Lauren Boebert narrowly wins reelection in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District after Adam Frisch concedes

Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert won reelection Friday in Colorado’s GOP-leaning 3rd Congressional District,  barely overcoming voters’ forceful rebuke of her highly controversial tenure in Washington over the past two years to help her party expand its slim majority in the U.S. House.

Boebert was leading Democrat Adam Frisch, a former Aspen city councilman, by 551 votes on Friday morning when Frisch conceded in a video news conference with reporters. The contest will have one of the closest margins of any congressional race in the U.S. this year, if not the closest.

Frisch said in a call with reporters that he wasn’t asking for the mandatory recount paid for by the state that he’s entitled to under Colorado law, but that he supports the recount “to ensure continued faith and the security of our Elections.”

If it does occur — Frisch would have to withdraw his candidacy to waive his right to the recount, which must be completed by Dec. 13 — it’s highly unlikely to make a significant dent in the margin between the two candidates.

“The likelihood of this recount changing more than a handful of votes is very small,” he said. “Very, very small. It would be disingenuous and unethical for us, or any other group, to continue to raise false hope.”

Frisch said he called Boebert, who lives in Garfield County, on Friday morning before the briefing with reporters to concede. Boebert declared victory in the race on Thursday night when it was clear that she would win unless the recount somehow reversed the outcome.

“With this victory and with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, we can focus on the issues that actually matter most, including getting inflation under control, increasing our domestic energy supply, securing the southern border and being a strong check on the White House,” Boebert said in a video posted to Twitter.

The fact that the race between Boebert, a bombastic congresswoman with a national following of both ardent supporters and fierce detractors, and Frisch, a relative newcomer on the big political stage, was so close shocked the Colorado political world given the 3rd District’s heavy Republican lean. 

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Few, if any, political observers believed Frisch, who ran as a moderate and promised to be a more measured voice in Washington, had a chance. Neither Democratic nor Republican national groups, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee, really invested in the race in a clear sign they thought the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

“It’s never fun to have phone calls returned nine months later, which obviously happened,” Frisch told The Colorado Sun on Friday afternoon. “The amount of phone calls that came in on Wednesday morning (after Election Day) … people in DC are very, very aware of how well of a race we ran, the team we had, and they are very, very aware they did not do anything for us. If we were to run again, I’m pretty darn certain and pretty darn confident that would change dramatically.” 

“It’s so much closer than anyone anticipated,” said state Sen. Kerry Donovan, a Vail Democratic who briefly ran to unseat Boebert this year but ended her candidacy when she was drawn out of the 3rd District during last year’s redistricting process. 

The 3rd District, which spans the Western Slope into Pueblo and southeast Colorado, was made more favorable to Republicans when its boundaries were redrawn last year as part of Colorado’s once-in-a-decade redistricting process. 

Voters in the district backed Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner’s unsuccessful reelection bid by 11 percentage points in 2020. In 2018, a year that was devastating for Colorado Republicans, voters in the district backed Republican Walker Stapleton’s unsuccessful gubernatorial bid by 6 percentage points. And former President Donald Trump won the district by 14 percentage points in 2016 even as he lost statewide.

Republicans also have a voter registration advantage in the 3rd District, which has not sent a Democrat to Congress since 2008. Forty-four percent of active registered voters in the district are unaffiliated, while 31% are Republicans and 24% are Democrats. 

Boebert even crushed a primary challenge this year from state Sen. Don Coram, a Montrose Republican, beating him by a whopping 32 percentage points in a further sign of her apparent dominance. Boebert raised and spent about $7 million on her reelection bid, compared with the roughly $5 million raised and spent by Frisch, including $715,000 he loaned to his campaign.

But the outcome of the 3rd District race made it clear: Voters in the district may be reliably conservative, but they have their limits. And Boebert — whose two years in Washington have been marked by controversy — nearly exceeded them.

In the days after taking office in January 2021, Boebert backed an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential Election. On Jan. 6, 2021, before rioters descended upon the U.S. Capitol, she tweeted that “Today is 1776.” She also was criticized by her colleagues for tweeting about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s whereabouts during the riot.