SILVERTON — In a town of fewer than 700 people perched at 9,300 feet in Colorado’s San Juan mountains, Scott Fetchenhier isn’t shy about expressing his repugnance for U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert.
“She’s in it to make these outrageous comments,” suggested Fetchenhier, a Democrat who owns Fetch’s Mining & Mercantile on Greene Street in Silverton and also serves on the San Juan County commission. “Even Republicans are getting tired of the shenanigans.”
Meet Thomas Moore Jr., who voted for Boebert in 2020 and last year.
“She’s vitriolic, she’s sensationalistic, she draws attention to herself,” said Moore, a Pueblo native and loyal Republican who’d just left that county’s courthouse on a warm September afternoon after picking up collector plates for his 1986 Mercedes-Benz 420SEL. He speculated about her high-profile congressional perch: “I think it’s gotten to her head.”
Whether it’s incendiary comments Boebert has made to colleagues in Congress, her shouting at the president during a State of the Union address or her recent ejection from a musical in Denver for inappropriate behavior, plenty of residents in her district — including some who liked her in the past — have had enough.
More than three years have passed since Boebert, a handgun-toting former restaurant owner from the Rifle area, rocketed to prominence by ousting a seasoned Republican congressman in a party primary, on her way to winning the seat. The headlines and attention that initially won her fans have taken a toll.
Now Boebert, 36, has exactly one year to refurbish her image and reassure voters across her massive congressional district that she deserves their support in the Nov. 5, 2024, election. That is, if she makes it through a GOP primary next June that already has some big names lining up behind one of her opponents.
“She’s a polarizer rather than a back-bencher. She’s going to raise a lot of money and she’s going to raise a lot of money for her opponent,” said David Wasserman, a senior editor and elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, which rates next year’s race as a tossup. “Her fate rests with the voters who didn’t show up for the (2022) midterm but will show up in 2024.”
Boebert, in moments of reflection during a recent interview with The Denver Post, acknowledged the challenges she faces in her re-election bid, especially after the theater incident. But she said she doesn’t plan any drastic changes in her approach to the job.
“I didn’t come here to go along to get along, and just do things the way they’ve always been done — because they aren’t working,” she said.
The Post found no shortage of opinions about the second-term congresswoman during a recent swing through Colorado’s sprawling 3rd Congressional District, which swoops from the northwest corner of the state down through many of its southern counties. It takes in Western Slope ranching communities and ritzy ski towns before reaching Pueblo and the plains.
While some voters sounded caution about another Boebert term in Congress, others feel she is the perfect answer for a state that has turned decidedly blue, at a time when there’s a feeling that the chasm between rural and urban Colorado has only deepened.
Dan James, a staunch Republican and gun shop owner in Pagosa Springs, said Boebert has “more balls than many of the people in Congress do.”
“Sometimes her toughness shows,” James said, as he offered up a free copy of the U.S. Constitution from a stack of booklets on his front counter at PS Guns & Ammo on an early fall afternoon. “We have a government that doesn’t want the citizens to be armed. And Lauren, a little itty person, she acts like she’s 10-foot tall.”
But the same thing can rub Christina McCleary the wrong way. The La Veta Democrat doesn’t like Boebert’s sometimes undiplomatic approach to those who don’t agree with her.
“I don’t have a problem with her speaking her mind, I have a problem with the way she does it,” said McCleary, who was stopping at a liquor store after work in this Huerfano County town of fewer than a thousand people. “It does not flatter our district at all.”
The varying assessments reflect the wildly divergent effect Boebert has had on the nearly 565,000 registered voters in her district since her 2020 election.
“Lauren is polarizing, like (Donald) Trump,” said Greg Brophy, a farmer, consultant and former Republican state lawmaker from Wray who first met Boebert at her Rifle restaurant a decade ago, during his run for governor. “Either they love her or hate her.”
Testing district’s strong Republican lean
Though her largely rural district leans firmly Republican, with a more than 40,000-count advantage in GOP affiliations over Democrats, voters nearly spurned Boebert last November for her challenger, former Aspen City Councilman Adam Frisch.
The 546-vote difference separating the two — out of more than 327,000 ballots cast — triggered an automatic recount under state law.
In pursuit of a rematch, Frisch has developed a formidable fundraising advantage over the incumbent and all other declared candidates. A poll commissioned by his campaign over the summer showed a statistical dead heat in the 3rd District, with Frisch leading by 2 percentage points.
