On Election Night of 2024, shortly before nine o’clock, Representative Lauren Boebert ascended a small stage at the Grainhouse, a sports bar in Windsor, Colorado. Windsor, part of the state’s Fourth Congressional District, is situated on Colorado’s agricultural northern plains, and the bar was housed in a massive metal grain bin. A bright-green John Deere 237 corn picker stood next to the stage. Boebert, who had moved to the district earlier in the year, wore a tightly fitted blue suit with red lining, a white shirt, a pair of silver stiletto heels, and a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap that had been signed on the brim in Sharpie by President Donald Trump. It had been less than two hours since the Colorado polls had closed, and most news organizations would not call the Presidential race until after midnight. But Trisha Calvarese, Boebert’s opponent for a seat in the House of Representatives, had already conceded.
“The swamp, they thought I would fail!” Boebert shouted to more than two hundred supporters. “But you all welcomed me to Windsor, Colorado. And, rather than failing, I think it’s kind of like an A-plus with extra credit with this G.E.D. right here!”
Two years earlier, Boebert had barely won the closest race in the nation, defending her seat in Colorado’s Third Congressional District by only five hundred and forty-six votes. Then her political prospects, which already looked dim, seemed to worsen because of a tumultuous personal life. After the 2022 election, Boebert got divorced; her ex-husband was arrested twice for domestic altercations; and her oldest son, a teen-ager, was also arrested, having allegedly participated in a string of vehicle break-ins and credit-card thefts. In September, 2023, Boebert herself was kicked out of the Buell Theatre, in Denver, after disturbing other audience members during a musical performance of “Beetlejuice” by vaping, laughing and singing loudly, and engaging in mutual groping with her date. Surveillance video of the incident, which also showed Boebert giving the finger to an usher as she and her date were escorted out, quickly went viral. Three months later, the congresswoman abruptly decided to seek office for a third term in a part of Colorado where she had never lived as an adult. And yet, despite all Boebert’s bad publicity, here she was in Windsor, at the age of thirty-seven, poised to become the senior member of Colorado’s Republican delegation to the House of Representatives.
“My Democrat opponent just called and conceded and asked me to uphold our democracy,” Boebert said from the stage. “And my response was ‘I promise you I will uphold America’s constitutional republic! ’ ”
The crowd cheered. Next to me, Fred Mahe, the treasurer of the Weld County Republican Party, shouted, “She’s right! She’s right! It’s not a democracy!”
Mahe wore a baseball cap with an image of Trump raising his fist after last summer’s assassination attempt. Another man nearby had a T-shirt that said “I’m Voting for the Felon and the Hillbilly.” One middle-aged woman, immaculately dressed in the colors of the American flag, wore a campaign-style button with the message “Life’s a Bitch—Don’t Vote for One.”
Earlier in the evening, several people had told me that they worried about the possibility of George Soros influencing Colorado’s elections. A woman in her sixties, dressed in an “All American Trump Girl” shirt, explained that she worked in Boulder, a liberal bastion, and she feared political violence. “If Trump wins tomorrow, Boulder could be a shit show,” she said.
At the end of Boebert’s speech, she introduced her mother, Shawna, who stood nearby, wearing an American-flag-patterned shawl. “Many of you have heard my life story of being raised in a Democrat household,” the congresswoman said. “And it wasn’t because my mom was liberal. It’s because she believed the lies. She believed the lies of politicians, and it entrapped us in a cycle of poverty.” She concluded, “In 2016, my mom voted for Donald J. Trump, and, just like you, she is ready for him to win his third Presidential election! God bless you, Windsor! Thank you so much. We’re gonna fight, fight, fight!”
Lauren Boebert’s political career began in the uniquely challenging terrain of Colorado’s Third District. To drive from corner to corner across the district, which is larger than the state of Pennsylvania, takes more than ten hours. It encompasses some of the tallest mountains in the continental United States, as well as vast stretches of high desert. In a hard landscape, geographical features have hard names: Disappointment Valley, Calamity Mesa, Battlement Mesa. Constituent communities include Silt, Stoner, Sawpit, Slick Rock, Bedrock, Marble. Another on-the-nose name is Rifle, Boebert’s home town, where she used to own a restaurant called Shooters Grill, whose waitstaff openly carried firearms.
Before Boebert, the district was represented by a Republican named Scott Tipton. His greatest moment of national publicity may have come in January, 2019, when, during a federal-government shutdown, the Onion ran a headline: “Poll Finds 100% of Americans Blame Shutdown Entirely on Colorado Representative Scott Tipton.” A photograph featured the fifth-term congressman wearing a blue suit, a blue tie, and a gentle, slightly hangdog expression. A fictional Pew Research pollster was quoted: “As far as the American people are concerned, Tipton and Tipton alone owns this shutdown.”
This joke—the targeting of some random low-profile Republican from an unknown rural district—became a reality of a different sort when Boebert entered the primary, later that year. She was thirty-two, with no political experience, and her family life had often been troubled. Her mother, a high-school dropout, had given birth to her at the age of eighteen, and Boebert never knew her biological father. She has said that her family sometimes relied on welfare, and that her mother had a partner who was abusive. At sixteen, Lauren met the twenty-two-year-old man whom she would eventually marry, Jayson Boebert. Like her mother, Lauren dropped out of high school and got pregnant, having a son at eighteen.
