Lauren Boebert wants ‘mercy.’ Some Republicans want an alternative.

At a casino bingo hall in southwest Colorado, Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert bounced her 6-month-old grandson on her knee.

“The election is still a ways away,” she said as guests arriving for the Montezuma County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day dinner trickled into the room. “And when you talk to people at events like this, it seems like there’s a lot of grace and mercy.”

The month before, Ms. Boebert, who was then in the midst of finalizing a divorce, was caught on a security camera vaping and groping her date shortly before she was ejected from a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” at the Buell Theater in Denver for causing a disturbance. The footage contradicted her own initial claims about the incident, and the venue’s statement that Ms. Boebert had demanded preferential treatment only added to the outrage.

The episode has proven surprisingly sticky for Ms. Boebert, a politician who more than anyone has embodied the gleefully provocative politics of the party’s right wing in the Biden era. Several local Republican officials have since expressed support for Jeff Hurd, a more conventional Republican who is challenging her for the nomination this year.

Mr. Hurd’s candidacy has become an occasion for Republican discontent over the perceived excesses of the party’s MAGA wing. His supporters include former governors of the party, such as former Governor Bill Owens, former Senator Hank Brown, and Pete Coors, the brewery scion, former Senate candidate and 2016 Trump fundraiser, who will soon give his support, said Mr. Hurd’s campaign.

Other Hurd supporters are more concerned about continuing the party’s recent string of defeats in the state, and some are former fans of Ms. Boebert who complain that she has been changed by her political celebrity.

“That crap she pulled in Denver pissed me off,” David Spiegel, a 53-year-old road traffic controller and party activist from Montezuma, told Mr. Hurd as he mingled with guests at the dinner, near where Ms. Boebert was sitting.

No polls have yet been released on the primaries, and the question of whether Ms. Boebert, whose political celebrity far exceeds her official influence in Congress, has actually gained favor among the party’s voters remains theoretical for now. In interviews around the neighborhood, it was easy to find supporters who still supported her.

“She’s aggressive, she’s young, she has better ideas than most of them,” said Charles Dial, who runs a steel manufacturing and recycling company in deep-red Moffat County, which Ms. Boebert won by more than 59 points in 2022. shrugged off the theater incident and compared the attention it generated to “what they’re doing to Trump.”

But Mr. Hurd’s expressions of support indicate concern among some party stalwarts that if Ms. Boebert remains a spirit animal for the right, she may end up a wounded one.

In 2022, despite her district’s solidly Republican tilt, she won reelection by just 546 votes. The close loss left her the most vulnerable of the party’s most beloved politicians, and turned her defeat into a coveted trophy for Democrats this year.

Adam Frisch, an Aspen lawyer who ran against her as a Democrat in 2022, hopes to challenge her again next year, though he first faces Grand Junction mayor Anna Stout in the primary. Mr. Frisch has raised nearly $7.8 million in donations, more than any candidate for the House of Representatives in 2024 other than Kevin McCarthy, the recently ousted Republican chairman, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader.

In August, before the theater incident, a poll at the behest of Mr. Frisch’s campaign, it appeared that he was ahead of Ms. Boebert by two points.

In a rematch with Mr. Frisch, “I will definitely vote for Lauren,” said Cody Davis, a Mesa County commissioner, who switched his endorsement from Ms. Boebert to Mr. Hurd. “But at the same time, I don’t think she can win.”

Mrs. Boebert appeared on the political scene in 2020 after winning a primary in Colorado’s Third District, which covers the entire Western Slope of the state and nearly half of the state’s territory.

She was then a 33-year-old gun-themed, pandemic-lockdown-defying bar and restaurant owner in the small town of Rifle. She was an instant sensation among the right wing of the party, which had transparently longed for its own response. to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the social media-savvy young left-wing Democratic congresswoman from New York.