As Boebert, a bomb-throwing member of the far-right Freedom Caucus in Congress, has made headlines for her antics and actions both on and off the House floor, Democrats have found themselves with potentially their best hope to reclaim a seat they haven’t won in 15 years.
“CD3 leans solidly Republican, so the incredibly close 2022 results showed substantial fatigue among many in the district with the drama — and a willingness to consider a moderate Democrat in the name of pragmatic legislating,” said Paul DeBell, an associate professor of political science at Fort Lewis College in Durango.
Boebert, he said, does better “when she focuses on pragmatic issues of legislation and less on churning out firebrand soundbites.”
The congresswoman publicly apologized for being thrown out of a performance of “Beetlejuice” at Denver’s Buell Theatre on Sept. 10. She’d found herself at the center of a national media firestorm as surveillance video showed her vaping, recording the performance and groping her male companion. It’s an incident that has prompted recurring moments of contrition at recent events in her district.
But she told The Post she doesn’t intend to be a “wallflower” in Washington, D.C. Boebert doesn’t see her feisty and combative approach as chaotic, but rather as a necessary, if sometimes “uncomfortable,” way of forcing change in the national’s capital.
“Not one of my colleagues campaigned on continuing with the status quo. We all campaigned (by) telling our voters that Washington is broken, that we need a new way to legislate,” she said.
This year, Boebert sponsored and passed several bills out of the Republican-controlled House. She worked with Colorado’s two U.S. senators on a bill that aims to preserve hundreds of jobs in Pueblo following the closure of the U.S. Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot. She regularly works on water, energy and inflation challenges that impact her constituents directly, she said.
“Look at my odometer in my car and see how much boots-on-the-ground time that I have in the district,” Boebert said. “I don’t see it as drama. I don’t see it as chaos. I don’t see it as dysfunctional. I’m a mother of four boys, I’m a previous restaurant owner — I know chaos and dysfunction very well.”
Primary challenge looms as “an escalating problem”
But looking ahead to 2024, several high-profile state Republicans have recently thrown their support to Grand Junction attorney Jeff Hurd, who announced in August he would challenge the incumbent in the GOP primary.
They include former Gov. Bill Owens, former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown, and John Suthers, a former Colorado attorney general and recent Colorado Springs mayor. Several county commissioners in Boebert’s district also have backed Hurd.
Former U.S. Attorney Jason Dunn, a Trump appointee who supports Hurd, told The Aspen Times last month that the Buell Theatre contretemps was “the straw that I think broke the camel’s back” for some party faithful. Dunn declined to elaborate when contacted by The Post.
The intraparty challenge is Boebert’s “immediate problem, and it is an escalating problem,” said Justin Gollob, a political science professor at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction.
“Recent endorsements of Jeff Hurd from local Republicans are not good news for her campaign and signal trouble ahead,” he said. “While this is a storm that can be weathered by her campaign, it is hard to ignore the gathering storm clouds.”
Wasserman, from the Cook Political Report, predicted a tough road ahead for Boebert in the next year, saying she has “done very little to rehabilitate her image since her close call” against Frisch. Nonetheless, he isn’t sure she will be so easily dislodged by fellow Republicans in June.
“I’m very skeptical Boebert can be beaten in a primary, given her viral following among Republicans and her primary victory in 2022,” he said, referring to her nearly 2-to-1 crushing of former state Sen. Don Coram.
And if Trump is the Republican presidential nominee next November, Brophy said, that should help her by rallying his supporters.
With next year’s race resting largely in the hands of the district’s roughly 250,000 unaffiliated voters, Boebert will have to figure out how to appeal once again to those who aren’t part of her base. And with Frisch more than capable of attracting national money in what will be one of the most closely watched races in the country, Wasserman said the congresswoman will need to be at the top of her game.
Boebert says she has beaten expectations before — no more so than during her successful quest in 2020 to defeat then-Rep. Scott Tipton in the Republican primary. Her chances were roundly dismissed outside conservative media, including by Tipton himself.
“I was elected to Congress as a fighter. I had to fight like heck to get here,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to win my primary against a five-term incumbent. I was outspent in my general election. I had $6 million in negative ads running against me — they were raining down on me — and I still won that election.”
Hope Scheppelman, the vice chair of the state Republican Party and a resident of Bayfield, near Durango, said Boebert’s record of “standing up for her conservative principles is unmatched.” Her background, which also includes work in Garfield County’s natural gas industry as a pipeline mapper, also helps her connect with people.
