Boebert forgoes special elections to focus on youth work in a new district
Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Colorado Republican, said Wednesday she will not resign from her current seat even though the seat she ultimately wants is now being vacated sooner than she expected by her colleague in the House of Representatives, Ken Buck.
The decision by Mr. Buck, a Republican, to resign next week instead of at the end of the year complicated an already difficult path for Ms. Boebert to secure his seat. The state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, quickly announced that a special election would be held on June 25 to fill Buck’s seat.
That left Ms. Boebert with a conundrum: If she were to resign from her current seat to run in the special election, she would risk shrinking Republicans’ already razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives through a special election. organize in her current district, where a Democrat has a chance to win.
To the relief of chairman Mike Johnson, she decided not to.
In 2022, Ms. Boebert nearly lost her district, which is on the western slopes of the Rockies, to Adam Frisch, a Democrat. If she had resigned before May 14, Mr. Frisch might have had a chance to win her seat in a special election. (Democrats excel at mobilizing for low-turnout special elections.)
Now that won’t happen. Instead of running in the special election in Buck’s heavily Republican district, she will continue to focus on winning a crowded Republican primary for the seat, which will be held on the same day.
That means convincing Republican voters in her newly adopted district to vote for one Republican in the special election against a Democrat, while simultaneously voting for her in the primary. That will be no easy feat in a district where she already has to deal with the ‘carpet dredger’ slur. The district is located in the eastern suburbs of Denver and the Great Plains of Colorado.
Ms. Boebert, who has the support of former President Donald J. Trump, appeared to acknowledge her disadvantage in the statement she released about her decision. She portrayed herself as a fighter against a clique of mainstream Republicans and Democrats, which she called the “Uni Party.”
“Ken Buck’s announcement yesterday was a gift to the Uniparty,” she said. She added: “The establishment has engineered a swampy backroom deal to rig elections.”