For a while, Lauren was a shift manager at a McDonald’s in Rifle. Later, she worked as a pipeline locator for a company that drilled for natural gas, a major local industry. She began devoting herself to born-again Christianity, and she and Jayson had three more sons. Both parents also had police records. In 2004, Jayson allegedly exposed himself to two women in a Colorado bowling alley; he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of petty offense for public indecency and lewd exposure, spending a few days in jail. That same year, an altercation between the couple resulted in a guilty plea for Jayson on a misdemeanor charge for harassment with a domestic-violence enhancement. After another fight, Lauren was charged with third-degree assault, criminal mischief, and underage drinking. (The outcomes of these charges are not known, because juvenile records in Colorado are automatically sealed.) A few years later, during the financial crisis, the couple lost their home in a foreclosure.
In 2013, Lauren and Jayson opened Shooters Grill. Boebert has claimed that she encouraged staff to arm themselves after a man was beaten to death outside the restaurant. But nobody has been able to find records of a murder that matches Boebert’s description. The Colorado Sun reported, in the only such incident it could turn up, that a man had been involved in a fight elsewhere in Rifle, and then ran to within a block of the restaurant, where he died from a methamphetamine overdose. Boebert’s first taste of fame came in September, 2019, at a Colorado town-hall meeting held by the Presidential-primary candidate Beto O’Rourke. O’Rourke had proposed a ban and a buyback program for assault rifles, and Boebert, standing in the audience, challenged him, in an exchange that subsequently appeared on Fox News. “I was one of the gun-owning Americans that heard your speech and heard what you had to say regarding ‘Hell yes, I’m going to take your AR-15s and your AK-47s,’ ” Boebert said. “Well, I am here to say, ‘Hell no, you’re not.’ ”
Few people took Boebert seriously when she entered the Republican primary. She had little financial support, and she didn’t receive her G.E.D. until after she declared her candidacy. Tipton chose not to spend several hundred thousand dollars of available campaign funds in the primary. But Boebert proved to be an energetic candidate, accusing Tipton of being soft on immigration and of failing to support Trump to an adequate degree. (In fact, Trump had endorsed Tipton.) After winning the primary handily, Boebert took the seat by six percentage points.
As a first-term congresswoman, Boebert developed an often cartoonish national image. During the campaign, she had said of QAnon, “If this is real, it could be really great for our country,” and on January 6th she tweeted, “Today is 1776.” At a Christian conference, Boebert joked that Jesus hadn’t had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” She made a series of Islamophobic comments about Representative Ilhan Omar, referring to her during a speech on the House floor as “the Jihad Squad member from Minnesota.” In 2022, when a same-sex-marriage bill passed in the House, Boebert opposed it, explaining that it was part of a progressive cause that “undermined masculinity.” That year, during the State of the Union address, she heckled President Biden while he talked about supporting veterans who suffered from medical problems.
These various controversies helped establish Boebert as a national figure, and her hard-right image seemed to be effective for fund-raising. In 2022, as she ran for reëlection, seventy-seven per cent of her itemized contributions came from outside the district, according to an Aspen Journalism analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission. But the congresswoman presented herself very differently to local constituents. “I’m straight out of Rifle, running a restaurant with my four little boys and with my G.E.D.,” she said at a dinner in Ouray, a former mining town. At events in Colorado, Boebert’s message tended to be more personal, and she seemed less intent on attracting attention with extreme statements. She preached a kind of bootstraps politics. “I finally said, Enough is enough,” she told the audience at another event outside Denver, describing her decision to run for office. “I can’t sit on the sofa and be mad anymore. That is getting me nowhere.”
At the dinner in Ouray, in October, 2023, Boebert had arrived holding her six-month-old grandson, Josiah. She was thirty-six; her own mother, at the age of fifty-four, had become a great-grandmother. “He came to me at seventeen,” Boebert said of her oldest son. “He said, ‘Mom, I’m going to have a baby.’ ” She continued, “And I said, ‘Well, what are you guys going to do?’ And he said, ‘Mom, I told you. We’re going to have a baby.’ ”
The room broke into applause. “He later told me it’s hereditary in our family to have your first at eighteen,” Boebert said. “That’s not exactly how it works, but, you know. . . . ” The audience laughed, and she said, “I’m so proud of them for choosing life.”
Boebert is petite—even in cowboy boots in Ouray, she stood barely five feet tall. At every event that I attended, she spoke without notes, often with a high level of detail. “She’s more sophisticated than a lot of people think,” Eli Bremer, a prominent Colorado Springs politician who described himself as “an old-school Republican,” told me. Even constituents who were horrified by Boebert sometimes acknowledged her charisma. “You go from Tipton to Boebert, from somebody who had no profile to somebody who is almost internationally known,” John Rodriguez, who had edited Pulp, an arts-and-culture news magazine in Pueblo, the largest city in the district, told me. “You have to give her credit.”
