On Election Night of 2024, shortly before nine o’clock, Representative Lauren Boebert ascended a small stage at the Grainhouse, a sports bar in Windsor, Colorado. Windsor, part of the state’s Fourth Congressional District, is situated on Colorado’s agricultural northern plains, and the bar was housed in a massive metal grain bin. A bright-green John Deere 237 corn picker stood next to the stage. Boebert, who had moved to the district earlier in the year, wore a tightly fitted blue suit with red lining, a white shirt, a pair of silver stiletto heels, and a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap that had been signed on the brim in Sharpie by President Donald Trump. It had been less than two hours since the Colorado polls had closed, and most news organizations would not call the Presidential race until after midnight. But Trisha Calvarese, Boebert’s opponent for a seat in the House of Representatives, had already conceded.
“The swamp, they thought I would fail!” Boebert shouted to more than two hundred supporters. “But you all welcomed me to Windsor, Colorado. And, rather than failing, I think it’s kind of like an A-plus with extra credit with this G.E.D. right here!”
Two years earlier, Boebert had barely won the closest race in the nation, defending her seat in Colorado’s Third Congressional District by only five hundred and forty-six votes. Then her political prospects, which already looked dim, seemed to worsen because of a tumultuous personal life. After the 2022 election, Boebert got divorced; her ex-husband was arrested twice for domestic altercations; and her oldest son, a teen-ager, was also arrested, having allegedly participated in a string of vehicle break-ins and credit-card thefts. In September, 2023, Boebert herself was kicked out of the Buell Theatre, in Denver, after disturbing other audience members during a musical performance of “Beetlejuice” by vaping, laughing and singing loudly, and engaging in mutual groping with her date. Surveillance video of the incident, which also showed Boebert giving the finger to an usher as she and her date were escorted out, quickly went viral. Three months later, the congresswoman abruptly decided to seek office for a third term in a part of Colorado where she had never lived as an adult. And yet, despite all Boebert’s bad publicity, here she was in Windsor, at the age of thirty-seven, poised to become the senior member of Colorado’s Republican delegation to the House of Representatives.
“My Democrat opponent just called and conceded and asked me to uphold our democracy,” Boebert said from the stage. “And my response was ‘I promise you I will uphold America’s constitutional republic! ’ ”
The crowd cheered. Next to me, Fred Mahe, the treasurer of the Weld County Republican Party, shouted, “She’s right! She’s right! It’s not a democracy!”
Mahe wore a baseball cap with an image of Trump raising his fist after last summer’s assassination attempt. Another man nearby had a T-shirt that said “I’m Voting for the Felon and the Hillbilly.” One middle-aged woman, immaculately dressed in the colors of the American flag, wore a campaign-style button with the message “Life’s a Bitch—Don’t Vote for One.”
Earlier in the evening, several people had told me that they worried about the possibility of George Soros influencing Colorado’s elections. A woman in her sixties, dressed in an “All American Trump Girl” shirt, explained that she worked in Boulder, a liberal bastion, and she feared political violence. “If Trump wins tomorrow, Boulder could be a shit show,” she said.
At the end of Boebert’s speech, she introduced her mother, Shawna, who stood nearby, wearing an American-flag-patterned shawl. “Many of you have heard my life story of being raised in a Democrat household,” the congresswoman said. “And it wasn’t because my mom was liberal. It’s because she believed the lies. She believed the lies of politicians, and it entrapped us in a cycle of poverty.” She concluded, “In 2016, my mom voted for Donald J. Trump, and, just like you, she is ready for him to win his third Presidential election! God bless you, Windsor! Thank you so much. We’re gonna fight, fight, fight!”
Lauren Boebert’s political career began in the uniquely challenging terrain of Colorado’s Third District. To drive from corner to corner across the district, which is larger than the state of Pennsylvania, takes more than ten hours. It encompasses some of the tallest mountains in the continental United States, as well as vast stretches of high desert. In a hard landscape, geographical features have hard names: Disappointment Valley, Calamity Mesa, Battlement Mesa. Constituent communities include Silt, Stoner, Sawpit, Slick Rock, Bedrock, Marble. Another on-the-nose name is Rifle, Boebert’s home town, where she used to own a restaurant called Shooters Grill, whose waitstaff openly carried firearms.
