Lauren Boebert

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Say her name three times, and Lauren Boebert appears: in a new district, in a new headline, in a theater row she’s about to be escorted out of.

The United States House Representative has certainly made her mark on Colorado since taking office in 2021. From jaw-dropping public outings to being on Donald Trump’s good side (and, for a moment, his bad side), the 39-year-old upstart politician has enough controversies to fill a book.

But here’s the thing: She’s still winning.

Despite a tumultuous career, the media darling (or villain) is 6-0 when running against another candidate, and, as of September, was favorited to retain her District 4 seat in the Nov. 3 election against Eileen Laubacher, according to a poll by the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition.

That doesn’t mean that people actually like her. They just know her. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s a Republican in CD4, which covers part of eastern Colorado and areas south of Denver, including Douglas County. It ranks as the most Republican congressional district in Colorado, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index.

Social media posts featuring Boebert often result in hundreds of comments, mostly snickering and clever jabs from both sides of the aisle. People point at decisions, remarks, looks and one historical Beetlejuice-related debacle. But it’s hard to find Lauren Boebert rallies or public events in Colorado. Her last virtual town hall was on April 28; the congresswoman has said “it’s not safe” for her to hold town halls in person.

So, why is she still around? Why does she keep dominating the news cycle?

Maybe her real supporters are hiding under the bleachers, scared to throw up a pom-pom as Boebert sings through another gun-toting tune. Maybe she’s like a bad TV show we can’t stop cynically watching as the world slowly burns around us.

“There seems to be a trail of chaos wherever she goes,” Dick Wadhams, a longtime Republican political consultant in Colorado, tells Westword.

Welcome to the Boebert show. Let’s run back some highlights.

Boebert’s political career began in 2019 when she was a restaurant owner in District 3, which largely comprises Western Colorado. Former Texas State Rep. Beto O’Rourke, whose national profile was growing at the time, visited Aurora to talk about automatic rifle bans.

Boebert, who lived and worked in Rifle, traveled to the Denver metro to confront the politician, which gained attention on social media and traction among some new fans back home, according to Wadhams.

“She got that initial burst of attention, and then she decided to challenge Congressman Scott Tipton in the 3rd Congressional District,” Wadhams says. “There was no indication at all that Scott Tipton was vulnerable at all.”

The incumbent Republican Tipton had been secure in office since 2011, but Boebert came gunning for the role three months after confronting O’Rourke. She appealed to the district’s MAGA base, many of whom she endeared herself to by wearing a gun on her hip while campaigning — and backing the QAnon conspiracy theory.

“Everything that I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values,” she said when asked about the wild theory of satanic cults leading the opposition against Trump.

Photos surfaced of Boebert posing with “Three Percenter” militia extremist members at a 2019 gun rights rally in Denver. You know, the same group that federal prosecutors tied to a 2020 scheme to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and bomb plots targeting government and minority community buildings.

Boebert claimed she didn’t know who the Three Percenter members were when the photos were taken, but just over a year later, more photos were published in the Colorado Times Recorder showing Boebert and the same people together before the 2019 rally.

In 2020, a district judge issued a cease-and-desist order against Boebert for reopening her restaurant during Gov. Jared Polis’ COVID-19 closure orders.

Yet many of these actions only appealed to her base.

Boebert went on to defeat Tipton in the Republican primary with 54.6% of the vote share, shocking the crowd and becoming the first person to unseat an incumbent congressman in the same party in Colorado since 1972, according to Wadhams.

And it was all down the Western Slope from there.

Within her first week on the job, Boebert voted against the 2020 presidential election results. After the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, she posted “Today is 1776” on social media.

Boebert followed that up by voting against the Violence Against Women Act, saying on social media that she opposed the bill because it would secure abortion rights and that the “expired amendment should be thrown out like rotten milk.” A few months later, she called Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar a terrorist in a viral video. Boebert later apologized for that one, at least.

Boebert has tried to label herself a conservative counterpart to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She wore a red dress that said “Let’s Go Brandon” — a conservative code phrase for “Fuck Joe Biden” — when meeting with Trump in 2021, a direct satire of Ocasio-Cortez’s red “Tax the Rich” dress at the Met Gala weeks before.

That was just her first year in office. In her second year, Boebert publicly said she was tired of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution. She also helped stoke the furry fever of the early 2020s, saying that Durango schools were “putting litter boxes in schools for people who identify as cats” during a luncheon.

Funny enough, that rumor actually started in Canada and then spread online via fake social media posts claiming that schools were starting to accommodate “furry” culture, not even those in the LGBTQ community.

Her CD3 constituents weren’t as enamored with Boebert in her first reelection bid as controversies around her office continued. She barely defeated Democrat Adam Frisch in 2022, winning by just over 500 votes, and was heading to a recount when Frisch conceded.

“I think there were a lot of people who felt like that exposed a pretty significant vulnerability she had in the third district,” Wadhams says. “That glare of attention from the media started working against her pretty early in her first term, as she got a lot of attention for her kind of flamboyant style.”

We saw a few more incidents in 2022, including yelling at President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address after the Afghanistan military withdrawal. Boebert also claimed that Biden’s student loan relief plan was “robbing hard-working Americans to pay for Karen’s daughter’s degree in lesbian dance theory,” a phrase that later went viral.

But 2023 is when the drama really kicked in.

That summer, Boebert was recorded on video throwing a memorial pin in the trash given to her by gun violence activists honoring Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, a 10-year-old victim of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Boebert later apologized for “the appearance” of disrespecting the victims, partly blaming the incident on wearing headphones at the time. She also missed a debt ceiling vote while CNN cameras caught her scrambling up the steps to the meeting.

On Sept. 10, 2023, the whole world learned who Boebert was after she got kicked out of the “Beetlejuice” performance at the Buell Theatre in downtown Denver for allegedly vaping in her seat next to a pregnant woman and fondling her date.

The worst part? He was a registered Democrat … from Aspen.

Boebert immediately went on social media to joke about being kicked out for being too loud, but the theater released security camera footage that told the whole story. That footage, which showed Boebert vaping in her seat and giving theater employees the middle finger as she was escorted out — among other things — went viral nationwide.

Even with public backing from Trump, cracks in Boebert’s