“For rural Colorado, she’s one of us at the end of the day,” Scheppelman said. “She’s proud of her roots and voters can relate to her story, they feel a connection with her when she speaks and they know she’s not one of the typical politicians that we see too much of in D.C.”
Legislative record in focus
Scheppelman also suggested Boebert’s effectiveness has benefited from Republicans’ retaking of the House majority at the start of the year, giving her bills a better chance of moving forward — though Democrats still control the Senate.
“She’s been able to push bills through the process that truly benefit 3rd District voters, and that will help immensely in this upcoming cycle,” Scheppelman said. “That wasn’t something voters were aware of in 2022, which I think hurt. But we’ve seen the difference this year and that’s just one reason she will win in 2024.”
Boebert points to bread-and-butter issues that she has worked on in Congress, including gas extraction and veterans benefits, as proof she is not constantly playing for the cameras. This year, she has sponsored and passed seven bills out of committee and three bills out of the House, while attaching more than 50 amendments to legislation.
One of Boebert’s bills, which passed the House Natural Resources Committee, aims to protect four species of threatened and endangered fish. Another bill she helped craft would extend the length of oil and gas drilling permits from two to four years; it was passed by the House.
She also points to a bill, which has made it through committee, that would yield local benefits by allowing Mesa County to buy 31 acres of federal land in Clifton for economic development purposes. The deal has the backing of the Bureau of Land Management, her campaign said.
“There is a real rural and urban divide that takes place, especially in Colorado, and our rural voters are often ignored,” she said. “The policies from these urban areas are forced on Colorado’s 3rd District and the area’s surrounding rural areas. So I want to give them the voice they never had.”
But Paul Henricksen, who lives in Pueblo County and served as a U.S. Army infantry staff sergeant in both Iraq and Afghanistan, said Boebert failed veterans when she voted against the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act last year. The $325 million bill, which passed through Congress, provides care to veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange and other toxins.
Hendricksen, who is president of the Pueblo Veterans Council, said Boebert is so partisan in how she governs that she’d rather spend her time “trolling the liberals” than helping vets.
“It’s about denying the other party any success,” he said.
Rocky Mountain Values, a progressive dark-money group, used the congresswoman’s rejection of the PACT Act in an ad campaign against her this summer.
Scheppelman, who served as a hospital corpsman in the Navy for four years, said Boebert voted against the PACT Act because it was a poorly written bill that had “no funding mechanism” and threatened to create a backlog in getting veterans their benefits.
She pointed to four other major veterans bills Boebert voted for that “directly impacted and improved the lives of veterans in the 3rd District.” Among them were money for veterans’ benefits and a cost-of-living increase of about 6% for veterans’ disability compensation that Congress passed last year.
Brophy said Boebert has been plenty busy in her district, but the public wouldn’t know it because much of the media “cannot help but blow up the more flamboyant things that she does that constitute a tiny fraction of her actual work.”
“They are as fascinated with her as Fox News is with AOC (New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez),” he said, “and for exactly the same reasons: She’s attractive, controversial and drives clicks.”
“This isn’t about one night,” Boebert says
At the top of the Boebert media-feeding frenzy is the ignominious boot she got from “Beetlejuice.” Bolstered by the security video of Boebert in a revealing dress, the story went ferociously viral. The congresswoman quickly became a point of national ridicule for everyone from comedian John Oliver to radio host Howard Stern to Saturday Night Live.
In a Time magazine story published in October, Western Slope GOP state Rep. Matt Soper said he heard from Boebert shortly after the incident.
“She talked about the stresses of her divorce that was almost finalized at that time and the excitement of going on a first date for the first time in years,” he told the magazine.
Boebert told The Post: “I did mess up, plain and simple, and I’ve taken accountability for my actions and I’ve apologized directly to my voters.” And her constituents, she said, are “abundantly merciful and graceful.”
“I believe wholeheartedly that my voters know this isn’t about one night,” Boebert added. “This is about the future of our country.”
DeBell, the Fort Lewis College professor, said the news media, which “deserve some culpability for our outrageous politics,” has developed an almost co-dependent relationship with Boebert.
“Sensational coverage gets more attention, and that provides incentives for outrageous statements and behavior in order to gain political prominence and get ahead in electoral contests,” he said.
While that may work in the fast-paced national media climate, DeBell suggested that “it plays much less well here in the 3rd District — where many voters, including many in the Republican Party, do not want to be known as the home of such outrageous political drama.”
