Lauren Boebert has won her primary. What now?

Lauren Boebert has won the Republican nomination for the House of Representatives in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District.

The win marks just the latest high-octane interlude in a political career that has been turbulent from the outset — to say the least.

Lauren Boebert, a mother of four sons and new grandmother at the age of 37, followed an unlikely path to Congress and to the Republican Party in general. She was raised by a Democrat mother, often on welfare, and first registered with the party of the left herself before switching to Republican in 2008.

She often speaks of her liberal upbringing and its alleged consequences to hammer home the rationale for her conservative values, just as she draws on her teenage job at McDonald’s in Rifle, where she dropped out of high school to work as a shift manager at the fast food chain.

Rep. Lauren Boebert and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene heckle during President Biden’s State of the Union in 2022. The Colorado congresswoman handily won her GOP primary on Tuesday (Getty Images)

It was fast food that would also put Boebert on the map and, arguably, on the path to the national stage; she and her then-husband, Jayson, opened a gun-themed eatery in Rifle in 2013 called Shooters Grill, which made headlines and eventually drew tourists with its open-carry waitresses. The Second Amendment theme foreshadowed her gun-heavy political career. Within a few years, she was publicly fighting for gun rights and in 2019 launched a congressional campaign to unseat five-term incumbent Scott Tipton in CD3. Only after she announced did she earn her GED.

Riding a wave of Western Slope libertarianism and Covid lockdown backlash, Boebert rocketed to victory in a highly-publicized upset. That kicked off what would become a nonstop rollercoaster of personal and professional shenanigans.

Boebert established herself as one of Trump’s most loyal and vocal supporters in the House, then became even more infamous after heckling President Biden during the 2022 State of the Union address. The move was controversial, even among her Republican colleagues, and her Democratic opponent in the CD3 race – Aspen businessman Adam Frisch – subsequently nearly tanked her re-election campaign, mandating a recount that saw her narrowly limp to victory with just over 540 votes.

Boebert and her then-husband operated Shooters Grill in Rifle until 2022; it became a tourist attraction for gun paraphernalia and later its association with the firebrand congresswoman (Sheila Flynn)

Frisch geared up for a rematch and in February 2023 announced his campaign to again unseat her – this time with higher name recognition, a national spotlight on the race and donations pouring in for the Democrat.

As his star continued to rise, though, Boebert’s began to falter. Her work in Washington did earn her an ally, at least for political expediency, in Mike Johnson following his election to speaker in the fall of 2023. But that was a tumultuous year for the House Republican caucus in general, and Boebert found herself in a public feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of her most acidic colleagues, in interviews.

Their spat escalated throughout the summer of 2023 and led to a confrontation between the two on the House floor wherein Greene was reported to have called Boebert a “little b****”.

Elsewhere, Boebert filed for divorce in May 2023, and by September had encountered one of the biggest stumbling blocks of her career: The sitting representative was filmed vaping and misbehaving with a date at a Denver theater, resulting in her ejection.

Boebert denied the incident before attempting to blame it on the trauma of her divorce when faced with video evidence – but the hits kept coming. She got into a public screaming match with her ex-husband, then her son – who’d recently fathered a baby with his teen girlfriend – got arrested.

Boebert, as usual, was making headlines, but not for the reasons she’d prefer. Frisch’s campaign continued steamrolling ahead, while her CD3 re-election bid stalled. She announced around Christmas time that she would abandon the campaign altogether, instead seeking a seat in a more heavily conservative district across the state. That alliance with Speaker Johnson and her continued loyalty to Trump led to her retaining two powerful friends as she sought a seat Tuesday in the fourth district, where she presumed she would have a better chance.

She got her answer tonight.

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