Cartoon by Roz Chast
Before Boebert, the district was represented by a Republican named Scott Tipton. His greatest moment of national publicity may have come in January, 2019, when, during a federal-government shutdown, the Onion ran a headline: “Poll Finds 100% of Americans Blame Shutdown Entirely on Colorado Representative Scott Tipton.” A photograph featured the fifth-term congressman wearing a blue suit, a blue tie, and a gentle, slightly hangdog expression. A fictional Pew Research pollster was quoted: “As far as the American people are concerned, Tipton and Tipton alone owns this shutdown.”
This joke—the targeting of some random low-profile Republican from an unknown rural district—became a reality of a different sort when Boebert entered the primary, later that year. She was thirty-two, with no political experience, and her family life had often been troubled. Her mother, a high-school dropout, had given birth to her at the age of eighteen, and Boebert never knew her biological father. She has said that her family sometimes relied on welfare, and that her mother had a partner who was abusive. At sixteen, Lauren met the twenty-two-year-old man whom she would eventually marry, Jayson Boebert. Like her mother, Lauren dropped out of high school and got pregnant, having a son at eighteen.
For a while, Lauren was a shift manager at a McDonald’s in Rifle. Later, she worked as a pipeline locator for a company that drilled for natural gas, a major local industry. She began devoting herself to born-again Christianity, and she and Jayson had three more sons. Both parents also had police records. In 2004, Jayson allegedly exposed himself to two women in a Colorado bowling alley; he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of petty offense for public indecency and lewd exposure, spending a few days in jail. That same year, an altercation between the couple resulted in a guilty plea for Jayson on a misdemeanor charge for harassment with a domestic-violence enhancement. After another fight, Lauren was charged with third-degree assault, criminal mischief, and underage drinking. (The outcomes of these charges are not known, because juvenile records in Colorado are automatically sealed.) A few years later, during the financial crisis, the couple lost their home in a foreclosure.
In 2013, Lauren and Jayson opened Shooters Grill. Boebert has claimed that she encouraged staff to arm themselves after a man was beaten to death outside the restaurant. But nobody has been able to find records of a murder that matches Boebert’s description. The Colorado Sun reported, in the only such incident it could turn up, that a man had been involved in a fight elsewhere in Rifle, and then ran to within a block of the restaurant, where he died from a methamphetamine overdose. Boebert’s first taste of fame came in September, 2019, at a Colorado town-hall meeting held by the Presidential-primary candidate Beto O’Rourke. O’Rourke had proposed a ban and a buyback program for assault rifles, and Boebert, standing in the audience, challenged him, in an exchange that subsequently appeared on Fox News. “I was one of the gun-owning Americans that heard your speech and heard what you had to say regarding ‘Hell yes, I’m going to take your AR-15s and your AK-47s,’ ” Boebert said. “Well, I am here to say, ‘Hell no, you’re not.’ ”
Few people took Boebert seriously when she entered the Republican primary. She had little financial support, and she didn’t receive her G.E.D. until after she declared her candidacy. Tipton chose not to spend several hundred thousand dollars of available campaign funds in the primary. But Boebert proved to be an energetic candidate, accusing Tipton of being soft on immigration and of failing to support Trump to an adequate degree. (In fact, Trump had endorsed Tipton.) After winning the primary handily, Boebert took the seat by six percentage points.
As a first-term congresswoman, Boebert developed an often cartoonish national image. During the campaign, she had said of QAnon, “If this is real, it could be really great for our country,” and on January 6th she tweeted, “Today is 1776.” At a Christian conference, Boebert joked that Jesus hadn’t had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” She made a series of Islamophobic comments about Representative Ilhan Omar, referring to her during a speech on the House floor as “the Jihad Squad member from Minnesota.” In 2022, when a same-sex-marriage bill passed in the House, Boebert opposed it, explaining that it was part of a progressive cause that “undermined masculinity.” That year, during the State of the Union address, she heckled President Biden while he talked about supporting veterans who suffered from medical problems.
These various controversies helped establish Boebert as a national figure, and her hard-right image seemed to be effective for fund-raising. In 2022, as she ran for reëlection, seventy-seven per cent of her itemized contributions came from outside the district, according to an Aspen Journalism analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission. But the congresswoman presented herself very differently to local constituents. “I’m straight out of Rifle, running a restaurant with my four little boys and with my G.E.D.,” she said at a dinner in Ouray, a former mining town. At events in Colorado, Boebert’s message tended to be more personal, and she seemed less intent on attracting attention with extreme statements. She preached a kind of bootstraps politics. “I finally said, Enough is enough,” she told the audience at another event outside Denver, describing her decision to run for office. “I can’t sit on the sofa and be mad anymore. That is getting me nowhere.”
