Rep. Lauren Boebert Could Still Lose Her House Seat

The gun-loving Colorado congresswoman is in an unexpectedly close race with Democrat Adam Frisch.

By Laura Bassett | November 14, 2022 | 6:05pm

Politics

Rep. Lauren Boebert Could Still Lose Her House Seat

Rep. Lauren Boebert, the gun-loving, trash-talking MAGA Republican congresswoman from Colorado, tweeted at 6:40 p.m. on election night: “The red wave has begun!”

But by midnight, the mood of her election party had visibly soured. Her Twitter feed went dark. The nation has waited with bated breath for nearly a week as Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District counts votes at an achingly slow pace, showing one candidate or the other up by just 60 votes at varying moments. On Monday, Boebert’s race against Democrat Adam Frisch, a former Aspen city councilman, was still too close to call.

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As of this writing, Boebert leads Frisch by 0.4 percentage points, or a little more than 1,100 votes (NBC News says 99 percent of the votes are in and currently has her leading 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent, or 162,040 votes to 160,918). The state accepts ballots from the military and overseas voters through the end of the day on Wednesday, November 16, and CBS said the race won’t be decided until Thursday at the earliest. If the margin is 0.5 percent or less once all the votes are counted, there will be an automatic recount.

The race is so close that voters are being urged to check the status of their ballot, and Frisch’s campaign is recruiting volunteers to help with the task of fixing rejected ballots, a process known as “curing.” One common reason for rejection is signatures not matching voter records, like when people scribble their name rather than carefully signing it.

Both candidates will get a list of voters whose ballots couldn’t be counted and they can contact them to encourage them to fix the issue. Colorado has a program that allows voters to fix signature discrepancies on their phones. The deadline for ballot curing is also November 16.

The “red wave” that Boebert so confidently boasted about failed to materialize in the midterm elections, and a number candidates who were tied closely to Donald Trump, including Boebert, underperformed. Republicans were counting on her Colorado seat to secure control of House and, as they sweat out a few remaining results, they can’t really afford to lose any more races.

Plus, Boebert is quite simply a bad candidate and a bad person. She made Islamophobic comments about her Democratic colleagues, suggesting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is a terrorist and a member of the “jihad squad.” She posted a Christmas photo of her kids posing with guns. She defended the fact that her husband exposed himself to a teenager in a bowling alley by claiming the teen had “begged” to see his “private area” tattoo. And she said plenty of dumb shit like this: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk…It was not in the Constitution, it was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like what they say it does.”

Nevertheless, pundits did not expect her to be in such a tight race in a red-leaning district with a 9-point Republican advantage. Frisch ran as a moderate Democrat, and lots of Boebert’s constituents were apparently tired enough of her antics to hold their noses and vote D this time around.

Tellingly, she even lost in her home county.

Losing your own county by double digits because the people who actually know you don’t like you sounds really harsh—but her neighbors did recently have to call 911 on her drunk husband after he ran over their mailbox.

Meanwhile, Frisch isn’t taking any chances. He attended orientation for freshman members of Congress, according to Bloomberg reporter Zach Cohen:

Wow, Frisch sounds like a serious person! That would sure be an upgrade for the residents of CO-3.