The Third District includes some of the poorest counties in the West, and Rodriguez noted that a history of adversity was part of Boebert’s appeal. “She had a hard family life,” he said. “And she found a community that loves her. But it leads to this behavior, and then everybody on the other side hates her.” He continued, “I don’t feel bad for her. She said terrible things about Arabs, about other minority groups.” He went on, “But she’s an interesting case. Why does she feel this need to put down people who are trying to do what she’s doing? She made the club. She started with nothing, and she made it. But what about her wants to help the America that keeps other people down?”
In certain respects, the rural region that produced Boebert is a throwback to a time when Colorado was deeply red, sometimes notoriously so. In 1992, more than fifty-three per cent of the state’s voters approved Amendment 2, which excluded gays and lesbians from anti-discrimination laws. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually struck down the amendment, but for a while Colorado was nicknamed “the hate state.”
The amendment helped galvanize a small group of wealthy progressive political operatives. Some were gay themselves, including Tim Gill, a University of Colorado graduate and a computer-software entrepreneur, and Jared Polis, who founded a series of successful tech endeavors while he was in his twenties. Gill and Polis were advised by Ted Trimpa, a political strategist who, having grown up closeted in a small town in Kansas, understood the way conservatives thought. Along with other wealthy progressives, these men figured out how to use money effectively in the wake of a series of campaign-finance reforms that included the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002.
This history is described in “The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado,” a book by Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer that was published in 2010. The McCain-Feingold Act and other reforms restricted the amount of money that candidates and parties could raise from individual donors. One unintended outcome, though, was that political power shifted toward independent nonprofits that were often able to hide their funding sources. In Colorado, Gill, Polis, and others developed a network of nonprofits, and they helped pioneer the way that such organizations could be used in campaigns. They focussed on down-ballot races, running moderate candidates rather than playing to the liberal base. They also targeted homophobic Republican lawmakers and, in a number of instances, were successful in getting them voted out of office.
In 2004, when George W. Bush won reëlection, Colorado was among the few bright spots for Democrats. That November, they flipped both houses of the Colorado state legislature, along with a U.S. Senate seat and a seat in the House of Representatives. They benefitted from demographic changes—more than a million people had moved into Colorado in the nineties—but strategic thinking and large financial resources were also critical. The first time that Polis ran for office, in 2000, he poured more than a million dollars of his own fortune into a campaign for an unpaid position on the Colorado State Board of Education. Polis’s Republican opponent spent roughly ten thousand dollars and lost by ninety votes. In 2019, Polis became the first openly gay man to be elected governor in America, and he still holds the office. No Republican has won a statewide election in Colorado since 2016.
Boebert’s rise could be seen as a reaction to the dominance of liberal Denver. Her seat in the Third District, where fewer than twenty-five per cent of voters are registered Democrats, had been considered safe for Republicans. But, in 2022, a Democratic challenger named Adam Frisch decided to run as a moderate, basing his campaign on the notion that Boebert was neglecting her constituents. Frisch contacted Michael Huttner, a Boulder-based political consultant who had managed Polis’s first campaign. Huttner agreed that Boebert might be vulnerable to a moderate opponent, because the Third District, like Colorado as a whole, includes large numbers of unaffiliated voters. But Huttner doubted that Frisch, who appeared to have retired at a young age after a career in finance, would put in the effort. “I pretty much assumed he wasn’t going to run,” Huttner told me. He thought the choice would be too easy: “Skiing every day versus going to Montrose to talk to old people.”
But Frisch surprised him. “He worked as hard as any candidate I’ve seen,” Huttner said. Discipline was also critical. “We knew we were not going to out-tweet her or make more extreme remarks,” Huttner said. “And we knew we had to be moderate on oil-and-gas issues. The liberals here in Denver bash the fracking, and we didn’t want to take the bait.”
In August, 2022, Frisch came to Ridgway, the small town in the Third District where I live. I attended an event at a local cattle ranch called the Double D, where he spoke to a gathering of about ninety people. At fifty-four, he had the trim build of a former marathoner, and he conveyed a calm, controlled energy. He emphasized that the Democratic Party needed to do better in the two thousand American counties that are considered rural. In 1996, Bill Clinton won more than half of these counties; in 2012, Barack Obama won only seventeen per cent. By 2020, when Joe Biden ran, the figure had fallen to ten per cent.
Frisch acknowledged that his background was unconventional for a rural candidate. He is Jewish, and he grew up in Minneapolis, the son of an obstetrician who worked in clinics that were often targeted by anti-abortion activists. As a young man, Frisch was a Wall Street currency trader, but after 9/11 he left the financial world. He moved to Colorado, where he met his wife, Katy, who had also had a successful career in business. They reared two children in the ski town of Aspen, where, at one point, the family bought a nineteen-foot Jayco camper to use on vacations. For the congressional race, Frisch wrapped the camper in a large sign that read “Beat Boebert.” He began hauling it on long trips around the district behind his red Ford F-150 pickup truck, accompanied by his sixteen-year-old son, Felix. Frisch’s previous political experience was modest: a total of eight years on the Aspen City Council.
