The AP has called Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District for anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO).

Boebert, who served two terms in Colorado’s Third, switched districts this year, fearing her Democratic opponent – who nearly beat her in 2022 – would force her out of Congress. The Fourth is a more conservative district than the Third, but switching districts led to charges of being a “carpetbagger.”

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Lauren Boebert demands Kamala Harris apologize for Joe Biden calling people like her “garbage”
People on social media mocked Boebert for her demand for an apology.

Boebert has spent much of her time in Congress facing personal scandals, including when she got kicked out of a live performance of Beetlejuice, the musical, for being disruptive, vaping, and groping her then-boyfriend in the theater near children.

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Instead of facing voters in the Third, she switched districts to the Fourth after former Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) announced he would be leaving Congress. In June, she won the crowded Republican primary – in part due to an endorsement from Donald Trump – essentially clinching reelection in the district that voted for Trump by a 57-41 margin in 2020.

Boebert has made numerous anti-LGBTQ+ statements in her two terms in Congress, including using homophobic insults to attack Transporation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for taking care of his kids, telling drag performers to stay out of her district, and accusing transgender people of being terrorists.

She got a score of “0” on HRC’s Congressional Scorecard for her first term in Congress, showing her solid opposition to LGBTQ+ equality. She didn’t just vote against LGBTQ+ legislation; she led a press conference in front of Congress to stop the Equality Act – which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of protected classes in federal civil rights law – from passing in 2021 when Congress was voting on it. She claimed that the law would be used to take children away from their parents if the parents refused to give their kids access to gender-affirming care, something that wasn’t in the bill at all.

In 2022, a report from HRC noted that Boebert’s Twitter account was the third biggest source of anti-transgender misinformation on the social media platform, just after rightwing pundit James Lindsay and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

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