Republican Lauren Boebert is no longer seeking reelection in Colorado's 3rd Congressional District.
Instead, the MAGA representative is running for the neighboring seat of Colorado's 4th District, which has a considerably redder hue.
Boebert's decision comes little more than a year after she eked out reelection by the narrowest of margins – 546 votes out of 327,000 – against Democrat Adam Frisch. Boebert has represented the sprawling 3rd District since 2021 after she defeated five-term incumbent Republican Scott Tipton in a bruising primary battle. Then-President Donald Trump endorsed Tipton before the primary, but Boebert's conservative bona fides and outspoken support for Trump won her adoration from grassroots conservatives.
Nonetheless, her combative style and controversies caused enough voters to shun her and transformed the traditionally Republican district into a hotly contested seat, at least temporarily.
The Colorado Sun's Jesse Paul hinted that Boebert's concerns about a presidential election year rematch with Frisch influenced her decision to jump to a far more favorable GOP seat:
The 3rd District leans 9 percentage points in Republicans' favor while the 4th District leans 27 points toward the GOP, according to a nonpartisan analysis of election results from 2016 to 2020 by staffers for the Colorado legislature. Boebert doesn't have to live in the 4th District to represent it.
“I did not arrive at this decision easily,” Boebert said in a Facebook video announcing the move. “A lot of prayer, a lot of tough conversations and a lot of perspective convinced me that this is the best way I can continue to fight for Colorado, for the conservative movement and for my children's future.”
The bombshell news comes as Boebert's reelection chances in the 3rd District look dim.
Her narrow victory in 2022 was seen as a referendum on her boisterous behavior in Congress — including interrupting President Joe Biden's State of the Union address in 2022 and making an Islamophobic joke about Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Her image was further tarnished when she and a male companion were ejected in September from a performance in Denver of the musical “Beetlejuice” for talking loudly, vaping and using her phone.
Surveillance cameras in the theater also recorded her and her date engaging in intimate behavior.
Boebert's path to representing the 4th District is wide open. Its current representative, Rep. Ken Buck (R), announced his plans to retire at the end of this term.
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