by Abigail Weinberg
November 14, 2022 “19 hours ago”
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... m-frisch/(Mother Jones) The only thing that’s certain in Colorado’s third congressional district is that it wasn’t supposed to be this close.
Most analysts assumed that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) would cruise to victory in her solidly red district, which became even more Republican after redistricting. In 2020, Boebert defeated her Democratic opponent by six percentage points. This year, FiveThirtyEight gave Boebert a 97 in 100 shot of winning. In June, when Boebert won her primary, I declared, “It looks like two more years of Lauren Boebert in Congress.”
But as election workers began tabulating votes, Democrat Adam Frisch took a narrow lead. On Wednesday, with about 97 percent of votes counted, Frisch led Boebert by 62 votes. By Thursday evening, Boebert had eked out a 1,122-vote lead, accounting for just 50.17 percent of the vote. As of Monday, the race is still too close to call.
“A Republican incumbent in a red district in a lean-Republican year should not be struggling like this, especially after doing reasonably well in 2020,” Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver, told me over email. Masket said that Boebert needed the support not only of her enthusiastic supporters, but of right-leaning unaffiliated voters, too. “Usually that’s not a problem for a generic Republican, but Boebert’s all-bombast-all-the-time behavior as an incumbent has clearly irked many of them.”
On Thursday, I drove from my home in Denver down to Pueblo, Colorado, the largest city in Boebert’s huge, diverse district. Pueblo, which has about a 50 percent Hispanic population, is a union town and one of the largest steel-producing cities in the United States. In the district’s large rural areas, many people find work as ranchers or in the oil and gas industry. The district also includes small, staunchly liberal enclaves, like the wealthy ski town of Aspen.