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Commentary - The impossible is possible in Lauren Boebert’s district

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Quentin Young
(Colorado Newsline)

Of Colorado’s eight congressional districts, none is more reliably conservative than the one that covers that vast Eastern Plains. Of Colorado’s eight members of the U.S. House, none is more far right than the person who represents that district.

That person is Representative Lauren Boebert, and it is nearly certain that she will win reelection in November to represent the 4th Congressional District. But there are indications that the Windsor Republican would be mistaken to take victory for granted. There are signs that the huge Republican advantage in the district could falter in a swell of voter backlash. There is evidence that the impossible is possible — that a Democrat could defy immense odds and pull ahead in the 4th.

First consider that Boebert is a serial underachiever at the polls, and her performance has worsened every cycle.

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Lauren Boebert

At the time of her first campaign in the 3rd Congressional District in the 2020 election, the district leaned right by roughly 13 points, but she beat her Democratic opponent by just 7 points. When she ran for reelection in 2022, the redrawn 3rd District favored Republicans by 9 points, but Boebert’s 546-vote victory margin made that House race the closest in the country.

For the 2024 race she fled the 3rd District for the safer electoral prospects of the 4th, which was drawn with a practically insurmountable 27-point Republican advantage. Indeed, she beat Democratic challenger Trisha Calvarese by 12 points, but that superficially strong win came with a spread that squandered more than half of the district’s built-in boost.

Boebert’s electoral trajectory over the last six years suggests further mediocrity in November.

Then there are national trends that spell trouble for Republicans in general, especially MAGA candidates like Boebert. On Saturday, Democratic first-time candidate Taylor Rehmet stunned political observers by easily flipping a Texas Senate seat in a district President Donald Trump won by 17 points in 2024. Rehmet’s win in that special election was widely seen as a warning to Republican candidates across the country, and it reaffirmed Democratic momentum in other recent contests in New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

That success is contrasted with Trump’s falling approval average, which this week is down to 41 percent and has been sinking since around June. That trend is particularly relevant to Boebert, who from the beginning of her political career has hitched her identity to Trump and ostentatiously emulated his style.

Campaign fundraising is an imprecise measure of candidate viability, but it can reflect certain dynamics in a race, and in the 4th it signals an intense determination to boot Boebert. Among the top Democrats who are challenging Boebert in November, Eileen Laubacher has raised more than $6.4 million so far, and Calvarese, who over-performed against Boebert in 2024, has raised more than $1.8 million. The incumbent Boebert comes in way behind with $1.2 million.

The quality of the candidates is also a factor. Calvarese is a former speechwriter at the National Science Foundation and former director of speechwriting and communications at the AFL-CIO. Laubacher is a retired Navy rear admiral and former National Security Council official. Boebert’s resume when she first ran for Congress mostly comprised pugnacious media appearances and her ownership of a restaurant in Rifle that was famous for a staff that open-carried guns.

Today she is best known for unruly behavior in addition to a near-perfect record of support for Trump administration actions that are increasingly unpopular with a majority of voters throughout the country, who disapprove of his mass deportation efforts, use of the military at home and overseas, handling of the economy and almost every other major area of policy. The nation is watching in horror as the administration perpetrates an unaccountable, deadly, terror-inducing immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota that even some Republicans find ghastly.

Boebert is not one of them. The far-right House Freedom Caucus, to which Boebert belongs, last week called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in pursuit of even more aggressive deployment of immigration agents to American neighborhoods.

That position could have ramifications in November. Some have attributed Rehmet’s win, at least in part, to broad voter backlash against Republicans everywhere, especially over immigration. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said the results in Texas “prove that no Republican seat is safe.”

If that’s true, it includes the seat in eastern Colorado.