Lauren Boebert Moved to Colorado’s Safest Republican Seat to Survive — Six Days After the Election, a Retired Navy Admiral Took It

On election night, Lauren Boebert did not look like a woman about to lose anything. At her watch party at The Grainhouse in Windsor, Colorado, she checked returns on a laptop. A 9NEWS reporter, Spencer Soicher, summed up the mood live on air: “She doesn’t seem too worried. She’s walkin around, drinkin a Busch Light.”

Six days later, her career in Congress was over, or close to it.

On Monday afternoon, CNN’s Decision Desk projected that Boebert, 39, will lose Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, the reddest seat in the state, the one she moved across Colorado to claim precisely because it was supposed to be safe. The woman projected to take it is a first-time candidate who once pinned on two stars. And the most surprising part of her story is not the uniform.

The Seat That Was Supposed to Be Forever

To understand how big a shock this is, start with the map. The 4th District sprawls across the Eastern Plains and the suburbs of Douglas, Weld, Larimer and Adams counties. Donald Trump carried it by roughly 18 points in 2024, and it had not sent a Democrat to Congress since 2008.

Boebert landed there almost by escape. She first won office in 2020 by toppling a five-term Republican, Scott Tipton, in a primary. Two years later, in the western 3rd District, she survived Democrat Adam Frisch by just 546 votes. So she switched districts for 2024 and won by nearly 12 points. The Colorado Times Recorder wrote that many people assumed the move had made her “a congresswoman for life.”

She also survived a lot. There was the 2022 State of the Union, where she heckled President Joe Biden, who later called her “one of the leaders of this extreme MAGA movement.” There was September 2023, when she was removed from a Denver performance of “Beetlejuice” after surveillance footage showed her vaping, and her and her date groping each other. She apologized and won anyway.

“This Doesn’t Define Me”

By Wednesday morning, Eileen Laubacher was ahead, and she stayed ahead. That evening Boebert went on 9NEWS and spoke like someone already bracing for the fall.

“We’re about a 5,000-vote deficit right now, a little bit less than that,” she said. “But we’re hoping that those election day ballots turn in my favor. And if not, again, this doesn’t define me. I’m a mom. I’m a granny, and I’m a believer. We’re going to continue moving faith to faith and glory to glory.”

The late ballots did help her, though not enough. On Thursday, her campaign attorney, Scott Gessler, released a statement saying that ballot returns had been “trending in Congresswoman Boebert’s direction.” Then he added: “We are investigating some very unusual voting patterns and expect this election to head to a recount, one way or another.”

The campaign did not explain what was unusual, according to 9NEWS and Colorado Politics. And the arithmetic was against them. 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark pointed out that Laubacher’s lead was “well outside the automatic recount threshold,” though a campaign can still pay for a recount itself.

On Monday, with the Associated Press estimating close to 98% of the vote counted, CNN made its call. The numbers: Laubacher 185,923 votes, or 48.77%. Boebert 182,686, or 47.92%. A gap of 3,237 votes out of more than 380,000 cast.

The Admiral Who Said She’d Never Run

Laubacher, a retired two-star rear admiral, spent 34 years in the Navy. Her campaign biography says she decided to go to the U.S. Naval Academy when she was in preschool, before women were even allowed in. She entered with the 11th class to include women in 1986 and graduated in 1990.

Her career ran through naval intelligence, a 2009 deployment to Afghanistan and three years as the senior U.S. defense official at the American embassy in New Delhi. Her last post, from 2022 to 2024, was senior director for South Asia at the National Security Council under Biden. She retired in October 2024 and went home to Colorado, where she and her husband, Chris, raised five children.

She told Colorado Public Radio she never intended to run. She did it, she said, “because we deserve a leader here in this district who understands this isn’t about you. It’s about service.” Her website was blunter: “Lauren Boebert has had her chance. She hasn’t delivered. I will.” She campaigned on prices, rural hospitals, middle-class tax cuts and ending Trump’s tariffs, and she raised more than $10 million doing it.

Then there is the detail that makes this result even stranger. According to Colorado Public Radio, Laubacher was a registered Republican until 2024, when she switched to unaffiliated. She became a Democrat in 2025, the same year she launched the campaign that would unseat one of the GOP’s most famous names.

Trump’s “MAGA Warrior” and the Other Number

The president was there at the end. In the final days of the race, Trump praised Boebert on Truth Social as “a MAGA Warrior, who has been with us from the very beginning.”

It had not always been that warm. Boebert crossed the White House last year by backing the push to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Then, this May, she campaigned for Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, one of Trump’s loudest Republican critics. Trump fired back on Truth Social: “Is anyone interested in running against Weak Minded Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District?” He called her “dumb” and threatened to pull his endorsement.

There is one more number in this race. A Libertarian, construction superintendent Douglas Mangeris, took 12,605 votes, 3.31% of the total. That is almost four times the gap between the top two.

Overall, the district swung about 19 points toward Democrats compared with the 2024 presidential race, according to The New York Times’ analysis cited by Quartz. CNN’s Brianna Keilar said the result pushed the Democratic House majority to 256 seats.

What Happens Now

CNN’s projection is not certification. Colorado counties have until Friday, Nov. 13, to finish counting, and a campaign can request a recount at its own expense between Nov. 13 and Nov. 25. A state-paid recount only happens automatically if the margin falls within half of 1% of the winner’s total, roughly 929 votes, according to 9NEWS. When Boebert’s 2022 race went to a recount, it changed only a handful of votes.

As of Monday afternoon, Boebert had not conceded. Over the weekend, her X account posted about gas prices and endorsed a friend for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee. Laubacher was already in Washington for new-member orientation. Her own post on Monday was four words long: “The work starts now!”

If the count holds, she will be sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027. And in a race that turned into a national spectacle, it comes down to two grandmothers. Boebert called herself a granny on live TV the night she started to fall behind. Laubacher, her campaign says, has three grandchildren of her own, and come January she is the one going back to work.