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WINDSOR, Colo. — On a recent February afternoon, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-Colo.) campaign manager walked into a coffee shop for a gathering of the Pachyderm Club, a local Republican group, and spoke briefly on behalf of his candidate. Boebert wasn’t there herself; she was back in her old district, figuring out whether her ex-husband had thrown her belongings into a pond.

That morning, Boebert had driven to her old house to retrieve the last of her things from a farmhouse on their property, which she’d moved into as their marriage began to fall apart. He still lived in the main house and, according to Boebert, when she called him ahead of her arrival, he told her she could find her stuff “at the bottom of the pond.” That turned out not to be true, but he had removed her stuff and put it into a storage trailer without her consent, she said. Boebert called the police and got a temporary restraining order. (Jayson Boebert’s lawyers did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Last year, dealing with a messy divorce and a real threat of being tossed out of the U.S. House by fed-up voters in Colorado’s western slope, the far-right congresswoman decided to relocate to a more conservative district on the other side of the mountains. “I needed to get away,” she told The Washington Post in an interview. “Absolutely away. I didn’t want to even be in the same county as him. It just was not healthy, obviously.”

She landed in the town of Windsor, a four-hour drive east, and moved into the first house that struck her fancy (“I’m very impulsive,” she said). She found a local charter school for her boys and has been looking for the kind of church that wouldn’t mind her rowdiness.

“People were freaking out about me dancing in the seat at ‘Beetlejuice,’” she said, referring to an incident, caught on a security camera, in which the congresswoman was escorted from a Denver theater after vaping and getting handsy with a male companion. “Well, they should see me in church.”

It’s a chance at a fresh start, but there are some things she’s not ready to leave behind. Like being a congresswoman.

Her new district is red enough that whoever wins the Republican primary in June is expected to prevail in November, and as a quasi-incumbent with a national profile, Boebert, 37, became a top contender for the nomination as soon as she arrived. This has complicated the Welcome Wagon: Her new GOP opponents — there are about nine of them (the number fluctuates depending on the day) — are keen to label her a carpetbagger with too much baggage. And members of Boebert’s own team had expressed concerns about how the move from her old district might look to voters: the MAGA warrior running away from a tough fight with a Democrat. (Her campaign says there was a “robust internal discussion” but everybody’s now fully onboard with the move.)

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“I’m not dumb,” Boebert said. “I knew all the attacks that would come my way. But I talked to God, I asked ‘How do I address this? Will this be perceived that I’m not fighting?’ And God said, ‘Do you have more faith in your ability to fight or my ability to open a door?’”

It was the day after the Pond Scare, and Boebert was sitting at the Wide Open Saloon ahead of a campaign event in her new district. She had traveled through a blizzard to get back here, passing abandoned cars on the side of the road. She wore a belted Stetson hat and bold red lipstick, and marveled at how many people had braved the weather to see her speak.

These were her people — a few dozen folks who like to talk about how there are only two genders and one rightful president. Some of them wore shirts from Shooters Grill, Boebert’s old gun-themed restaurant where servers carried trays in their hands and firearms on their hips. They cheered when Boebert bragged about carrying a loaded Glock pistol through the halls of Congress, and again when she spoke about being a leading advocate for the long-shot effort to impeach <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">President Biden</a>.

If recent political history has taught us anything, it’s that Republican voters can be extremely tolerant of flawed, attention-hungry politicians who ignore rules and don’t play well with others. But while a lot of unlikely figures have risen in the party by defending Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior, the Trump-like antics voters will tolerate in other GOP politicians has been less consistent.

In Colorado, Boebert’s attempt to remain electable raises the question of whether Republicans might want a different kind of politician as a neighbor than they want as a president.

“I think she’s a great representative of my values, but is she a great representative of the district?” said Bryan Mannlein — a Boebert fan who had driven 20 miles through the snow to see her speak — echoing a statement repeated in various interviews across the state. “Is she just doing this to hold onto a job? Why did she move?”

When Boebert was 4 years old, her mother, Shawna Bentz, took her on a Greyhound bus from Florida to Colorado to stay with a man they barely knew. Before long they were back in Florida, moving in with a different boyfriend, only to quickly head back to live with the Colorado man.

“My mom could be, in a word, ‘flighty,’” Boebert wrote in her memoir, “My American Life.” “Perhaps that is where my need for adventure originates from.”

