Democrat challenger concedes to Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert as race heads to likely recount

Rep. Lauren Boebert, a far-right Republican from Colorado, was locked in a race that was too close to call and inside the threshold for an automatic recount, the Associated Press projected Thursday. Despite the close contest, her opponent, Democrat Adam Frisch, called the lawmaker Friday to concede the race and told his supporters that the recount wasn’t likely to change the outcome.

With nearly all votes counted, Boebert led Frisch by 0.16 of a percentage point, the AP reported. Under state law, a mandatory recount must be completed no later than 35 days after the election, which is Dec. 13. Boebert’s lead was 551 votes out of nearly 327,000 votes counted, the AP reported. The news agency said it would await the results of a potential recount to call the race.

After his concession call Friday, Frisch told reporters that the chances of a recount “changing more than a handful of votes is very small, very, very small.” He asked supporters to discontinue raising funds and “false hope.”

“Colorado elections are safe, accurate and secure. Please save your money for your groceries, your rent, your children, for other important causes and organizations,” Frisch said.

Boebert tweeted Friday about the call, saying she looked forward to getting past the election and “focusing on conservative governance in the House majority.”

The race in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District - a wide swath of the state’s west - was a showdown between Boebert, a gun-toting Republican from the working-class town of Rifle on the banks of the Colorado River, and Frisch, a conservative Democrat from the ritzy ski town of Aspen.

Former president Donald Trump won the district by about eight percentage points in 2020, helping pave what had been thought to be a clear path to victory for Boebert in the largely rural district.

But the race ended up closer than many had expected. Frisch, a former city council member in Aspen, had framed his campaign as a reprieve from the commotion around Boebert, describing himself as a “candidate to defeat Lauren Boebert.”

“Lauren Boebert is an anti-American, anti-Colorado show pony who can’t tell right from wrong,” Frisch said on his campaign website. “I’ve spent my career as a successful businessman. Now I’m running for Congress to cut inflation and create local economic growth and jobs. I’ll put Colorado First and keep America Strong.”

Since her election in 2020, Boebert has made national headlines for her remarks on subjects including gun rights and pandemic restrictions and has made baseless claims about Democrats. She also came under scrutiny for using campaign funds to pay her rent and utility bills, and for receiving an eyebrow-raising $22,259 in mileage reimbursements from her campaign.

Last year, a group of Democratic lawmakers called for Boebert to be stripped of her committee assignments after she made an Islamophobic remark about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

“You know, we’re leaving the Capitol and we’re going back to my office and we get in an elevator and I see a Capitol Police officer running to the elevator,” Boebert told the crowd at an event in her district last November. “I see fret all over his face, and he’s reaching, and the door’s shutting, like I can’t open it, like what’s happening. I look to my left, and there she is. Ilhan Omar. And I said, ‘Well, she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine.’ "

Boebert later apologized “to anyone in the Muslim community I offended” but declined to publicly apologize to Omar, and doubled down on her Islamophobic attacks instead.

In March, Boebert heckled President Biden during his State of the Union address as he mentioned the dangers U.S. troops face, among them cancer, the disease that his son Beau died of in 2015.

“When they came home, many of the world’s fittest and best trained warriors were never the same. Headaches. Numbness. Dizziness,” Biden said. “A cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin. I know. One of those soldiers was my son, Major Beau Biden.”

“American warriors in flag-draped coffins,” the president added.

“Thirteen of them!” Boebert shouted, referring to the U.S. service members who were killed in a suicide bomb attack at an entrance to Kabul’s international airport during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. She was booed and shushed by others. One Democrat shouted: “Kick her out!”

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The Washington Post’s Mariana Alfaro and Amy Gardner contributed to this report.