Fight For Every Seat

Neither party fields candidates for every House seat, but seeing Lauren Boebert headed for a likely recount gives me hope that Dems can pull this one seat off.

 

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, a renowned conservative firebrand whose combative style helped define the new right, is likely headed to an automatic recount in her bid to fend off a surprisingly difficult challenge by a Democratic businessman from the ritzy ski town of Aspen.

The Associated Press has declared the election in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District too close to call. AP will await the results of a potential recount to call the race. With nearly all votes counted, the incumbent Boebert leads Democrat Adam Frisch by 0.16 percentage points, or 551 votes out of nearly 327,000 votes counted.

A margin that small qualifies for an automatic recount under Colorado law, in a race that has garnered national attention as Republicans try to bolster their advantage in the U.S. House after clinching a narrow majority Wednesday night.

As counties finalized unofficial results on Thursday, Boebert’s already slim lead was cut in half. All but one of the 27 counties in the district had reported final results by Thursday evening. Otero County plans to finalize its numbers on Friday.

In Colorado, a mandatory recount is triggered when the margin of votes between the top two candidates is at or below 0.5% of the leading candidate’s vote total. On Thursday night, that margin was around .34%.

 

It's extremely unlikely that Frisch will be able to win, maybe he can shave 50 votes off with a recount, but likely not 500+. Curing votes, the process of correcting errors on the ballot in order to make them count, has a far likelier chance of moving the needle.

The updated results follow a hectic few days for both campaigns as they scrambled to “cure” ballots — the process of confirming voters’ choices if their ballots had been rejected in the initial count. Both the Republican and Democratic national campaign committees had boots on the ground in Colorado to support the efforts.

Spokespeople for Frisch’s and Boebert’s campaigns declined to comment.

 

Boebert has declared victory already and most likely she's correct. But the race never should have been this close in the first place. There's zero chance that Boebert moderates her disgusting nonsense with the GOP taking control of the House, so maybe she can put herself out of a job in two years.