Facing increasingly long re-election odds, Rep. Lauren Boebert has come up with a new plan: The Colorado Republican is moving. NBC News reported late Wednesday:
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., announced Wednesday that she’ll be seeking the GOP nomination next year in a neighboring congressional district that’s solidly Republican, instead of her district where she eked out a win against a Democratic opponent during the 2022 midterms. Boebert said she would be running in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, where fellow Republican Rep. Ken Buck previously announced he would not seek re-election.
In a video message posted to Facebook, the far-right congresswoman said, in reference to the district shift, “I did not arrive at this decision easily. 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.”
What Boebert did not say is that if she ran for re-election in her own district, she was very likely to lose. Rhetoric about “the conservative movement” notwithstanding, the motivation behind the Republican’s shift appears to be about little more than survival.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, soon after taking office in 2021, Boebert became one of Congress’ most controversial members. Six months into her first term, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a column describing the congresswoman as being “lost in a cacophony of crazy.”
It was generally assumed, however, that she’d face no real consequences for her partisan antics. After all, Boebert represented a GOP-friendly district where her re-election was all but assured. Headed into the 2022 midterm elections, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast model showed the right-wing incumbent with a 97% chance of winning, despite her routine ridiculousness.
What the political world didn’t fully appreciate was just how many voters in her Colorado district had grown tired of Boebert’s strange behavior. The Republican incumbent prevailed, but to the surprise of many, her re-election contest proved to be one of the nation’s closest House races.
Common sense suggested that the congresswoman, if she expected to stay on Capitol Hill, would need to get her act together. Boebert has spent 2023 doing largely the opposite, as evidenced by her unfortunate antics at a musical production of “Bettlejuice,” featuring surveillance footage that proved she’d obviously acted inappropriately — and lied about it.
The Republican was faced with limited options. Boebert could retire and try to join the ranks of well-paid far-right media personalities, she could take her chances against a Democrat who’s already outraised her, or she could clean up her act and ask her neighbors to give her another chance.
The Coloradan has apparently settled on a fourth option: She’s found a new district. As a tactical matter, this makes a fair amount of sense. Boebert’s current district, Colorado’s 3rd, certainly leans in the GOP’s direction, but retiring Rep. Ken Buck’s district, Colorado’s 4th, is easily the state’s most Republican-friendly bastion. Her odds of success would almost certainly be better in the latter than the former. That said, there are a variety of questions that do not yet have obvious answers. Are voters in the Rocky Mountain State’s eastern district eager to rally behind a congresswoman from the western district, simply because she’s looking for a way to save her own skin? With six GOP candidates already running to succeed Buck, how difficult a primary will Boebert face? Watch this space. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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