Democrat Eileen Laubacher, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, has won the House race in Colorado’s 4th District, defeating Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Associated Press declared Friday.
Laubacher’s victory is a remarkable turnaround in a district that voted for President Donald Trump by 18 points in 2024. But Boebert, a controversial figure in the House, was far outraised by Laubacher, giving her an advantage in a midterms season that was already ripe for Democrats to dethrone Trump-aligned incumbents.
Boebert switched districts in 2024 to run in a more conservative area in hopes of preserving her chances of reelection, but it wasn’t enough this year.
The congresswoman hopscotched from her previous seat across the state in the 3rd District, where she served two terms. Her old district had grown more competitive, and she barely survived her first reelection bid there in 2022.
More recently, Boebert weathered multiple public splits from the president. Trump nonetheless tried to promote her in the waning weeks of the campaign with social media posts and a tele-rally held days before the general election.
Boebert is among the highest-profile members of the House for her devotion to MAGA ideals and slate of controversies from her personal life that have spilled into public view over the years. She was a frequent target of Democrats in Congress. The national party has eyed her seat across multiple cycles in hopes of flipping it.
This year, Laubacher raised more than $13 million to Boebert’s $1.2 million.
The cash differential, Boebert’s polarizing profile and a cycle that heavily favored Democrats were the formula to flip Colorado’s most conservative district in an upset that election handicappers did not think was possible two months ago. Boebert was widely seen as a shoo-in for her seat until mid-October, when polls began suggesting a much closer race.
Laubacher, a moderate Democrat and former National Security Council member, credited her campaign’s success to her track record of public service and communicating it to voters in the hope they would believe that to her, the congressional office “isn’t about party.”
“It was about people who felt that they were not being heard and not being served,” she told The Washington Post on Monday, after other news outlets projected her win.
During the week, as Laubacher attended orientation in Washington for new members of Congress, Boebert told reporters outside the Capitol that the race was close because “there was a lot of money dumped on my head.”
“It’s gross how much we dump into these races,” she said. “And I was actually hoping to prove that seats just can’t be bought, but maybe I’ll be proven wrong. We’ll see.”
She also told Scripps News on Wednesday that she would not run again in 2028. Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Even with surging voter fury and waning approval of the president ahead of the midterms, Democrats wouldn’t have had a chance of winning Boebert’s seat without her streak of bad publicity, said Dennis Lennox, a Republican strategist with a focus on Colorado politics.
“You had six years of largely unforced errors and scandals and endless controversies,” Lennox said.
Boebert’s breakout moment came in 2019, before she ran for Congress, when she confronted then-Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke about gun rights. O’Rourke had said during a recent debate: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”
At a subsequent rally in Aurora, Boebert told him: “I am here to say hell no, you’re not.” She wore a black T-shirt from the gun-themed restaurant she co-owned at the time, Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado.
As the crowd jeered, Boebert said she’d brought a Glock with her that day.
The exchange went viral, and it foreshadowed the firebrand scenes that would power her rise in Republican politics. Nine months later, in June 2020, she ousted a five-term Colorado congressman in the 3rd District’s Republican primary and won her first term that year.
In Congress, Boebert has stayed true to her hard-line conservatism, most recognizable by her fierce defense of gun rights. Her commitment to the issue endeared her to Colorado’s GOP base.
But her brand of politics also came with incendiary remarks and public scandals that led some voters to abandon her. Clips of a now-infamous 2023 incident when she disrupted a performance of “Beetlejuice” made their way into the attack ads levied against her this year. Others stressed her allegiance to Trump.
Boebert has been a close ally to the president. In her first campaign, she embraced the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory. She also amplified the GOP’s baseless claims that Trump lost the 2020 election due to fraud and voted against certifying votes from two states.
She notably broke with the president in 2025 when she was one of four Republicans who helped force a vote on releasing more of the Jeffrey Epstein files. During this year’s primary, Trump lashed out at Boebert for campaigning for one of the other GOP lawmakers who signed on to support the vote, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky.
The congresswoman said she was “not mad or offended” by Trump’s comments. She was uncontested in the 4th District primary despite Trump calling for Republican challengers, and he endorsed her in late October.
“I knew the risks when I agreed to stand by my friend Thomas Massie,” Boebert wrote in a May post on X. “I was, and will be, America First, America Always, and MAGA.”
By contrast, Laubacher ran her campaign as a moderate who would counter both MAGA conservatives and the progressives in her own party. She was a Republican before switching her party affiliation after she retired from the Navy in 2024.
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