As I sat down to write this column on Colorado’s 4th Congressional District race, the news came over the transom that Lauren Boebert was among the group of right-wing congresspeople who had been out hunting confrontation with pro-Palestinian protesters at George Washington University.
My immediate response was, of course she was.
Boebert even had a bullhorn with her, presumably so she could be heard over the heckling protesters who were chanting, “Free, free Palestine,” as she spoke. And because it was Boebert, they were also chanting, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.” Yeah, she’s just that, uh, famous.
The campus protests are, of course, a huge story, especially to the MAGA base that generally prefers its protesters to be wearing either Trumpy-red hats or stylishly horned headdresses, and so naturally Boebert wanted to be in the middle of it.
How it turned out for her, I guess, depends on how you see Boebert, who as you know is vying to move from her House seat in the 3rd Congressional District — where she probably would have lost if she had run again — to a more Republican-friendly seat in the neighboring 4th CD.
There are a couple of ways to see her, even beyond the obvious observation that she is an ambition-driven carpetbagger who will do what it takes to keep her phony baloney job.
This is the way Boebert would prefer you perceive her: as a fearless fighter, ready to take on anyone for the benefit of the MAGA cause.
Or you could look at her this way: as a heat-seeking celebrity politician who is unafraid to embarrass either herself or her constituents so long as there are enough TV cameras nearby. I mean, returning fire at hecklers is small change when compared to her viral heckling of Joe Biden at a State of the Union address.
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However you see her, Boebert was clearly playing to the MAGA base when deciding to visit the D.C. university. That’s because the way she looks at it — and the way virtually every political pundit looks at it — is that since she’s in a six-person race, overwhelming support from the base is pretty much all she needs to win.
As veteran former state legislator Jerry Sonnenberg, who is also running in the 4th CD primary, put it:
“It’s definitely a challenge with six people in the race. It’s tough. Lauren is going to get her 30%. She’s going to get her base. That leaves five of us fighting over the rest of the vote. To beat her, you’re probably going to need at least half of that 70%. That won’t be easy.”
That’s the math as we head toward the June 25th primary. And it’s the math that everyone who is running against, or rooting against, Boebert must face. It’s the same kind of math that some might remember from 1998, when Tom Tancredo, in his first race, won a five-way GOP primary in the 6th CD with less than 30% of the vote.
It’s the math that Sonnenberg said he discussed with Deb Flora, another 4th CD candidate, regarding the possibility of someone conducting an independent poll that might persuade some of the lower-polling candidates to drop out. Flora and Sonnenberg certainly think polling shows they are Boebert’s most serious rivals, but who knows?
It’s the math that what’s left of the GOP establishment, most of whom are backing Sonnenberg — including Cory Gardner and Wayne Allard and Hank Brown, all former U.S. senators who previously represented the 4th in Congress — is facing.
And it’s the math Boebert understands. Certainly her savvy campaign manager, Drew Sexton, understands it. Sexton comes to the race from Arizona, where he worked for the GOP’s national committee.
Rumor has it that national Republicans said they would back Boebert in the 4th if she dropped out of the 3rd CD race, where Democrats are hoping to pick up a valuable seat that she won by a mere 543 votes last time out.
And to much controversy, the state GOP party, headed by Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams, has also thrown its support to Boebert. The party has broken every unwritten rule, and a few that are written, picking favorites — including Williams himself, who’s running in the 5th CD — in primary races.
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Trump is backing her, of course. So is House Speaker-for-now Mike Johnson, who was also heckled when he recently traveled to Columbia, where he simply made matters worse, to demand that the university’s president resign.
And so Boebert is doing her part, getting her headline — standing up to the hecklers, trying to tear down a Palestinian flag that was draped over a statue of George Washington, threatening to block federal aid to the university if the encampments aren’t removed.
As for the flag draped over the statue, Boebert said, “This is America, and that shit needs to come down.”
Mission accomplished.
When last I saw her, a little more than a week ago, she was holding court in Isabel’s, a Christian-friendly coffee shop located in the town of Elizabeth in rural Elbert County. There were crosses hanging on the walls amid signs suggesting, for instance, that we kneel for prayer and stand for the flag. There was a poster for National Prayer Day. It is that kind of place.
