Lauren Boebert On The Ballot
Four states hold primary elections today: New York, South Carolina, Utah, and Colorado. There are interesting races in all of them -- including a major Democratic showdown in New York -- but the one that interests me the most will happen in Colorado. Because the voters in one House district will have the choice of bringing an end to Lauren Boebert's congressional career.
Boebert's case is interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is her toxic personality (she is one of the queens of "anger politics," fighting hard for the reigning title with Marjorie Taylor Greene...). Her obnoxiousness is highly repellant and she deserves ejection from the House by Colorado voters on those grounds alone, in fact. More interesting to the politically geeky, however, is that she is attempting a rather astonishing bit of carpetbaggery in her current run. She is not running to be re-elected in the district she now represents, but instead a different district -- with a heavier Republican lean to it. It is an open seat, made possible by the voluntary midterm retirement of fellow Colorado Republican Ken Buck.
Boebert has made this move to avoid getting kicked out by her own district's voters this November. She only beat her Democratic opponent in the 2022 midterm election by a razor-thin margin of 546 votes, which was somewhat of a shock to the political world (since few had predicted her race would be that close). If she had stayed put, she would have faced the same Democrat in November, after another two years of her increasingly off-putting and flamboyant antics -- which included getting kicked out of a stage production of Beetlejuice for vaping and indulging in some heavy petting with her date. If she only won by 546 votes before that particular embarrassment, she figured she'd have a tough time winning again this time around, obviously.
So she decamped and headed eastward, across the Continental Divide, to a new House district in the eastern part of the state. Her run was complicated by the fact that Buck didn't just announce he wasn't running for re-election, he actually quit the House in the middle of his term. So there will be two elections on the ballot today in the district: one to elect a replacement for the remainder of the current term, and a second to select both parties' nominees for the general election in November (for the upcoming term). Boebert didn't run for the fill-in spot, likely because they didn't hold a primary for it -- the local Republican organization just selected someone to appear on the ballot today to run against the Democrat. Boebert's carpetbagging into the district didn't win her a lot of fans with the GOP establishment there, so she chose not to even put her name forward for the special election (which was probably smart). The Republicans chose a seat-warmer, basically -- a candidate who is not running for the full term and will thus just serve until the end of the calendar year (if he wins). This at least didn't give one of Boebert's opponents a leg up in the race.
Boebert is running against five other Republicans for the GOP nomination. She is not wildly popular in the district, but she does have one big boost: Donald Trump endorsed her. And apparently, none of the other five has truly caught fire with the Republican electorate. A poll was released at the start of this month which showed Boebert pulling down 40 percent while none of her opponents got more than five percent (with 40 percent still undecided, but still...). So the safe money would be that Boebert will win tonight.
There was one rather notable ad from one of her opponents, who filmed it "sitting in the very same seat that Lauren Boebert got kicked out of" in the Beetlejuice theater. This even earned Boebert some gratuitous mockery from Mark Hamill.
Boebert has had an enormous cash advantage in her race -- none of the other candidates even have enough to run television ads to counter hers. And with her name recognition and Trump's endorsement, if she loses tonight it will be a monumental upset. But the story might not actually end there....
Even though 60 percent of the district voted for Trump, Boebert might just have a real race on her hands in November. Perhaps it is wishful thinking on his part, but a HuffPost article on the race provided a very positive possibility to end on today:
If [Lauren] Boebert wins, she'll face the winner of Tuesday's Democratic primary. One of the candidates, Ike McCorkle, recently released an internal poll suggesting he'd beat Boebert in a hypothetical general election matchup.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
Bobert has won the primary.
@russ,
yeah, that was depressing. boebert is popular with the crazy and vindictive crowd, which is unfortunately a large percentage of republican primary voters.
@cw,
Jamal Bowman lost in my wife's home district (technically mine too, but i've been glacially slow with the moving paperwork so I couldn't vote yet).
I formally nominate Bowman for MDDOTW - for his 20-point primary loss itself, for his defiant non-concession concession speech, and also for the myriad underlying reasons for his loss. he's ignorantly anti-israel in a district with a LOT of Jews, AND he pulls fire alarms in the capital. I do believe he'll be on my "not sorry to see you go" list this December.
JL
A search turns up many hits saying that the Latimer v Bowman primary was extremely expensive, and that pro-Israel groups provided lots of the funding for Latimer. But they don’t bother with anything substantive that Bowman said on the subject.
Of course, even when I do find something substantive on a politician's opinions about Israel/Palestine, it's never framed correctly. It always goes along with the political fiction that Hamas and Netanyahu are on opposite sides.
Whose side are fire alarms on?
What? Did Bowman say something about fire alarms?
Fire alarms do not recruit donors and fighters for Hamas. That sort of puts them on the anti-Netanyahu, anti-Hamas side. Although I suppose if they're in buildings used for Hamas recruiting or funding efforts, like banks in Iran or the UAE or something, they sort-of do help keep Hamas going. (Or was it Bahrain instead of UAE? One of the smaller Gulf states has some significant involvement. Hamas certainly isn't just an Iranian effort, anyway.)
bowman didn't just talk about fire alarms, he actually went and pulled one.
CW wrote about it in his mclaughlin awards last December.
Ah, thanks. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, because it wasn't anyone I'm ever going to have to decide whether to vote for. Sounds as though Bowman is probably a representative that the Democratic party is better off without.