Her mom could also be, in a word, lenient.

“She’s basically never had a leash on her,” Bentz said of Boebert in an interview. “She’s still the same way, never leashed down.”

Bentz, who became a mom at 18, sometimes acted more like a big sister than a parental figure, and today she and Boebert call each other their “best friend.” Neither Bentz nor her daughter knows the identity of Boebert’s father. Bentz said the closest they ever came to finding out was when Boebert took a DNA test and found out that she was “part whatever Jesus was.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Bentz remembers telling her daughter. “Jesus is the only father you need.”

After the permanent move out west, the Colorado man became Boebert’s stepfather. They moved into an Aurora apartment, followed by an Aurora house, and then — as the family grew — to the Montbello neighborhood of Denver. Things were tricky in Montbello. Bentz said she pulled Boebert out of her middle school after having problems with a teacher, and one day Boebert was jumped by classmates on the street and bloodied up. Seeking a safer option, they moved to Rifle, a town in western Colorado that Boebert would call home for years.

Home was not necessarily a sanctuary, though. In her book, Boebert writes that the Colorado man was abusive to her mother, yelling at her and slapping her around. It took years, until Boebert had moved out herself, before Bentz finally left him.

Bentz says now that she wasn’t as good at being a mother as Boebert was at being a daughter. “I told her a couple of weeks ago that I am so thankful that she’s so strong and I don’t have to see the things that should be bothering her,” Bentz said. “I don’t think I could handle it. And she said, ‘Mom, that’s why I disappear sometimes and you don’t hear from me.’”

As a teenager Boebert listened to Eminem, and she recalls earning the respect of her peers by participating in rap battles after school. She even wrote a rap about Eminem for a contest to appear on the MTV show “FANatic,” where fans meet their idols. It was “amazing” work, according to her mom, but Bentz never actually submitted it. “I wasn’t the kind of mom to do whatever you had to do to make things happen,” she said, “so I never did anything with it. But I still make her sing it to me today.” (When asked by The Post about this, the congresswoman claimed she couldn’t remember any bars. “Was never recorded,” Boebert said in a text. “Maybe a really good thing!”)

She never finished high school, dropping out after getting pregnant with her and Jayson’s eldest son. But Capitol Hill is its own kind of high school, and Boebert came to Washington with Mean Girl energy. Alongside fellow MAGA bully Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Boebert interrupted assemblies (heckling Biden during the State of the Union), name-called their classmates (referring to a group of their liberal colleagues as “The Jihad Squad”), and fought among themselves over who should get to try to impeach Biden first (“You’ve been nothing but a little b---- to me,” Greene snapped at Boebert on the House floor, according to reporting by the Daily Beast. “And you copied my articles of impeachment after I asked you to co-sponsor them.”)

Boebert said she and Greene “never had a personal relationship whatsoever,” and is happy to try to differentiate herself from her Georgia colleague. Lately she has been talking about a bill she sponsored, the Pueblo Jobs Act, that got folded into the National Defense Authorization Act and signed into law by Biden, bringing as many as 1,000 jobs to her old district.

“I don’t get loud to hear myself talk or just to be heard,” she said. “I do it to be effective and have an end goal. Everything I do, I do with a purpose.”

“Lauren has went through a lot in the past year,” Greene told The Post in a statement. “She faces many challenges ahead, like how to get people to vote for her in the new district.”

A few hours after finishing her event at the Wide Open Saloon, Boebert found herself in what appeared to be a large cafeteria, trying to figure out where to sit.

“Picking a table can be like getting in a hot tub,” she said. “You worry that maybe your presence will send everybody out if you’re not vibing.”

This was the Washington County Lincoln Day Dinner, and after grabbing a seat with members of her campaign staff, Boebert sneaked to the back of the room to eat vanilla ice cream and gossip about her primary opponents, some of whom were also in attendance.

