Colorado’s high-profile conservative U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert maintained her hold among Western Slope Republicans and fended off a challenge within her party from state Sen. Don Coram, unofficial results show.
As of 7:31 p.m. on Tuesday, unofficial results showed Boebert, of Silt, with 63.75% of the vote to Coram’s 36.25%. So far, 70,386 votes have been counted in the district. The Associated Press affirmed at 7:37 p.m. that Boebert had won the race.
Not only did Boebert raise more money for her campaign but she spent more and enjoyed the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. Despite any controversies surrounding the congresswoman — and there were many — she maintained a strong hold on her district.
Coram entered the race relatively late and as a long shot. He couldn’t compete with Boebert’s reach on social media and his grassroots campaign strategy apparently failed to materialize.
Boebert leaned heavily into her conservative credentials during the relatively low-key campaign. All the while, Coram attacked her for failing to pass a single piece of legislation in Congress and said he would more readily work with Democrats.
Boebert even appears to have successfully fended off attempts to smear her campaign with anonymously sourced rumors from the same group that helped defeat first-term U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a like-minded, far-right Republican from North Carolina.
But the political action committee publishing those rumors, American Muckrakers, shows no signs of slowing as Boebert looks to enter the general election. If the results hold, she’ll square off against Democratic candidate Adam Frisch, who appears to have defeated Sol Sandoval and Alex Walker in the early results.
Frisch, a former Aspen City Council member, holds 43.81% of the vote, early results show. Sol Sandoval, a community activist from Pueblo, held 39.87% of the vote and Alex Walker, an engineer living in Eagle, took home 16.32% of the vote.