In a surprise move yesterday, Representative Ken Buck announced that he will not be stepping down from his seat at the end of his current term (as he had previously announced), but instead will step down next week. By doing so, Buck has roiled the waters of the Republican House majority and his surprise move also may tend to quash Representative Lauren Boebert's hopes of remaining in the House after November.

Let's start with the majority math. Apparently some political journalists can't count properly, as Buck's exit was portrayed as somehow changing the vote margin for Speaker Mike Johnson. "Republicans can only lose two votes from their majority!" was the gist of this misread. Well, yes... Republicans will indeed only be able to lose two votes, but that is where things stand right now. It will not actually change.

Currently, the House has 432 active members. There are three vacancies, which we'll get to in a bit. Republicans hold 219 seats to Democrats' 213. So if Republicans lose three votes across the aisle, they only wind up with 216 versus the Democrats' 216. There is no tie-breaker in the House (unlike the Senate), so ties lose. Any bill or motion has to have a House majority, and a tie doesn't cut it. So right now -- before Buck leaves -- Republicans can only lose two votes (which would leave them with a 217-215 majority).

When Buck does leave, it'll leave the overall balance at 218 to 213. If Republicans lose three votes at this point, they'll have 215 to Democrats' 216 -- a clear loss. So, once again, they can only lose two votes and still muster a majority. Nothing has changed in this basic equation, except the fact that losing two votes would only leave Republicans with a 216-215 majority.

What has changed, however, is that everything is one step closer to that margin dropping to only a single vote -- which may actually happen soon. Of the three current House vacancies, two seats are pretty solidly Republican and one is pretty solidly Democratic -- and the Democratic one will be up for a special election next month. This will give the Democrats 214 seats to Republicans' 218, meaning Republicans will only be able to lose one vote (if they lose two, under this situation, they'll wind up in a 216-216 tie again). This situation won't last forever though, since the other two seats will have their own special elections (in May and June), and Republicans are expected to win both of them.

But it's Ken Buck's special election that really put a cat among the pigeons. Because it sets off a cascade of chess moves that seems almost designed to deny Lauren Boebert any reasonable chance of staying in Congress.

Ken Buck represents a Colorado district that is more conservative than the one that Boebert currently represents. Boebert only won her last election by a margin of a little over 500 votes, which was the smallest in the entire country. This convinced her to pack her carpetbag and head for Buck's district this time around (once Buck announced he wouldn't be seeking re-election). She is in an open primary in Buck's district with a number of other Republicans, all of whom have much deeper ties to the actual district being represented. But she is still currently serving from the district she won in 2022.

What will happen as a result of Buck's sudden departure is that there will be a special election to fill Buck's seat for the remainder of the current term -- held on the same day as the primary election which will decide which Republican will be on the November ballot for the upcoming (full) term. This is a bit confusing to voters. [Editorial Note: I personally just voted in a primary where I had to vote for a Senate candidate for the remainder of a term as well as vote for a Senate candidate for the upcoming term, so the process is familiar to me right now.]

Since the Colorado district Buck represents is pretty deep red, whichever candidate wins the GOP primary for the full term is pretty much guaranteed to win in November. If the elections were being held separately (say, a month apart), then whichever candidate won the special election could then run as "an incumbent" in the primary (which is always a boost), but since the two elections will be held the same day incumbency isn't going to be an issue.

What is going to be an issue is whose name is on the special election ballot on the Republican line. Because it is a special House election, there will be no primary. Here's what happens instead: "a committee of Colorado Republicans must pick a nominee for the special election held the same day as the primary." And they're not likely to pick Boebert (since she has no ties to the district, unlike all the other people running). So she pre-emptively announced she would not be a candidate for the special election. This means some other GOP candidate will be on the ballot for the special election, which will pretty much guarantee their victory (since there won't be any other Republicans competing with them, in a very red district). If that candidate chooses to run for the full term as well, then their name will also be on the ballot in a second place, for the full-term primary election. So for Boebert to win the primary, she's got to convince people to vote for some other person and then also vote for her -- a pretty extreme form of "vote-splitting." This greatly diminishes her chances of winning the primary.

So why didn't Boebert at least throw her hat in the ring for the special election? Well, to do so would have meant stepping down from her own seat in Congress, which would have triggered another special election, in the district Boebert represents now. And the Democrats might have actually picked up this seat. They even stand a good chance of doing so in November (remember that tight margin from Boebert's last race). If they did so in a special election, however, that would swing the House one more seat closer to Republicans losing their majority for the rest of this year.

As I said, this is a cascade of consequences from a single House retirement. House members do actually step down (or are incapacitated or die in office) all the time -- there are 435 of them, which is a big enough actuarial universe for such things to happen regularly. But normally nobody pays much attention to them (other than the voters in the affected district), since normally it doesn't change the balance of power all that much. But with the historically-thin majority the Republicans have in the House, every seat matters. The margin is so close that things like absences (also a commonplace event) can change the outcome of major votes. This is the biggest reason why Buck's retirement has caused such interest. The other big reason is the possibility of effectively shutting out Boebert, who is one of the most annoying and hotheaded Republicans in the House.

Boebert already faced an uphill battle for the primary race. She does have national name recognition, but a lot of this stems from her unruly and downright obnoxious behavior (both in Congress and while out on a date). This is the big reason why she only squeaked by in her re-election bid in 2022 -- because the voters in her district were getting tired of her incessant antics. She figured that moving to a more conservative district would improve her chances, but that's before you take into account the obvious carpetbagging (which local voters usually tend to view very skeptically). So it's not like she had a lock on winning the primary in any case. Now that she'll have to compete alongside a special election with only one Republican name on the ballot (which will not be her own), her chances for winning have shrunk even further.

The only thing she has guaranteed herself, by not running for the special election, is that she'll still be in the House through the end of this calendar year. If she had resigned her seat and then not been chosen by the GOP committee for the special election nomination, then she'd be out of a job immediately.

It's hard to imagine Ken Buck didn't figure all of this out -- all of these cascading consequences -- ahead of time, before he made his surprise announcement. So maybe we'll all have a very conservative Republican to thank for tanking Boebert's chances of staying in the House? Stranger things have happened....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant