HIGHLANDS RANCH — Before U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert spoke last week to a Republican club at a sprawling retirement community just south of Denver, some members of the audience weren’t all that jazzed about the congresswoman. 

“Interesting,” is how one woman described Boebert. The woman’s husband said the congresswoman was a “character,” for sure. Another man said Boebert was just “OK.” A fourth person said she was turned off by the congresswoman’s “antics.”

But the group also had another thing in common: They had all cast their ballots for Boebert — and never considered backing her Democratic opponent, first-time candidate Trisha Calvarese. 

“I held my nose because I would not vote for the Democrat,” said Sheree Weverstad, who made the “antics” remark and expressed a particular distaste for Boebert’s decision last year to switch congressional districts.

Such is the dynamic playing out in Colorado’s Republican-leaning 4th Congressional District this year. The majority of voters in the district, which spans the Eastern Plains into Douglas County and Loveland, are Republican die-hards, but they aren’t necessarily big fans of Boebert, whose political and personal brands are both dominated by controversy. 

Statistically speaking, the 4th District is the most Republican of Colorado’s eight congressional districts in terms of voter registration and past results. The district’s last representative, Ken Buck, won each of his final two reelection bids by more than 20 percentage points. 

The race between Boebert and Calvarese is expected to be much closer this year. After all, Boebert is known for her unique ability to transform a stronghold Republican district into a toss-up.

Whether Calvarese can do more than just tighten the spread, however, depends on her ability to persuade those voters who typically back Republicans but are skeptical of Boebert to try a Democrat for a change. To do that, Calvarese is running a race focused on policy instead of beating the drum on the congresswoman’s image, and she’s not backing off her progressive beliefs around things like labor unions and health care.

“We went with the messaging that the polls show we can win (with),” Calvarese said, highlighting the contrast she has drawn with Boebert on veterans’ issues in particular. “We went with the message that we know swings voters.”

Boebert, meanwhile, is trying to win over the hearts of 4th District voters one at a time. She said she finds that once people get to know her better, especially in person, the skepticism they may have had for her seems to melt away. They generally like where she stands on the issues and are willing to overlook everything else.

Case in point: A woman who attended the meet and greet at Wind Crest Retirement Community last week said she came to Boebert’s event not a fan. But she wrote in an email to the congresswoman’s campaign — viewed by The Sun — that she left “very impressed.”

“I’ve seen that time and time again with folks who don’t know what to think about me, or have had an opinion formed for them about me, and then they meet me,” Boebert, who is seeking her third term, said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “I guess I’m radically Lauren Boebert, but I’m not a radical.”

“That lady running against Boebert”

A run for Congress seemed unthinkable a year ago for Calvarese, who is 37. But things quickly changed after both of her parents entered hospice care and died of cancer within two weeks of each other.

Calvarese moved home to Colorado from Virginia in October 2023 to care for them, leaving a job at the National Science Foundation.

It was her father’s dying words — “he told me to step up and run” — that Calvarese says inspired her to launch a longshot bid in the 4th District. She said her decision to run was made by mid-December, when she registered to vote in Colorado. That was a few weeks before Boebert shocked the political world by announcing she was abandoning her reelection bid in the 3rd Congressional District on the other side of the state and entered the 4th District race. 

Boebert’s dive into the 4th District transformed the contest from a ho-hum Republican shoo-in to a national spectacle. 

Boebert was facing an uphill reelection battle in the 3rd District, which also leans Republican — though to a much lesser extent. She won there by less than 600 votes in 2022.  

Calvarese made her congressional bid official Jan. 2 with a Federal Elections Commission filing. She won the three-way Democratic primary in the district and, fueled by a surge in campaign donations by Democrats who detest Boebert, set out to court the conservative vote by trying to connect through her upbringing in Sterling and Highlands Ranch. 

“My parents were conservative,” Calvarese said. “They raised me on those values of you respect the dignity of all working people. You absolutely respect your veterans and your elders. That’s just something Lauren Boebert has not lived by.”

Calvarese, who now lives in Highlands Ranch, said she became a Democrat at first to needle her Republican parents. Now, she’s trying to engage beyond labels.

“It’s on basic things like keeping America competitive, having good job opportunities wherever you are (and) making health care affordable and accessible to everybody,” she said.