In a district of loaded names, Aspen is probably the worst home town for any candidate. Western Colorado’s voting patterns often correspond with elevation: relatively low-lying communities, many of which depend on agriculture, energy extraction, or construction, tend to be conservative, whereas scattered pockets of blue are found in high-altitude towns that attract outdoor hobbyists, remote workers, and the independently wealthy. During that 2022 election season, one Boebert flyer that arrived at my home began, “Democrat Aspen Adam: Up on his mountain . . . looking down at the rest of us.” The mailer listed Frisch’s house as being worth $9,785,900.
Boebert seemed to take her victory for granted, holding relatively few campaign events. Meanwhile, Frisch, who had provided much of the initial funding for his race, drove more than twenty-four thousand miles in the Ford F-150. Some polls indicated that the margin between Frisch and Boebert was narrowing, but Boebert remained the overwhelming favorite until Election Day. The week after the vote, the race was still too close to call, and Frisch and Boebert both attended the new-member orientation at the Capitol. By the time Frisch returned to Aspen, in mid-November, he had received close to a million dollars in new online donations. The tiny gap between the two candidates—.17 per cent—was well within the range of state law for a mandatory recount. But Frisch decided to concede in a video statement. He asked people to stop sending contributions: “Please save your money for your groceries.”
Less than two weeks later, I met with Frisch in Aspen, and I asked if the announcement might have been premature. “The politically expedient thing would have been to keep my mouth shut and keep generating the money,” he told me. But he believed that the concession had impressed some conservative voters who dislike greedy politicians. By then, Frisch had already registered with the Federal Election Commission for the 2024 race, although he hadn’t yet formally committed to running again. He thought that Boebert would probably face a competitive primary. “I’ll be shocked if there’s not a serious Republican challenger to Boebert who is a normal Republican,” he said.
Frisch’s year of driving had convinced him that something was changing in rural areas. “I thought Trumpism was peaking a year ago,” he told me that November. “People want the circus to stop.” He continued, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump doesn’t even run in 2024.”
In February, 2023, Frisch announced that he would run again. The Third District was considered to be one of the few places in rural America where the Democratic Party had a chance to flip a seat, and in the first quarter of that year he outraised Boebert by nearly a million dollars. I visited Aspen that spring, as Trump’s candidacy was gaining strength, and reminded Frisch about his prediction. “Some of us need to eat some humble pie,” he said. He referred to the Republicans’ poor performance in the 2022 midterms: “I thought that, after the colossal losses, the base would have realized we’re not winning with this guy.”
We sat in a café not far from the chairlift to the Aspen Mountain Ski Resort. A woman with her leg in a cast stopped by. “I’m so happy you’re doing this,” she said to Frisch. “Every time I get a little money, I throw it your way.”
Frisch thanked her and asked about the leg.
“I broke my ankle on the last day of uphilling,” she said.
“It’s always the last day of the season,” Frisch said.
She repeated it like a mantra: “It’s always the last day of the season.”
That year, Frisch continued driving around the district, and periodically I met him at campaign events. I noticed that he avoided talking directly about his opponent, and that he never mentioned her personal problems or her lack of formal education. “I give her credit for going from her upbringing to a member of Congress,” he told me. “I wish it had been done in a more positive way instead of bringing that angertainment. But she represents a lot of people who just feel left out of the deal.”
Frisch often used that word—“angertainment”—to refer to Boebert’s behavior without going into details. He believed that Democrats generally underestimated the emotional side of the working-class perspective. “Pride and dignity trump pocketbook issues,” he told me. He publicly opposed Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness program, believing that it wasn’t focussed on people who truly needed help. He often referred to the importance of controlling illegal immigration, and he visited the southern border in order to talk to law-enforcement officials. “Just because you hear it on Fox News doesn’t mean that it’s not true,” Frisch said during a meeting last summer with liberal voters in Ridgway.
At that meeting, a local business owner warned Frisch that his occasionally negative comments might undermine Democratic morale. Frisch countered that Democrats were out of touch with farmers, energy workers, and others whom he described as producers rather than consumers. “Every once in a while I get talking points from the national Party,” he said. “And I got one three weeks ago, and it said, If you are going to talk about the farm bill, talk about it as a nutrition bill. To me, that’s a perfect example, that the Democratic Party sees a farm bill as a consumer-oriented bill, whereas I see it as related to the producers. We need to figure out a way as a Party to treat people with more respect who are producing.”
Frisch had been wrong about Trump not running, but he was right about primary challengers to Boebert. In 2023, Jeff Hurd, a moderate Republican lawyer from Grand Junction, declared his candidacy, as did Russ Andrews, an engineer and a financial adviser from Carbondale. Andrews hosts a conservative radio show, and he had endorsed Boebert twice in the past.
“But, that being said, she kind of ignored the district,” Andrews told me last March, when we met near his home. He echoed a common criticism that Boebert had prioritized national fame over local issues. During her first term, she did not introduce a single bill that made it out of committee. “She brought back 1.1 billion fewer dollars to the district in 2022 than the average Colorado district,” Andrews said. He believed that Boebert was too rigid in her ideological commitment to small government. “I think that she truly believed that if she left a billion dollars back in D.C. that that’s money that would never get spent,” he said. “But of course it did. It got spent in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco. But this is an impoverished district, and we need every nickel we can get.”
