‘Carpetbagger.’ ‘Selfish.’ ‘Fighter.’ Lauren Boebert’s potential new constituents – and her rivals – weigh in

The small town of Limon on the eastern Colorado plains was slowly creeping back to post-holiday life on the third day of 2024, exactly one week after controversial Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert announced she’d be switching from the state’s 3rd congressional district to this one, the 4th – hundreds of miles from her hometown and the communities she currently represents.

The swap made big news in political circles and on social media, the latest in a long list of headlines grabbed by the 37-year-old new grandmother. But in Limon’s hair salon, the lunch cafe, the quilting store … mention of the fiery Republican’s name elicited blank stares. A flicker of recognition ran across one woman’s face as she handled fabric in the 2,000-person enclave.

“Didn’t she used to run ‘over there?’” the Limon resident said, using a colloquial term for the other side of Colorado; then, upon hearing Boebert had joined the race in the Republican primary, she snorted: “At least she’s not a Democrat.”

That derision of the left is a hallmark of the region Boebert hopes to represent, a congressional district even more favourable to Republicans than her current one; the GOP candidate is all but guaranteed to take the seat in CD4. But the area is also filled with ultra-conservatives as averse to outlandish behaviour as they are to brash outsiders; locals tend to talk in terms of “here” or “there,” with Boebert decidedly hailing from the latter.

CD4 is heavily rural and agricultural, with the majority of hard-working voters most immediately concerned with the day-to-day and the hyper-local – not dramatics emanating from Washington DC. (The capital and its lawmakers, in general, are not too popular around here.) Many still don’t have computers in Limon, about halfway between Denver and the Kansas border, and fibre-optic internet remains a work in progress. The incumbent, Republican Rep. Ken Buck, announced in November that he would not seek a sixth term, citing his exhaustion with “insidious narratives” that “breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law.”

“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.

Now he’s watching as one of the party’s biggest MAGA provocateurs vies for his home seat.

But more than a half-dozen other Republicans are competing for the primary in CD4, a few giving Boebert’s gun-toting image a run for its money – with deeper local roots and no accompanying baggage. Boebert’s abandonment of decorum at the 2022 State of the Union, berating the President as he spoke and turning her back on the Cabinet, turned off some straight-laced Republicans; exponentially more shook their heads when the sitting congresswoman was thrown out of a Denver performance of Beetlejuice in September for vaping, groping her date and generally misbehaving. She made news yet again for all the wrong reasons this past weekend when police were called during a public altercation with the ex-husband she recently divorced – and his arrest on Tuesday on six charges in their home county kept the drama in the headlines.

None of it jibes well with her purported promotion of Christianity and conservative family values.

“I won’t vote for her because of who she is and what she has done,” Randy Wallace, an unaffiliated voter, tells The Independent from behind the counter of his antique store in Elizabeth – 216 miles from the town where Boebert raised her boys.

He, too, had not yet realized Boebert was switching districts to represent the eastern parts of the state – a move Boebert made as her Democratic challenger, to whom she lost by only 546 votes in the last election, continues a well-funded and celebrity-endorsed campaign for the CD3 seat.

That Democrat, Adam Frisch, gloated that Boebert was “running scared” following her announcement; many members of her own party – and potential constituents – cried foul.

“It’s just very obvious that she’s not moving here because her kid’s going to college or for a real reason,” one Republican party officer within CD4 tells The Independent. “We’re not fans of people that seek power for power’s sake … there’s already a lot of candidates that we had [in the constituency] for a very long time that are well qualified. And then this just naked power-seeking behaviour to save the seat, because she gave away a plus-nine Republican seat, doesn’t really sit well. You might be shocked at how many people are not happy about it … a lot of people tell me they think it’s very selfish.”

Particularly unhappy about it are the Republicans who’d already thrown their hats into the ring.

“The first thing that came to mind was carpetbagger – 100 per cent she’s a carpetbagger,” State Rep. Richard Holtorf tells The Independent. (He introduces himself as “the most qualified and the best candidate and the rowdiest, most raucous of all; I don’t mince words … I’m a cowboy and cattleman and I shoot straight, walk straight and talk straight.”)

“The next thing that came to mind is: She’s a deserter. She’s deserting her people out of political expediency,” Holtorf says.

Kyle Saunders, a political science professor at Colorado State University, acknowledges the “carpetbagger narrative” and “the baggage that Boebert comes with from Beetlejuice” but points out “there are these other things that she’s bringing with her.”

“She also has name recognition, which is both a positive and a negative in this case,” Mr Saunders tells The Independent. “She has campaign finance experience. She has run a campaign successfully in a constituency as large as a congressional district, which none of her competitors have.

“There are these advantages that she comes in with,” he says. “Now whether or not she’s able to persuade the Republican primary voters that she is going to represent their district better than any of her competitors, when those competitors are from that district, especially” remains to be seen.

One place Boebert certainly didn’t seem to have name recognition was Limon, where the local paper refrains from printing political news and where residents look askance at anyone doing anything “outrageous,” according to Catherine Thurston, the business manager of The Limon Leader and a native of the town.

‘People around here used to make a deal on a handshake,” Thurston tells The Independent. “If you’re not going to spend time talking face-to-face with people out here, you’re probably not going to get the vote.”

Back in CD3, Frisch’s campaign has made a point of wooing voters unhappy with Boebert’s perceived lack of attention to local issues and preference for national headlines (and controversy.)