Calvarese supports abortion access, Medicare for all, the Inflation Reduction Act and lifting restrictions on when the gun industry can be sued. She thinks there should be legal pathways to citizenship for people living in the U.S. illegally and changes to the tax code so that the wealthy pay more.

Those are positions that might normally turn off a conservative voter, but Calvarese insists she’s breaking through.

“I don’t know what the folks on the Eastern Plains expect from a Democrat, but you show up, and it’s almost like you can feel the joy and relief” when I start talking, Calvarese said.

The two TV ads Calvarese is running attack Boebert for voting against the PACT Act, which expands benefits for veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits. One features a woman whose husband, a military veteran who deployed to Iraq, died of lung cancer in 2020. 

Boebert said she voted against the bill because it lacked a funding mechanism or a staffing plan. She argued that it would actually hurt veterans by further hampering the Department of Veterans Affairs, an agency that has been plagued with problems. 

The problem with Calvarese’s strategy may be that while the district’s voters who typically vote for Republicans don’t like Boebert’s personality, they’re not necessarily opposed to her policies or the way she votes in Congress. 

Democrat Adam Frisch, who nearly beat Boebert in 2022, pitched himself to voters as a moderate and promised to put a stop to Boebert’s “angertainment.” He criticized her for not getting enough done in Washington, D.C., but took policy positions opposite his party on a long list of issues.

“I am not a traditional Democrat,” he repeatedly told voters in 2022. 

So why isn’t Calvarese hitting Boebert more on things like her ejection last year from a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver after she talked loudly, vaped and engaged in mutual groping with a male companion? The episode was recorded by surveillance cameras as if it were ready-made for a campaign ad. 

That’s not to mention the many other controversies Boebert has been at the center of. 

“They’re so expensive,” Calvarese said of TV ads and why she hasn’t run “Beetlejuice”-centric spots, again pointing to how her polling has indicated that an issues-based campaign is the way to victory.

Calvarese is also up against a name ID problem. Voters don’t know her because she’s effectively a new face in Colorado politics. Calvarese, in an interview with The Sun, joked that the mullet haircut she accidentally gave herself when she launched her campaign didn’t help.

Now she’s trying to introduce herself through the story of caring for her dying parents, which she thinks voters in the 4th District can relate to. 

“We’re getting there,” she said of how well she’s becoming known in the district, recounting how a pharmacist recently recognized her as “that lady running against Boebert.”

Technically, Calvarese does have one race under her belt. 

She ran in the June special election to serve out the final months of Buck’s term after he resigned from Congress in March. Calvarese lost that 4th District race to Republican Greg Lopez, a former mayor of Parker who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and 2022, by 24 percentage points.

The largest share of voters in the district — 47% — are unaffiliated, while 35% are Republicans and 16.5% are Democratic. But like all other congressional districts in Colorado, the unaffiliated voters in the 4th District tend to be chameleons, voting with the party that has the largest share.

Trying to reintroduce herself to voters, one at a time

Boebert’s strategy has been twofold: prove to voters in the 4th District that she’s about more than the negative media attention she’s received, and talk about the issues that she thinks matter most to conservatives. 

Immigration. The economy. Abortion. Transgender people playing in girls’ and womens’ sports. Skepticism about — or an all-out rejection of — the results of the 2020 presidential election. Loyalty to Donald Trump. 

The congresswoman, 37, hit on all of those during her stop last week at Wind Crest. 

“I’m moved by the word of God,” she said. “I’m moved by my children and by my country, and those are the things that I’m fighting for. And I will remain immovable by anything else.”

Boebert told a story about how when she was dining once with Trump at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, the former president told her over a meal of mac-and-cheese and scallops that, when he was in the White House, he threatened to use nuclear weapons against Afghanistan if anything happened to the U.S. troops stationed there. (There hasn’t been any reporting that The Sun could find to corroborate that Trump ever made that private threat, though he did publicly say when he was president that if he wanted to he could wipe Afghanistan “off the face of the Earth.”)

The congresswoman used the scene to contrast Trump’s handling of Afghanistan with the Biden administration’s bloody withdrawal from the country. 

In terms of the 2020 election, Boebert explained her skepticism of the results in terms of the voting changes made by states in the lead-up to the contest. She said those were unfair. (The changes — like extended mail ballot return deadlines and the expansion of absentee voting — were made in many cases in response to the COVID pandemic.)