There was Richard Holtorf, an antiabortion state representative who had recently been in the <a href="https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/local-politics/colorado-anti-abortion-gop-lawmaker-praises-impact-abortion-he-paid-for/73-589d9901-228f-4940-970a-56f710f82e53" target=_blank>news</a> for saying he had once paid for a girlfriend’s abortion so she could live her best life. “He kept telling me this was his backyard,” Boebert said. “So how come he’s wearing two name tags?” There was Ted Harvey, a Trump-aligned political consultant who has, in the past, gotten heat for operating a political action committee that raised millions of dollars and then spent most of it on <a href="https://coloradosun.com/2023/07/30/nicolais-timothy-shea-colorado-grifters-gop/" target=_blank>operating costs</a>. “He’s been a grifter for 10 years,” Boebert said. (Harvey later called this comment “desperate” and “unfounded” and said his “record speaks for itself.”) Candidate Mike Lynch, the former state House minority leader who had <a href="https://www.cpr.org/2024/01/24/colorado-gop-rep-mike-lynch-resigns-as-minority-house-leader/" target=_blank>stepped down over a 2022 arrest</a> for driving and having a gun while intoxicated, was nowhere in sight. “I hope he’s not in the clink,” snarked Boebert between bites of ice cream.

In politics as in the back of a classroom, Mean Girl energy can seem fun when you’re not the one in the crosshairs. Part of what Boebert’s die-hard supporters love about her is her penchant for cracking on others (and herself), and for bringing them in on the joke.

“She’s fun,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) a close ally of Boebert’s. In early 2023, Gaetz, Boebert and a clique of Republican troublemakers ganged up on then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for a humiliating game of keep away with the House speaker’s gavel. “Some folks out on the trail, even when they run for president, don’t quite have half the sparkle Lauren does,” Gaetz said.

Boebert’s “sparkle” is, of course, beside the point to anyone worried about the MAGA threat to reproductive and LGBTQ rights, democratic institutions, climate policy or the nature of truth itself. If Trump wins back the White House, his and his allies’ ambitions reportedly include <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term" target=_blank>radically reshaping the federal workforce in his image</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/" target=_blank>sending the Justice Department after his enemies</a>, using the Insurrection Act to crack down on political protests and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/20/trump-mass-deportations-immigration/" target=_blank>initiating militarized mass deportations</a>.

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Running against fellow conservatives in her new district, rather than against a Democrat in her old one, means that Boebert — one of Trump’s most loyal supporters — will not have to answer to voters who are worried about that stuff. Republicans here are broadly onboard with Trump’s plans for America. (They are, in a word, lenient.)  On Saturday, Trump offered what could be a Deus ex MAGA, throwing his “Complete and Total” support behind Boebert on the social media platform Truth Social. “If someone gets Trump’s endorsement,” Holtorf had said in an interview before the endorsement, “this race is probably over.”

As strange as it may sound, Boebert is occupying the role of Washington insider. She was, according to Gaetz, the first person to suggest that Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) would make a good speaker of the House. Earlier this month, Speaker Johnson returned the favor by endorsing her and showing up to one of her Washington fundraisers. Boebert’s move from fringe candidate to a member of the Republican establishment doesn’t mean that she’s changed — it means the establishment has.

Trump is the GOP standard-bearer, MAGA is mainstream, and the main dividing line in the party is between conservatives who support and defend Trump happily and those who do so unhappily.

My father used to tell me that I was born 100 years too late.”

Jerry Sonnenberg, the man many believe to be Boebert’s biggest competitor for the seat, lives in a one-story ranch house, situated on 4,000 acres of wheat fields and cattle pastures, that has belonged to his family since 1937.

Sonnenberg has lived here almost all of his life, except for a few brief sojourns, like when he moved to California in the 1970s to pursue a career as a baseball umpire. He is opposed to the idea of moving. Instead he’s in a constant cycle of rehabbing his house. Much to his wife’s chagrin, he’s been in the middle of a bathroom renovation for six years.

Once, Sonnenberg was pulled over for driving 65 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone. In those days, if you were pulled over with an out-of-state license you had to post a bond. Sonnenberg had a California license, but not $100.

And so, during a recent debate with his fellow candidates, he had raised his hand when the moderator asked how many people onstage had been arrested. (Six of the nine candidates present had been, including Boebert, who was arrested for disorderly conduct at a music festival in 2015 and again after skipping a court date for a careless driving infraction.)

“My wife was like, ‘Why did you raise your hand? You weren’t really arrested!’” Sonnenberg said, sitting on a leather couch in his living room while his wife, Vonnie, graded her middle school students’ math tests on a nearby table. “And the truth was, I wasn’t, but I spent part of the night in jail. … I didn’t want to not raise my hand and then have someone dig that up and call me a liar.”