Andrews described Boebert as a friend. “Lauren’s had a really tough life,” he said. “I mean, she’s kind of the American Dream. She made a bad choice, I think, with who she chose to marry, and I don’t think he’s been a good actor.”
In August, 2022, the Boeberts were living in Silt when their neighbors called 911 to report that Jayson had been driving recklessly, damaging property, and threatening people, and was “probably drunk.” The next year, in April, Lauren filed for divorce, and then, a few months later, she was kicked out of the Buell Theatre. That fall, I attended two of Boebert’s first post-“Beetlejuice” appearances in the district, both of which were at fund-raisers that were called Lincoln Day dinners. Lincoln Day is fluid; there’s no set date for such events, which are scheduled by local branches of the Republican Party. The first one I went to, in Ouray, was on October 7th, with more than fifty people in attendance. Boebert began her speech by referring to that day’s attacks in Israel. “We need to cry out for safety, for angels to protect them, and for God’s will to be done in Israel,” she said. Then she embarked on a long description of the Holman rule, an obscure guideline that allows House members to amend appropriations bills on the floor. “I hope it’s not too wonky and boring for you,” she told the audience. Afterward, an auctioneer sold four guns that were signed by the congresswoman. A Kimber .45 handgun went for $1,776, to great applause. Boebert never mentioned the “Beetlejuice” scandal.
A week later, she attended another Lincoln Day dinner in the small farming community of Hotchkiss, in Delta County. Organizers began by auctioning off an AR-15 that had been engraved with the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” Lincoln Day is also fluid in its sense of history: here in Hotchkiss, a slogan that had been embraced by the Confederacy had been engraved on a semi-automatic weapon and then sold at an event honoring the first American President to get shot in office.
After Boebert was introduced, she finally addressed the theatre incident. “Now, this month we’ve had some stuff happen,” she said to an audience of more than a hundred. “In all honesty and humble sincerity, for any burdens that my actions brought on you in Delta County, I apologize.” She continued, “I just wanted to apologize to you directly. Not on a Facebook post, not in a tweet, not talking to Jesse Watters. But to you who elected me.” The room fell silent. Boebert transitioned to a description of having worked at McDonald’s, and then she talked about lawmaking. “I have seven bills that have been passed out of committee that need to come to the floor,” she said. In fact, only three bills sponsored by Boebert were currently waiting for House votes after having been reported out of committee; none has yet become law. In the district, Boebert’s speeches often focussed on legislation, undoubtedly because opponents like Frisch and Andrews had targeted her weak record in Congress. Andrews had also described Boebert’s situation as a simple math problem: having won the last election by the barest of margins, she couldn’t afford more bad press.
It was two months after the Hotchkiss dinner that Boebert abruptly announced, in a video posted to Facebook, that she would not seek reëlection in the Third District. “And the Aspen donors, George Soros, and Hollywood actors that are trying to buy the seat, well, they can go pound sand,” she said, although she had relied significantly more on out-of-district funding than Frisch had. In public, the congresswoman claimed that she was moving across Colorado for family reasons, but reportedly an internal poll had shown plummeting support. When she called Andrews to inform him that she was switching districts, she acknowledged her electoral challenges. “The first thing she told me when she called was ‘Hey, you’ve been telling me for eight months that the math didn’t work, and we finally agreed,’ ” Andrews said.
The week after Boebert’s announcement, she was involved in an altercation with her ex-husband at a restaurant in Silt. Jayson was charged with disorderly conduct, third-degree trespass, and obstruction of a peace officer. Three days later, he was arrested again, this time for assaulting one of their sons and for possessing a gun while drunk. (He pleaded guilty to a lesser misdemeanor.)
The next time I saw Boebert at a Lincoln Day dinner, it was in Elbert County, on the eastern plains, in June, 2024. “Now I’m a flatlander,” she had begun saying in stump speeches, after moving with her children to Windsor. At the dinner, I asked her about switching districts. “Unfortunately, it’s been very publicly documented the things that we were going through and experiencing at home,” she told me. “I wanted as much separation from that as possible.”
When I brought up the theatre incident, she bristled. “More ‘Beetlejuice,’ great,” she said. But she answered my questions. At one point, I asked if she thought that her identity as a woman had made the criticism especially harsh, because I was curious to see whether she would use that as a defense. But she responded with an awkward joke. “I definitely believe that this is the hardest any Republican has been criticized for a night at the theatre,” she said. “We’re at a Lincoln Day dinner here, and he had a theatre incident, ended a little differently.” She laughed and then became serious. “Folks were hard on me. Maybe some of it rightfully so.” She continued, “I never want to burden anyone, especially the people that have elected me and trusted me and that I represent. I never want to burden them with my issues.”