The drama began as Boebert took office. On Jan. 6, 2021, she objected to certifying the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, calling the results in Arizona a “travesty.” A few days later, she refused to turn over her bag to Capitol police after she set off metal detectors. She had vowed to carry her Glock throughout Washington, D.C. in previous days and was rebuked by the city’s police chief for saying so, given the city’s restrictive gun-carrying laws.
In late 2021, Boebert apologized after being captured on video implying that Ilhan Omar, a fellow member of Congress and a Muslim, could be a suicide bomber. The following summer, Boebert was lambasted for critiquing a cornerstone principle of the American republic.
“I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk,” she told a gathering in Basalt.
Jim Harper, whose family owns the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad and the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton, said in an interview that it was time to lower the temperature of the political discourse. As he threw sheets and towels into a washing machine in the basement of the 140-year-old hotel in September, the registered Republican chose his words carefully when asked about Boebert.
“National politics are national politics — we need to focus on home,” Harper said. “Maybe it’s time to focus on home and mending those fences. I’m Silverton-first, I’m Colorado-first.”
GOP challenger: “Our district is lacking the leadership it needs”
That’s precisely what prompted Hurd, one of four announced Republican challengers, to enter the district’s GOP primary in August. The 44-year-old attorney, who specializes in working with electric co-ops across the 3rd Congressional District, said voters want a “reasonable Republican.”
“I think people in the district want someone who is focused on local headlines, not national ones,” Hurd said. “I feel our district is lacking the leadership it needs.”
The “Beetlejuice” incident, he said, amounts to a character question for voters.
Dissatisfaction with Boebert goes beyond just big-name Republicans. Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis recently switched his allegiance to Hurd. His colleague, Commissioner Bobbie Daniel, did the same.
“I have supported the congresswoman over the years, but it’s become less about her constituents and more about her,” Davis said. “We need to elect leaders focused more on fixing the problems that ail our country, and that starts with electing a new generation of representatives.”
In neighboring Delta County, Republican commissioner Don Suppes said last month that he also would support Hurd over Boebert. And on Thursday, Rio Blanco Commissioner Ty Gates became the latest local Republican Western Slope officeholder to endorse Hurd and not Boebert.
But Wendell Koontz, who sits on the dais with Suppes in Delta County, says he’s sticking with the incumbent.
“To put it in perspective, she made a dumb move — but we’ve all made dumb moves,” he said of the “Beetlejuice” incident. “I like candidates who have suffered some of life’s hard knocks and picked themselves up and learned from them.”
But will the seemingly endless controversy swirling around Boebert impede the flow of money necessary to mount a successful campaign?
Frisch, the Democratic frontrunner among several candidates seeking that party’s nomination, has raised nearly $7.8 million to Boebert’s $2.4 million so far in the 2024 cycle. Hurd, meanwhile, raised about half of Boebert’s $800,000 third-quarter haul, despite having been in the race for only six weeks. Another notable Democratic entrant is Grand Junction Mayor Anna Stout, who’s raised just over $100,000.
“It is certainly a poor sign for Boebert, though it is difficult to determine how much this is predictive of fundraising over the next year,” Fort Lewis College’s DeBell said. “One thing is for sure, she has serious challengers in both major parties who are well-organized, working hard and focused on winning her seat.”
That will keep a bright spotlight on the race. Case in point: A small group of protesters — complete with someone dressed in a striped Beetlejuice costume — gathered at the edge of Buckley Park in downtown Durango in late September to protest Boebert, a full 13 months before the election. Rocky Mountain Values had a hand in organizing the rally.
“It feels embarrassing to live in this district,” said a sign-wielding Nikki Bauer, a 25-year-old Minnesota transplant who works at the local Unitarian Universalist Church. “She doesn’t govern — she’s just making a scene for the media.”
Nearly four hours away via winding roads and over towering mountain passes, Elizabeth Brim likes Boebert’s forward style. She flies an anti-Joe Biden flag outside her house in Gunnison, and she particularly embraces the congresswoman’s “gun stance and her opposition to the Democrats.”
“I love people with no filters,” said Brim, as she juggled kids and groceries in the doorway of her home. “I like hearing the truth, even if the truth is something I don’t want to hear.”
But if that kind of outspokenness has had a strong appeal in the political turmoil of recent years, it’s wearing thin for other voters. Joe Martinez, the owner of the stalwart business Martinez Shoe Repair in Alamosa in the San Luis Valley, said he started off open to Boebert, despite being affiliated as a Democrat.
But the headlines she has created have become too much for him.
“She started off really good, and then it fell apart,” he said.
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