Lauren Boebert, Colorado’s Trump-Backed Gun-Toting Darling, Staring Down a Monster Upset
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U.S. News & World Report 13 mins ago Lauren Camera
Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert – who splashed onto the political scene in 2020 as a young Second Amendment evangelist and quickly cemented her image as a Trump-thumping MAGA Republican – is staring down what could be the biggest upset of the 2022 election cycle in a race that was considered locked in her favor.
“The red wave has begun,” Boebert tweeted as polls began closing Tuesday evening. But as the sun rose over the Rockies on Wednesday morning, the firebrand conservative found herself underperforming in staggering fashion – one of several Republican candidates whose undecided races could cost her party control of both chambers.
Democratic challenger Adam Frisch, former Aspen City Council member, is on top of the leaderboard with 90% of the vote counted, 50.6% to 49.4%.
“Hey, Coloradans,” Frisch tweeted to voters Tuesday afternoon, “are you ready to say ‘see ya’ to lying, self-serving, morally compromised Lauren Boebert and make real change in Western and Southern Colorado?”
“It’s getting late and we’re going to let the vote counters do their job for the [rest] of the night,” he said in the early morning hours as it became clear the race was too close to call.
Boebert was considered a safe incumbent for Colorado’s sweeping 3rd Congressional District, which covers almost the entire western half of the state and includes both the upscale mountain towns of Aspen and Steamboat Springs as well as sprawling cattle ranches. In fact, according to FiveThirtyEight’s campaign forecaster, she had a 97-in-100 chance of winning the election.
A Boebert loss in a solidly red district would be a significant rebuke of Trump’s brand of Republicanism in a state where conservatives have long been independent and rejected extreme candidates and the type of groupthink that tends to propel them to Congress. It would mean that perhaps Republicans aren’t willing to hold their noses all the way to the polls just to secure a majority in Congress.
Frisch, who ran as a common-sense moderate, nabbed the endorsement of the Republican that Boebert defeated during the GOP primary and launched a “Republicans for Frisch” website. He’s painted her as Trump’s right-hand woman and an extremist candidate that hasn’t represented their district in Washington well.
Boebert’s two-year tenure in the House is marked by elevating QAnon conspiracy theories, denying the results of the 2020 presidential election and making racist and false accusations against her opponents and Democratic colleagues in the House, including calling Muslim Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar a member of “the jihad squad,” and calling her GOP primary opponent – a conservative Republican who has a gay son – “a groomer.”
President Joe Biden honed in on candidates like Boebert ahead of Election Day in a major speech on democracy, urging Americans to reject their brand of Republicanism.
“In a typical year, we are not often faced with the question of whether the vote we cast will preserve democracy or put it at risk,” he said. “But we are this year.”
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