One point of consistency in the various life stories that Boebert told on the campaign trail was that she didn’t present herself as a victim. She also rarely referred to anything as an issue specific to women, with the exception of certain MAGA ideological priorities, such as the Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act, which Boebert co-sponsored. (The bill passed in the House but didn’t make it out of committee in the Senate.) From the police record alone, it was clear that Boebert had been exposed to a significant degree of domestic violence, but she never mentioned this as a formative experience or as a pressing social problem. Her proposed solutions for Colorado—fewer government regulations, more fracking, less welfare—were always connected to an ideal of self-sufficiency. At the top, the national MAGA movement was full of opportunists, mostly male, some of whom had been polished by Ivy League degrees: J. D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, Trump himself. But Boebert’s mind-set was much closer to the psychology of the white working poor. A history of suffering was key to her identity, but it seemed equally important to her that she not speak about any damage or reveal any weakness. This was part of the challenge that Frisch talked about—pride and dignity mattered, even when people’s circumstances and behavior happened to be undignified.
After Boebert left the Third District, Jeff Hurd handily won the Republican primary there. Hurd grew up in Grand Junction, the district’s second-largest city, and he attended Notre Dame, where he decided to become a priest and a college professor. In 2002, as a postulant who was preparing to enter the seminary, he went to a conference in Slovakia, where he met a young law student named Barbora. He began sending her long letters. “For some reason, she wasn’t getting all the letters I was writing her,” he told me. “Her post lady bundled up all the letters and sent them back. I foolishly had put down my return address.” One day, Hurd’s superior at the seminary called him in for a meeting, and the letters were stacked on his desk. “He said, ‘We need to talk,’ ” Hurd explained. “And that was right.”
Hurd told me this last spring, not long after we first met, in his new, sparsely furnished campaign office in a Grand Junction strip mall. The space had previously belonged to a Jenny Craig franchise that had gone out of business in the wake of Ozempic. Hurd talked about meeting Barbora, who is now his wife, as a roundabout way of explaining that he hadn’t had a longtime goal of becoming a politician. After the couple married, Hurd studied law at the University of Denver and Columbia University, and then worked as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan. Eventually, he and Barbora settled in Grand Junction, where they were rearing five children. He had never run for office before.
A few days later, I accompanied Hurd while he campaigned in the small city of Durango. He had a gentle air that couldn’t have been more different from Lauren Boebert’s public demeanor. “If the voters decide not, that’s O.K.,” he told a group of citizens who had gathered in a private home north of town. “I don’t have to be in Congress.” He told another attendee that his favorite writer was Marcus Aurelius. “He wrote a book called ‘Meditations,’ ” Hurd said. “It was things he was writing to himself, about how to live virtuously.”
In downtown Durango, he stopped in shops and restaurants. A manager at a framing store described herself as a pro-business conservative. She asked, “So, what’s your choice for President?”
“I’m staying out of the race for President,” Hurd said. “People want you to say which tribe you’re in, and I want to focus on my district.”
Later, I asked Hurd whether he had voted for Trump in the past, and whether he would vote for him in November, and he declined to answer both questions. He also wouldn’t say if he had ever voted for Boebert. Originally, Hurd had been recruited to run by Republican leaders across the state who had been dismayed by the congresswoman. Both Frisch and Hurd described themselves as reluctant politicians, and they often talked about the same issues: inflation, immigration, the need to support Colorado’s oil-and-gas industry. They also shared a cerebral quality. “I can see those two sitting down in a restaurant for lunch and having a great conversation,” Jerry Sonnenberg, a sixty-six-year-old Republican politician and cattle rancher in eastern Colorado, told me. Over time, I recognized this as part of the strange power of Lauren Boebert. Somehow, her sheer presence had taken these two decent middle-aged men, transformed them into politicians, and sent them off to battle across the wilds of western Colorado.
In her new district, Boebert was pursuing a seat that had been vacated by Ken Buck in March of 2024. Buck lives in Windsor, the flatlander town that Boebert turned up in after leaving the mountains. I visited him at his home, where he told me that Boebert’s switch had surprised him. “She didn’t ask for my input,” he said.
Buck, who was first elected to Congress in 2014, as part of the Tea Party movement, was once considered to be among the House’s most radically conservative members. But, over time, he had stayed the same while the Republican Party entered, in his description, “the MAGA world.” In November, 2023, Buck announced that he would not seek reëlection. “Our nation is on a collision course with reality,” he said in a video statement. “Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Buck decided to leave Congress rather than finish his term, triggering a special election. Local Republican leaders supported a stand-in candidate named Greg Lopez, who promised to serve out the rest of the term and not run again. This cleared the way for Boebert to enter the primary without resigning her seat.
Initially, there were media reports that Boebert might have trouble in the primary. But throughout the spring she travelled frequently across her new district. Her speeches continued to focus on legislative issues, criticizing omnibus bills, for example, as opaque and wasteful. Attempts by other candidates to highlight her personal failings generally didn’t work, in part because those candidates had plenty of problems of their own. At the first Republican debate, the moderator asked the candidates if they had ever been arrested, and six of the nine people onstage raised their hands. The audience cheered, and Boebert high-fived Trent Leisy, a county-council member who in 2016 had been arrested for causing injury to a child, a charge that was dismissed when he pleaded guilty to harassment.
