Hardline conservative Representative Lauren Boebert announced Wednesday evening she will ditch her constituents in Colorado’s third congressional district to run in the deeper-red fourth district, which is currently represented by retiring Congressman Ken Buck.
It’s an effort by Boebert to avoid a 2024 rematch against Democrat Adam Frisch, whom she beat last fall by just 546 votes. (Boebert raised just $2.4 million through September compared with Frisch’s nearly $7.8 million, Federal Election Commission reports show.)
The district-hopping follows what she described in her announcement video as a “pretty difficult year,” when she made headlines for her divorce and a Beetlejuice date that went haywire. If this hilariously narrated minute-long video doesn’t jog your memory, here’s a quick summary of her year from the Colorado Sun:
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 also recorded Boebert and her date apparently groping each other during the musical.Boebert initially downplayed the incident, denying that she was vaping. But the congresswoman released a mea culpa after the video recording was released and then went on a districtwide apology tour asking her constituents for their trust.
Buck did not immediately respond to National Review‘s request for comment on Thursday about whether he will endorse Boebert in the already crowded fourth district GOP primary to succeed him.
But recall that in his retirement announcement video last month, the Colorado congressman cited his GOP colleagues’ obsession with 2020 election-related conspiracy theories as one of his main reasons for leaving Washington.
“Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing Jan. 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponization of our justice system,” Buck said in his retirement announcement. “It is impossible for the Republican Party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future while being obsessively fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.”