This one is now official.

After more than a week of counting, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert has lost her bid for a fourth term in Congress.

The Associated Press called Colorado’s 4th Congressional District for Democrat Eileen Laubacher on Friday afternoon.

The call turns an earlier projection into the definitive race update and gives Democrats another flip in what was supposed to be one of Colorado’s safest Republican districts.

Fox News reported that Laubacher held 48.7% of the vote to Boebert’s 47.9% with 99% counted when the AP made its call.

ADVERTISEMENT

Libertarian Douglas Mangeris drew a little more than 3%, a share far larger than the margin separating the two leading candidates.

Fox also reported that the result ends Boebert’s attempt to win a fourth term. She represented Colorado’s 3rd District for two terms before moving to the more Republican-friendly 4th District and winning there in 2024.

The network placed the result inside a much larger Democratic wave that flipped Republican-held seats in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina and Mississippi. It reported that Democrats had already secured a commanding House majority while a handful of races remained uncalled.

That move was supposed to give one of the best-known MAGA voices in Congress a much safer political home.

Instead, the seat flipped blue.

News outlets moved quickly once the AP issued its Friday call:

Boebert’s campaign did not accept those early calls.

Her attorney said the campaign was examining what it described as unusual voting patterns as Laubacher’s lead narrowed and then widened during the count.

When CNN projected Laubacher as the winner earlier this week, Boebert publicly refused to concede.

ADVERTISEMENT

She argued that counties still had ballots to count and cure and said the contest was not over until the process was complete.

Friday was the key date she had been waiting for.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s 2026 election calendar set November 12 as the deadline for voters to cure signature or identification problems and for eligible military and overseas ballots to arrive.

The calendar then required counties to finish tabulating accepted in-person and mail ballots on November 13 and upload their updated results files.

It also makes clear that the later canvass and recount calendar is separate from the deadline for completing the count itself. Interested parties may request a recount beginning November 13, but the state does not finish its formal canvass until later in the month.

In other words, Friday was the point at which the remaining cure, military and overseas ballot deadlines had run their course and counties had to report the completed tabulation that election desks needed for a final projection.

That final influx was not enough to erase Laubacher’s lead.

Colorado Public Radio reported earlier in the week that Laubacher was already ahead by more than 3,000 votes, a margin outside the range that would trigger an automatic recount under Colorado law.

Both women had traveled to Washington while the result remained unresolved. Laubacher attended orientation for incoming House members, while Boebert continued participating in congressional business and waited for the count.

ADVERTISEMENT

CPR also noted that Laubacher considered herself the winner before the AP made its call, while Boebert maintained that the outstanding ballot process needed to finish. That gap between political reality and a definitive election call explains why the race remained in limbo for days after other networks projected the outcome.

A Colorado outlet posted the updated Friday margin as the race was called:

The scale of the upset is difficult to overstate.

Boebert won this district in 2024 by more than 50,000 votes. President Trump carried it by more than 18 percentage points that same year.

This was not a suburban swing seat that Republicans expected to lose. It was the most Republican-friendly congressional district in Colorado.

But the money and the movement in Douglas County told a different story.

Axios Douglas County reported that Laubacher outraised Boebert by more than 10-to-1 through June and built an advantage of roughly 22,000 votes in Douglas County.

The outlet noted that Republicans had carried that county by nearly 26,500 votes just four years earlier.

Axios described the result as a stunning upset in a longtime Republican stronghold. Laubacher’s advantage in the populous Denver suburbs overwhelmed Boebert’s support across the Eastern Plains and transformed a district that had barely drawn national attention at the start of the cycle.

ADVERTISEMENT

The fundraising gap helped make that possible. Laubacher entered the final stretch with the resources to define the race, while Boebert found herself defending terrain that Republicans had treated as safely red.

That swing helped produce the district’s first Democratic member of Congress in 18 years.

Laubacher, a retired Navy rear admiral and first-time candidate, will replace a congresswoman who became a national figure almost immediately after entering the House in 2021.

Boebert built her reputation as a relentless defender of the Second Amendment, a fierce critic of the Biden administration and one of President Trump’s most visible allies on Capitol Hill.

Trisha Calvarese, the Democrat Boebert defeated in 2024, congratulated Laubacher while also crediting Boebert for signing the petition that forced a House vote on releasing the Epstein files:

She also survived one of the closest House races in America in 2022, defeating Democrat Adam Frisch by only 546 votes in her former district.

Two years later, the district switch gave her a double-digit victory and appeared to reset her political future.

Now that future is uncertain.

Fox reported that Democrats hold 256 House seats to the Republicans’ 169, with several races still unresolved. A party needs 218 seats for control.

Boebert’s loss is therefore bigger than one personality or one district.

It is another piece of a brutal midterm map for the GOP, and it raises hard questions about how a Republican incumbent lost a district President Trump had carried so comfortably only two years earlier.

The earlier calls were projections.

Friday’s AP call is the update that closes the race: Eileen Laubacher is projected to win, Lauren Boebert is projected to lose, and Colorado’s 4th Congressional District is flipping from Republican to Democrat.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

Join The Conversation. Leave a Comment.