And Boebert, the Christian nationalist who sprinkles her speeches with constant “Praise the Lord” refrains, was railing against the Republican establishment while branding herself as a “RINO” hunter.
“Actually,” she told a crowd of maybe 50 or 60 jammed into Isabel’s, “you probably saw that I just bagged a Buck.”
OK, you probably know what RINO — Republican In Name Only — means. And her bagging-the-Buck comment was in reference to Ken Buck, the longtime congressman from the 4th CD. Buck, who had announced his retirement at the end of his term next January, decided to resign in March instead, sparking a special election that many hoped would derail Boebert.
Of course, it did not. And now Boebert calls him “Ken Buckle.”
In the Boebert-heavy crowd in the coffee shop, Buck is Enemy No. 1 following his last year in Congress. His sins were many. Although a hard-line conservative, Buck opposed the attempt at an evidence-free Biden impeachment, lashed out at the MAGA notion that the 2020 election was stolen, and blamed Boebert-like Republicans for what he called the worst congressional dysfunction in 50 years.
There’s no independent polling in the race, so it’s hard to know who is best able to challenge Boebert, who likes to say that voters in the largely rural 3rd CD share the “same values” with voters in the 4th CD, if not the “same crops.”
Flora, a former right-wing radio host, a maker of documentaries, an actor, a so-called parents’ rights activist, an advocate for what conservatives call academic freedom, is pinning her hopes on the fact that the 4th CD is, in fact, quite different from the third.
“The 4th is 70% suburban,” she told me at a coffee house in Parker. “Forty-seven percent of the voters are unaffiliated. The reality is that Lauren is very beatable. Douglas County, where I have very deep roots and have a lot of support, is almost all the electorate.”
Douglas County is very Republican. It is also very well educated and very wealthy. Is that Boebert territory?
Flora doesn’t think so. Of course, Flora’s politics — if not her style — are not far removed from Boebert’s. In fact, when Flora, who ran in the Senate GOP primary two years ago, announced her candidacy in the 4th, she said her focus was on “communists and terrorists.”
Still, it’s no coincidence that the campaign slogan on her website says, “The Conservative Fighter You Can Be Proud Of.” She might as well have said she’s the conservative fighter who never groped anyone — or was willingly groped by anyone — in a public theater.
Two Republicans who had been in the 4th CD race have announced their support for Flora. She says it shows that she’s now consolidating support. Maybe it does.
At Isabel’s coffee shop, Boebert’s personal problems didn’t seem to cause all that much concern. One supporter mentioned Bill and Hillary Clinton as counterpoints.
Another person in attendance, who said he supports Flora, did say that Boebert “had abandoned her constituents, the people she worked for, and took their (campaign contributions) with her.” But that was a minority opinion in the room.
Rep. Ronny Jackson, a right-wing Republican, drove six hours from Amarillo to offer Boebert his support. You remember Jackson. He was the White House doctor — and admiral in the Navy — treating presidents from G.W. Bush to Trump, who left the job to run for Congress in what he calls the reddest district in the country.
“We take a lot of arrows,” he said of Boebert and himself, particularly as they take on the Republican establishment. “We get beat up, but you know what, she’s just like I am. She don’t worry about it, and I don’t worry about it.”
They both defended the fact that they weren’t supporting the removal of Mike Johnson, although everyone else in the room seemed to want him gone. Jackson and Boebert said the move was too risky in a House where Republicans can afford to lose only one seat.
Jackson did say that if Republicans keep the House in November and possibly add to their majority, he and Boebert will support Jim Jordan for speaker. That’s what we’re talking about here.
Others on the six-packed ballot include Mike Lynch, the former House Republican leader who had to resign after it was found that he had covered up a 2022 arrest for drunk driving and gun possession.
There’s Peter Yu, a businessman who has been a candidate in several congressional races, who is putting his own money into the race.
There’s Rep. Richard Holtorf, who is maybe best known for calling a colleague “Buckwheat” and for telling another colleague whose son had been murdered in the Aurora theater shooting to “let go” of it. Or maybe best known for that time when Holtorf, who is strongly anti-abortion, admitted that he paid for a former girlfriend’s abortion.
To show that he hasn’t lost a step, Holtorf has now compared Boebert to a prostitute on a radio show. Seriously. Or, in Holtorf’s case, very unseriously.
And so, here’s the real joke: This race is still Boebert’s to lose.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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