As she tries to win her GOP primary in a new House district this month, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) has to deal with a lot of bad press and claims of carpetbagging.
The fiery politician from Colorado currently serves the western 3rd Congressional District. At the end of last year, she said she would be running in a new district. Now, she has to beat a few Republican candidates in the primary on June 25 for the 4th District in eastern Colorado.
Observers say she’s likely to win both her primary and the general election in November. This is a huge change for the second-term congresswoman, who was barely re-elected in 2022 and has been under more and more public criticism.
Doug County GOP Chair Steve Peck, who is not running for office himself, said, “I think a lot of people knew as soon as she got in the race that she was the person to beat.”
If everything else stays the same, she is a national figure, so as soon as she said she was running, several candidates contacted me to ask what I thought and how the campaign would change. He also said that Boebert had to “fight and earn the respect” of local Republican leaders and grassroots activists.
In the primary for a House spot in the Western Slope in 2021, Boebert beat out a Republican who was already in office.
She has become one of the most divisive people in Congress since then. Over the past few years, Boebert’s actions have caused a lot of attention and anger. For example, she said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was a terrorist, which she later apologized for to the Muslim community, and she booed President Biden during the annual State of the Union speech.
Some of those actions almost cost her her House seat in 2022, when she barely won reelection by more than 500 votes. That’s why she moved to the eastern 4th District after retiring Republican Rep. Ken Buck said he wouldn’t run for reelection.
Buck quit his job early, which meant there would be a special election to finish his term. That election was set to happen on the same day as the GOP primary for the regular two-year term, so there were serious doubts about whether Boebert would be back in Congress next year.
Boebert chose not to run in the special election because if she did, she would have had to resign from her current seat in Congress. This would have caused a special election to finish out the rest of her term, which would have made the Republicans’ already slim majority even smaller. People may have been more likely to vote for the same candidate in both races if she hadn’t run in the special election. This could have hurt her in the normal GOP primary.
This is on top of the fact that Boebert had to publicly apologize for being kicked out of a Denver “Beetlejuice” show last year for vaping and being a nuisance. People who are running against her have also called her a “carpetbagger” in the new district.
Some of these scandals have made Republicans in the area think twice. There was a lot of trouble with Boebert, but Gregory Martin, the GOP chair for Cheyenne County, told The Hill that former radio show Deborah Flora and former state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg (R) were two of his top choices.
Boebert has also won some important battles. For example, investor Greg Lopez, who won the GOP primary to run in the special election, said he only wanted to run to finish Buck’s term. This made it more likely for Boebert to win the primary for the full term.
The Republican candidate from Colorado got an extra boost in April when she won 41% of the delegate vote at the nominating assembly. This put her ahead of all of her opponents on the list.
“It was her audience, it was her core base,” said Jeff Hunt, a radio host and former head of the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University. He was talking about the mood in the room during the nomination meeting.
Boebert also has an advantage because there are a lot of candidates, which made it hard for Republicans to agree on which one to support. Besides having a lot of name ID and cash on hand, she also has the support of former President Trump, which is very important.
There are still Republicans who don’t trust Boebert. The head of the Sedgwick County Republican Committee, Mike Benson, said the representative wasn’t his “favorite.”
Benson said, “I just don’t see how she’s going to really represent the farming community.”
Other Republicans agree that some of her actions, like the “Beetlejuice” incident, hurt her image at first. But a lot of people seemed to have mostly forgotten about those events.
The chair of the Bent County GOP, Pamela Kuhns-Valdez, said, “I think that ‘Beetlejuice’ was something that definitely hurt her.” Kuhns-Valdez had seen Boebert at a party meeting earlier in the week and said she was “received very well.”
“But now that we look back… we’re all sinners who fall short of God’s glory,” Kuhns-Valdez said.
