said his goal is “to make local headlines, not national headlines.”
In Boebert’s new district, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has endorsed her candidacy, and the NRCC is treating her as an incumbent. Less happy with the move is Republican state Rep. Richard Holtorf, now one of her opponents.
“Because Lauren Boebert shopped in the neighborhood and became a carpet bagger so she could keep her office in DC, she has now become part of the swamp,” he said.
Whether Boebert will join the ranks of American politicians who have moved and won remains unclear.
That road is littered with many who “could never quite convince voters that they were doing this for anything other than their own ambition,” says Christopher Galdieri, a professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire who wrote a book about American politicians who I picked up and moved races.
Boebert has a number of things working in her favor: she’s not leaving Colorado, she’s a known conservative gladiator on national issues like immigration and reducing the national debt, and she’s a devoted acolyte for Trump, whose popularity among the Republicans in rural areas remains high.
Rancher Dawn Whitney, who attended one of Varhelman’s recent auctions, said Boebert’s flag for conservative, Christian and agricultural values is enough to earn her vote.
“Farmers and ranchers are pretty much the same everywhere,” Whitney said, her calloused hands working on a word search puzzle as the auctioneer sang.
“As long as she’s land-related, I think she’ll be fine,” said Whitney, who offered a time-worn reason why voters cling to Boebert: Rural residents often feel their political power slipping and see Boebert as an outspoken champion.
“She doesn’t back down,” she said.
Still, Boebert joins a race that is almost guaranteed to elect a Republican anyway, Galdieri said. In effect, this means she is putting aside “homegrown options” to work in a safer district.
“The voters notice that,” he said.
While some voters — even if they chafed at Boebert’s style — weren’t so miffed about her switching districts, June’s Republican primaries are where her opponents can do the most damage. She and Holtorf will face Mike Lynch, minority leader in the Colorado House of Representatives.
“I was a fan of Lauren Boebert when she first got there,” he said. “And then I think she, for lack of a better term, drank the Kool-Aid and became what she was fighting against.”
Boebert’s answer is unwavering.
“If anyone is going to take on the swamp, it’s me,” she said. “I’m the only candidate in this race who has actually done the work.”
Nodding to some of the challenge ahead, she added: “I enjoy meeting people and learning more about key local issues.”
While some of the voters in the new district are in a more urban center south of Denver, the region stretches across the Colorado prairie east of the Rocky Mountains — where some people’s great-grandparents lived during the Dust Bowl. tablecloths ate. Half a century ago, grandparents wrestled their calves out of the blistering winter cold, just as their descendants did this week, and as their own children will do as long as things remain steady.
While Boebert may escape the tough electoral odds, voters in the new district hold firmly to the traditional values that emerge from that history — the same values that Boebert stepped on in the groping episode at a musical production of “Beetlejuice” in Denver.
That shame was momentous enough to transcend district lines.
“I don’t really care what she does, but she certainly needs to make something of it and be thrown out of a theater,” said Mark Moorman, a Republican who bid at auction for a bull the size and weight of a small car.
Before switching districts, Boebert had apologized up and down Colorado’s Third District as part of her last-ditch strategy against Frisch. She had completed a local press tour and basic training to highlight her work on local issues.
Now, in new territory, “that’s totally out the window,” said Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics in Denver. “She is the candidate for national politics. That is her weakness; that is her strength. She doesn’t really have a 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 more will she bring than the candidates we have?” – and the passerby at a nearby ranch store, who shouted, “The Rifle girl? Hell, yeah.” ___
Bedayn is a staff 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.