“She was a rabble-rouser,” Kevin McCarney, then chairman of the Mesa County Republican Party, recalled admiringly. Last year, Mr. McCarney defended Ms. Boebert in the media after being criticized for heckling President Biden as he spoke about his son’s death in his State of the Union address.

“I was still by her side until her little escapade,” he said, referring to Ms. Boebert’s behavior during “Beetlejuice.”

Then Mr. McCarney endorsed Mr. Hurd.

Mr. Hurd, a 44-year-old lawyer from Grand Junction, is said to be a lifelong conservative but a newcomer to politics. The son of a local medical clinic director, he attended the University of Notre Dame and planned to become a Catholic priest when he met his wife Barbora at an American Enterprise Institute seminar in Bratislava. Instead, he went to law school.

Soft-spoken and cerebral — he lists “Meditations” by the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius as his favorite book — Mr. Hurd has similar policy views as Ms. Boebert on gun rights and conservative but less absolute views on abortion.

He presents himself as a reprieve from the turmoil, headlines and Trump-centricity that Ms. Boebert has represented to her opponents.

Mr. Hurd appears only tangentially in his first campaign ad, in which Barbora describes her journey to American citizenship after a childhood in communist Czechoslovakia and warns that “we cannot take this freedom for granted” — a Reagan revivalist tone that also nods towards his concerns about the risk of authoritarianism within his own party.

Asked whether he had voted for Mr. Trump in previous elections, Mr. Hurd declined to answer but went on to describe a vision of the Republican Party in which “we believe in, you know, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power in elections.” . .”

“If we as Republicans lose an election,” he continued, “we have to figure out how to win the next election.”

Ms. Boebert was early and vocal in promoting Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

For some Colorado Republicans, the main battle for her seat has become a proxy battle in the ongoing conflict within the party between an old guard of politicians and donors and the right-wing grassroots activists who have come to dominate state and county organizations. – a battle in which the denial of the 2020 elections is a major dividing line.

Others are simply concerned that Ms. Boebert could easily lose to Mr. Frisch, a self-described conservative Democrat. “We all know what happened last cycle,” said Bobbie Daniel, a Mesa County commissioner who supported Ms. Boebert last year and now supports Mr. Hurd. “There wasn’t much room for error.”

Mr. Frisch’s near victory came as a surprise in a race that few in either party expected to be competitive. “We were blown away by everyone,” Mr. Frisch recalls. Two weeks before the election, his campaign essentially ran out of money, and at that point his operation was “just me driving the pickup truck a few more thousand miles,” he said.

This year he won’t have that problem. Mr. Frisch and outside Democratic groups have already earmarked $1.2 million in ads for the race — more than any other 2024 House race to date and more than 100 times what Republicans have spent in the district, according to Ad Impact , a media tracking company.

Drew Sexton, Ms. Boebert’s campaign manager, noted that her campaign spent little time last year shaping voters’ impressions of Mr. Frisch, and argued that 2024 would be a different battle.

“A lot of people didn’t attend the midterm elections, whether it was apathy or the belief that there was a red wave and they didn’t need to participate, or just the fact that President Trump wasn’t at the top of the list. he said. “Those people are going to come back in droves this cycle.”

On the stump, Ms. Boebert has worked hard to show her supporters that she does not take their votes for granted. In her speech at the Montezuma County dinner, she had just one line of applause about the Biden family investigation and was very specific about water policy. There was also remorse.

“You deserve a sincere, humble apology from me,” she told the crowd.

Many of her supporters have accepted the apology, although not unconditionally. “Lauren has made things harder for herself,” said Kathy Elmont, the secretary of the Republican Party of Ouray County, who has supported Ms. Boebert since her first campaign. “But I look at it as a Christian.” She recalled the passage from the Gospel of John in which Jesus admonishes a crowd not to stone an adulterous woman: “He who is without sin among you, let him first throw a stone at her.”

But Ms. Elmont pointed out that this was not the last story. “He ended with, ‘And sin no more,’” she said.