Boebert’s strongest competitor was Jerry Sonnenberg, who had had a long career in the state House and Senate. Sonnenberg’s arrest was pretty minor—he said that it had something to do with bail and a speeding ticket, many years ago. In the current climate, this may have bolstered his image as a traditional conservative. On the day of the primary, Sonnenberg told me that he expected to finish a distant second, and he acknowledged that Boebert had campaigned effectively. “She painted herself as a fighter, someone who will defend the district,” he said.
When I visited Buck, he told me that during his final weeks in Congress he and Boebert had stopped interacting. “She would talk to somebody near me on the floor, but we wouldn’t make eye contact,” he said. I asked if he was planning to vote for her in November.
“She hasn’t asked,” he said.
“Will you support Trump in this election?”
Buck smiled. “He hasn’t asked, either.”
Even before moving to Windsor, Boebert had been characterized by a kind of political homelessness. Her profile was built primarily through social media and on the national stage, whereas her personal local connections were often weak. “She burns bridges, unfortunately,” one Republican woman, who has known Boebert for years, told me. During Boebert’s first two successful congressional campaigns, she never came close to winning her home county, Garfield. When I visited Rifle this October, it was easy to find echoes of Boebert but hard to get people to comment about her. At McDonald’s, a woman behind the counter said that she had worked there with Boebert years ago. “I was in high school with Lauren,” she said, before declining to say more. (“Very challenging for me,” she texted later, when I asked again if she would meet.)
Rifle High School had no commemoration of its most famous former student. Theresa Hamilton, the director of communications for the school district, answered my questions in a terse but professional manner. “Any time you have a political figure that creates some controversy, sometimes it’s a little difficult to navigate,” she told me. I asked Hamilton if Rifle High School had ever asked Boebert to attend an event.
“Not that I’m aware of,” she said.
In downtown Rifle, Shooters Grill, which had had a series of controversies related to Boebert’s refusal to comply with COVID-19 policies, closed in 2022. These days, the space is occupied by a Mexican restaurant called Tapatios. I stopped by in October; a manager nervously claimed that Boebert’s restaurant had been situated somewhere else. But next door, at the Tradesman Pawnshop, a clerk confirmed the location. “Nobody likes to talk about it,” he said.
The only person on the block who was willing to comment was a twenty-two-year-old named Maria Ramirez, who was drinking a margarita at Jalisco Grill, another Mexican restaurant, across the street from Boebert’s old place. Ramirez is an American citizen, having been born in the U.S., but she spent most of her childhood in Mexico before returning to Colorado. She said that her friends in the immigrant community had opposed Boebert in the last election.
“She didn’t like illegal people,” Ramirez said. “When it was COVID time, everyone was closed and she was open. She said she needed to feed her family. My friends said, ‘That’s why we’re here, to feed our families.’ ”
But Ramirez didn’t have the same reaction to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in the current Presidential election. In 2020, she had voted for Biden, but this year she was supporting Trump, as were most of her friends. “I think he’s going to get the economy good again,” she said.
In 2016 and 2017, when I reported on politics in western Colorado, I saw many examples of politicians and activists imitating Trump’s behavior. They often came across as abrasive and angry, which appeared to galvanize their supporters. This time, though, many conservatives struck me as reluctant Trump voters. “I wish he had not run,” one Republican woman, who had voted for him in 2016 and 2020, told me. “I think a lot of us feel that way, but we’re just going to pull the handle for him, because we don’t like the alternative.”
One problem with Trumpism in Colorado was that it worked poorly at the local level, where politicians needed to win allies in order to get things done. Boebert’s strategy seemed to be to try to have it both ways: on social media, she maintained her vitriolic national image, but at local events she portrayed herself as a responsible legislator. As the election approached, she shifted closer to the former President. In October, she was featured alongside Trump at a vehemently anti-immigration rally in Aurora, a Denver suburb. The event came in the wake of repeated false claims by Trump that Venezuelan gangs had taken over an Aurora apartment building. At the rally, Boebert told the crowd, “Our back yard is looking like an episode of ‘Narcos’!”
Such comments may have been aimed at pleasing Trump rather than the voters in Boebert’s new district, which includes only a tiny part of Aurora. Trisha Calvarese, her Democratic opponent, had grown up in the Fourth District, and she was exactly Boebert’s age—they were born the same week in 1986. “As a millennial, who is our spokeswoman? It’s people like Boebert,” Calvarese told me. “As a millennial, I’m sad about that.”
Despite Calvarese’s being a first-time candidate in a heavily red district, her campaign attracted significant donations. She told me that she had adopted many of Adam Frisch’s strategies, including running ads that targeted Boebert’s weak legislative record. In May, the congresswoman had tried to take credit for a fifty-one-million-dollar bridge project in her original district when, in fact, three years earlier she had joined a hundred and ninety-nine other Republicans to vote against the bill that funded it.
The day before the election, I met with Heather Graham, a Republican who last January had been elected mayor of Pueblo, the largest city in the district that Boebert still represented. “Since I’ve been the mayor, I have not spoken to Congresswoman Boebert, not one single time,” Graham told me, explaining that her only contact had been with Boebert’s staff. “Every other U.S. senator in Colorado, attorney general, governor—every single person either came here to see me or reached out.”