“When you have folks who are not elected in the state legislature changing election laws in the middle of an election, I believe that is fraudulent and that is election interference,” Boebert said in explaining her decision to reject the certification of some states’ 2020 election results. 

Boebert also now seems more confident in explaining her decision to switch congressional districts. The move had obvious political benefits — the 4th District is, by the numbers, about three-times more favorable to Republicans than the 3rd District. But she talks about it in terms of her family. She said she and her four boys needed a fresh start from her ex-husband in Silt and that her new home in Windsor has provided that.

“It’s been so amazing,” she told the crowd at Wind Crest. “It’s been so precious. Y’all don’t know my boys, but I do, and I see the difference. I see a different level of joy in my boys each and every day — a different level of engagement and activity and even togetherness with one another.”

Since “Beetlejuice” and her move to the Front Range, Boebert’s fundraising — once powered by a national following — has faltered. She says that’s not a sign of diminishing support for her, but rather a purposeful decision to focus more on her family than trying to rake in campaign cash. 

For instance, she said, last weekend she made the decision not to campaign on Saturday and instead was on snack duty for her 15-year-old son Kaydon’s football team. Boebert said she planned to bring orange slices — the most basic option, but also a staple of American mom-ism — at their request. 

“I tried to offer something really fun and good,” she said, “and they want sliced oranges.”

But the fact remains that when Boebert enters a room nowadays, even one that on paper is friendly, she’s often facing a crowd who is at least somewhat sour on her. 

Does it bother her? Does it matter?

“It doesn’t bother me for those who haven’t heard from me personally yet,” she said in an interview, referencing her ability to change people’s opinions of her after she meets them in person.

Has she done enough to reach enough people in the 4th District to change their minds and win in November?

“It’s never enough,” she said, “but I’m very happy with the amount of places that I’ve been and people that I’ve connected with.”

Boebert definitely has a solid base of support in the district. She won the six-way Republican primary in June with 54,605 votes, or 44% of the total. Calvarese picked up 22,756 votes, or 45% of the total, in the district’s three-way Democratic primary.

A potential Libertarian spoiler

The big wild card in the 4th District race is Libertarian candidate Hannah Goodman. 

Goodman, a Holyoke mom and chairwoman of the Libertarian Party of Colorado, could take votes away from Boebert on Election Day and either close the gap for Calvarese or, in an extreme case, tip the election in the Democrat’s favor. 

Goodman has been critical of Boebert on social media, blasting the congresswoman for refusing to sign a pledge created by the Libertarian Party of Colorado. Libertarians have vowed to drop their candidates in races where the Republican candidate has signed on.

That pledge includes a vow to pull funding for Ukraine, abolish U.S. intelligence agencies and not fight presidential pardons for Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Ross Ulbricht. Assange pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information. Snowden is accused of violating the espionage act by leaking classified information to the news media. Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web site Silk Road, is serving a life sentence for facilitating the sale of illegal products.

“Hey @laurenboebert I can’t wait to spoil your election,” Goodman posted on X. “All you had to do was sign. Pride cometh before the fall. Give my regards to Mossad.”

Mossad is Israel’s national intelligence agency, and Goodman’s reference to the agency appeared to be linked to the Libertarian Party’s opposition to foreign intervention. 

Drew Sexton, Boebert’s campaign manager, said the congresswoman doesn’t sign pledges. 

In an interview with The Sun, Goodman said, in reality, if she had to support someone besides herself in the race, she’s not sure if she would back Calvarese or Boebert. 

“I like just as much about Trisha as I do Boebert,” she said, admiring how Calvarese, in her opinion, is an old-school Democrat, while also celebrating Boebert’s support of the Second Amendment. 

Goodman said she hopes to spoil the race in a way that will reveal data on persuadable voters for future Libertarian candidates in Colorado.

“We want to see how we can affect elections here in Colorado if we were to be really strategic in how and where we run,” she said.

Goodman also ran in the 4th District special election to serve out Buck’s term. She picked up 5% of the vote, which may not sound like a lot, but it could be enough to sway the outcome of a close race between Boebert and Calvarese. 

In 2022, the Libertarian candidate in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District appeared to serve as a spoiler after winning 9,280 votes, or 4% of the total. Democrat Yadira Caraveo beat her Republican opponent, state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, by roughly 1,600 votes — or less than a percentage point — in the district that reaches from the northeast Denver suburbs along U.S. 85 into Greeley.