Thurston says she believes Boebett’s reception locally was “going to be pretty cool,” adding: “I think that she will not get a big warm welcome from the folks out here.”

Holtorf, despite being one of Boebert’s rivals, summed up the impressions of many Republicans familiar with Boebert’s personal and legislative track record.

“She started out doing really well, but she got a little out of line and started losing a level of professionalism that I think she needed to hold,” he tells The Independent. “And she’s done some good things in Washington DC, but … there’s certain very disruptive things she’s done that are unprofessional and should not be done, particularly the outcries during the State of the [Union] speech – you just don’t do that. That kind of high school banter is totally unprofessional at that level.

“That’s one issue. But the real issue I have is when you come home to your home state and then you start doing very disrespectful things,” he says, referring to Boebert’s ejection from Beetlejuice.

“You have to hold yourself to a higher standard,” he says.

The congresswoman’s shenanigans will be easy fodder during the race, Saunders points out.

“You can imagine the campaign ads that her opponents are going to run,” he says “It’s going to be dark, grainy footage of her in the theatre: ‘Lauren Boebert does not represent the 4th Congressional District of Colorado … doesn’t represent the values.’

“I mean, that’s what’s coming.”

Thurston, in Limon, acknowledges that Boebert’s “behaviours are a little questionable but, there again, I mean, so are Trump’s.”

The 45th President was hugely popular in Lincoln County, and much of CD4 is MAGA territory – so any endorsement from Trump could significantly impact Boebert’s chances, Saunders says.

“Let’s say Trump is the Republican nominee and endorses Lauren Boebert,” he tells The Independent. “All it takes is one mention, and all the free media that Donald Trump gets, all of a sudden Lauren Boebert gets. I don’t know that that’s going to happen, but that’s a scenario that seems plausible.”

Many within her party, though, remain hugely nervous about just what impact her entry will have on the race and wider Republican efforts.

Colorado House Minority Leader Mike Lynch, who announced his CD4 campaign the week after Boebert, told the Denver Post her bid for the 4th was “unfortunate because of the political theatre she brings to the race.”

He told the paper he was “shocked that anyone would have the hubris to make such a move. To assume that the state needs her so bad that she’d switch her constituent bases was shocking.”

The Republican party official who’d derided Boebert’s “naked power-seeking” is also “very concerned that there will be significant down-ballot consequences – and that she will drive Democratic turnout that could affect other races and potentially even the CD4 race. It could also drive unaffiliateds to the primary to vote against her.”

The official continues: “More experienced activists are very concerned about the impact someone so polarizing could have on down-ballot, closer races throughout CD4” – especially in places starting to lean more democratic like Douglas County, populated more densely with metro-area and suburban voters.

The Colorado Democratic Party, meanwhile, has “been organizing in CD4 since before Lauren Boebert announced for this race,” chairperson Shad Murib tells The Independent.

“We actually had some really interesting success flipping all three Douglas County School Board seats to the Democrats,” he points out, adding: “We’re not leaving anything on the table; my motto is that the next frontier of Colorado politics is local, and we compete everywhere, whether it’s a safe seat or not.”

Labelling Boebert “a walking eye-roll for most people,” he said that constituency residents “who are working hard, who are providing America’s food, whether it’s beef or something else, they expect someone who can actually get work done – not someone who’s a showboater.

“And so I think the most common phrase that we hear is that she’s a coward, that she’s most interested in her social media accounts and not actually getting things done,” he tells The Independent. “And that’s from Republicans and unaffiliated to Democrats.”

There are also, of course, Boebert’s ardent supporters. At a Republican town hall in Parker last week – held in an event room at a sleek, multi-million-dollar county library with plenty of fast wifi, unlike Limon – the first question asked was what the state representative planned to do about “radical” gun reform being “pushed” in the Colorado legislature. Boebert’s brashness and platforms – and gun-themed family Christmas cards – resonate deeply in a region where the 2nd amendment is sacrosanct. (Back in Limon, according to Thurston, “even the liberals out here have their guns.”)

“She wants to stay in the fight; she wants to stay in the legislature, and I want her to stay there,” one well-dressed Republican town hall attendee tells The Independent, asking to be referred to as a “senior citizen.”

Referencing Boebert’s Beetlejuice “incident down at the auditorium,” she says: “I’m giving her grace, because she is going through a tough divorce, and the husband admitted it was his fault.”

She believes “her controversy” was “kind of a setup,” reasoning that “people, when they’re under stress and they’re in the public eye … who had the camera right on her? It was kind of amazing that that was all videoed and to show out to the public and it was all to destroy her.”

One thing is certain: The race, with Boebert and a cast of cowboy-hat-clad characters, will not be boring. And it’s ramping up fast; the primary is in June.

Candidate Jerry Sonnenberg, the Logan County commissioner who’s served in both the state house and senate, graciously applauds the “excitement about somebody new carrying the message in the 4th.”

He’s a fourth-generation farmer and rancher and, unlike Boebert, hails from the constituency – calling himself “a working stiff – I drive an eight-year-old pickup with 235,000 miles on it. I’m one of those blue-collar working stiffs, and I think that makes me a better voice, because I know exactly what they’re going through and the struggles that those other families in the district are going through.”

The crowded Republican ticket, he says, “makes the race better – and it makes it tougher for candidates.”

Of Boebert’s constituency switch, he says: “I welcome her to the fourth district.

“I look forward to representing her as her congressman, quite frankly.”