Graham described herself as “the MAGA mayor,” because she was a dedicated Trumpist, but in October she endorsed Frisch. “You can be a fan of Adam Frisch and Donald Trump,” she told me. She said that she liked Hurd personally, but she had been impressed by Frisch’s moderate positions. In her endorsement, she noted that Frisch had spent more than a hundred and thirty days campaigning in Pueblo.
Last summer, Frisch ran ads that highlighted Hurd’s refusal to say whether he would vote for Trump. But he soon dropped the issue, which didn’t matter to anybody I talked to. In late September, when Frisch and Hurd participated in a debate in Grand Junction, Trump’s name was never mentioned. Both candidates seemed determined to separate themselves from national figures. Frisch noted that he had been among the first Democratic congressional candidates in the country to call for Biden to step aside. “If there was a get-stuff-done party, I’d be in the get-stuff-done party,” he said. Hurd, meanwhile, looked intent on establishing how little he had in common with Boebert. “A reporter once said I’m as exciting as a bread sandwich,” he said during the debate. “That’s O.K. Rural Colorado doesn’t need excitement.”
The night before the election, Frisch held a final rally in Pueblo. The city is almost four hours from his home, and a local named Jeff Woods told me that he had hosted Frisch and his son for more than thirty nights during the past two years. “I’ve kept a room in my home for Adam and Felix,” he said.
After the rally, Frisch and Felix picked up some pizza at a nearby food court. They planned to drive the Ford F-150 another eight hours on Election Day. The truck’s total mileage in the course of the two campaigns would top seventy-seven thousand.
“Some say it’s better just to stay home,” Felix said.
“That’s how it is with many candidates,” Adam said. “They are told to sit in a room for forty hours a week and fund-raise.”
The next afternoon, I called Hurd, who described himself as cautiously optimistic. When I asked if there was anything he wished he had done differently, he unknowingly echoed his opponent.
“I think I could have done a better job of showing that I was engaged and active,” he said. “Raising money takes a lot of time that could be spent on meeting people. I’ve done a good job of it. But I also would have liked to make sure that I was out.”
In the end, Lauren Boebert won in her new district by a little less than twelve points. Two years earlier, Ken Buck had won by twenty-four points. At the Grainhouse, in Windsor, after Boebert’s victory speech, I asked if she was concerned about the diminished margin.
“No,” she said. “Ken Buck’s race was not something where Democrats wanted to spend money. We were outspent five to one. It is more expensive to sell a lie than it is to share the truth.” She continued, “My opponent was spending millions of dark-money dollars on all of the airwaves.”
Drew Sexton, Boebert’s campaign manager, told me that he was satisfied. “I know that there are races that were a lot closer than this one that could use four million dollars,” he said. “And so that’s going to be a question for Democrats. Do they want to keep hate-donating against Lauren?”
When I spoke with Calvarese, she hadn’t decided whether she would run again. A number of people told me that the district was so red that Boebert might be vulnerable only to a Republican challenger, but Calvarese still believed that a Democrat could win. “Her strategy was to get out of Dodge and go to another place where people don’t know her,” she said. “But people are going to find out about her.”
In the district that Boebert had abandoned, Hurd defeated Frisch by 4.98 points. “I look at this as a mandate election,” Hurd told me. “We will be held accountable in two years.” As a Republican who preferred to talk about Marcus Aurelius rather than about Trump, Hurd seemed likely to have his stoicism challenged in the coming term. He acknowledged concerns about tariffs, and Trump’s talk of expelling eleven million immigrants. “Certainly, we need to get illegal immigration under control,” he said. “When it comes to how to deal with the people who are already here, I’m going to have to see the outlines of his proposals.”
In the various November postmortems, experts lambasted the Democratic Party for failing to listen to working-class and rural people. But it was hard to imagine a candidate who had been more focussed on those voters than Adam Frisch. He was careful to respect people without much education; he broke with the Democrats on key positions; he had earned the endorsement of the MAGA mayor in the largest city in his district. He had driven a pickup truck the equivalent of a third of the way to the moon. The final payoff, though, was minimal: in the district, Frisch outperformed Kamala Harris by only about five percentage points.
“We could have solved the Colorado water problem, and cured cancer, and had ten million dollars more, and it wasn’t going to change the result,” Frisch told me, a week after the election. He said that voters had been too rigidly committed to their tribes. Democrats continued to lose ground across rural America, where Harris won eight per cent of the counties.
In an election of many hard ironies, “Beetlejuice” may have been a stroke of good fortune for Colorado Republicans. The fallout had forced Boebert to move to a safer district, allowing her former seat to be protected by a more moderate Republican. “If ‘Beetlejuice’ hadn’t happened, she would have stayed,” Frisch told me. “I think we would have come out ahead.”
He said that a number of people had suggested that he move to the Fourth District and run against Boebert in 2026. An image immediately came to mind: Frisch, Buck, and Boebert, all of them neighbors on the vast flatlands of Windsor. But Frisch dismissed the possibility. “Would it be great if Lauren Boebert was not in Congress anymore?” he said. “Yes, but it’s not my lifelong mission.” He didn’t know if he would ever run for office again, but he planned to get back in the Ford. “We’ll probably drive around the district thanking people,” he said. ♦