In important ways, Sonnenberg isn’t very different from Boebert. As a longtime state representative he was always ranked as one of the most conservative politicians in Colorado. He has a house full of guns, is vehemently anti<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/abortion/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">abortion</a>, and won’t say a bad word about Trump. But stylistically, Sonnenberg is pretty much Boebert’s opposite. He’s an avuncular pol who calls himself a “coalition builder,” and is so anti-drama that even his reason for spending time in jail is boring.

“I liken myself to a workhorse rather than a show horse,” Sonnenberg said. But is there even room for such a thing in today’s Republican Party? It’s possible that he’s as antiquated as the actual workhorses, Finale and Fred, he keeps on his farm. They are big, beautiful Belgian drafters, around 2,000 pounds of muscle, the kind of horses that used to plow the fields but now have no real use on a modern farm.

“If we have a problem as Republicans in Congress, we need to lock ourselves in a room and solve the problem,” he said, “rather than embarrass ourselves across the country.”

Savannah Wolfson, a former Boebert volunteer who used to live in Boebert’s old district, said in a phone interview that the drama fatigue had set in among some supporters long before the “Beetlejuice” incident.

Wolfson said that last year she and some of her friends had noticed Boebert had been posting “weird” pictures on Facebook that looked like she was “constantly at frat parties.” One of her friends decided to text Boebert with a warning: I don’t know if this is the road you want to go down, Wolfson said paraphrasing the text.

“She just responded with a kissy face emoji,” said Wolfson.

It felt, Wolfson said, like Boebert was saying “bye, b----” to the people who helped elect her in the first place.

“She has a bad reputation with her volunteers at this point,” Wolfson continued. “She just kind of uses you and then leaves.”

Boebert has tried framing her move as good for everyone except the libs: Leaving a competitive seat would stop the flow of “Hollywood” money into elections in her old district, where Democratic donors nationwide sense that a well-funded candidate could have bumped her off.

But the biggest thing, she said, is that she wanted to get away from Jayson, with whom things had gotten particularly nasty since their divorce. In early January, Jayson was arrested after an argument with Boebert got unruly at a restaurant. He accused her of punching him in the face, authorities cleared her of wrongdoing and he was charged with disorderly conduct after refusing to leave. Jayson was charged a second time a few weeks later after a physical altercation with their 18-year-old son, Tyler, in which Jayson had grabbed a rifle after the teenager called the authorities.

Her opponents note that it would have been possible for Boebert to get away from Jayson without abandoning her current constituency. You could drive six hours, from Grand Junction to Pueblo, and still be in the 3rd district. And some of them have questioned whether her decision to remain in the limelight is the best thing for her boys right now. (Last week, Tyler <a href="https://www.cpr.org/2024/02/28/rep-lauren-boebert-son-tyler-arrested-multiple-felony-charges/" target=_blank>made headlines</a> after being arrested and charged with 22 counts including vehicle trespass, property thefts and criminal possession of ID documents.)

Boebert said she has contemplated receding from public life — the way anyone, especially someone with kids, might consider quitting their job, but said she thinks it’s important for her to continue fighting in Washington to keep the country safe and free for her family.

The move, she said, has been “liberating.” She now has a chance to be the best version of herself — which, to be clear, will be just like the old version.

“The only difference I perceive is that I’m not weighted down and afraid someone is going to be mad at me at the end of the day,” Boebert said of her new life. “I can have a thousand people come and tell me how much they love me, and say ‘Thank you so much.’ And if I don’t get it from the one person I’m really needing it from, then I feel like, you know, maybe I’m not doing enough.”

There are a lot of different ways to look at Boebert’s move. You could see it as a necessary step for a divorcee to cope with a legitimately harrowing family ordeal. You could see it as a strategically convenient way for a politician who enjoys power and status to avoid losing it. You could see it as a way for someone who grew up without a leash to slip out of some unwelcome restraints.

Maybe it’s as simple as this: She moved so she doesn’t have to change.

An earlier version of this article misreported the location of Rifle, Colo., as being on the eastern side of the state. It is on the western side. An earlier version also incorrectly referred to Colorado's 3rd district as the 4th district in one reference. The article has been corrected. 

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Brandeis University, B.A. in American Studies

Ben Terris is a writer in The Washington Post's Style section with a focus on national politics.

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Lauren Boebert’s battle to stay in Congress after rough couple years

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Portrait of Lauren Bobert at The University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

Photographs by Stephen Speranza for The Washington Post

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Lauren Boebert doesn’t want to lose the House