September 10, 2024 03:33 PM UTC

The Grope Felt Round The World: One Year After #Beetlebert

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• by: Colorado Pols

To say that the Colorado political landscape looked very different one year ago today would be an understatement like few in our years of history covering Colorado politics. On September 10, 2023, the fate of Colorado’s perpetual motion machine of political mayhem Rep. Lauren Boebert was very much in doubt. Five days before, Boebert sent an email blast to her supporters flat-out stating that “If the Election were held today…Lauren would lose.” After barely holding on to her seat in 2022 by a 546-vote margin against hard-charging Democratic challenger Adam Frisch, Boebert’s weakness in a district that should not have been a problem for Republicans to defend had made her a liability the Colorado Republican donor class was exhausting of propping up–so much so that a heretofore un”hurd”-of challenger, Grand Junction Attorney Jeff Hurd, had launched a primary bid challenging Boebert with significant Republican support.

And then Boebert gave her opponents a gift that would keep on giving.

The initial reports following Boebert’s ejection from Denver’s Buell Theater on the night of September 10, 2023 focused on her alleged smoking of a vape pen while seated in the crowded venue, as well as the harder-to-deny images of Boebert berating Denver Center for the Performing Arts staffers on her way out the door. Boebert had reportedly threatened to contact Denver’s Democratic Mayor Mike Johnston to complain about her treatment, dropping the classic “do you know who I am” as if knowing who is breaking the law makes someone less of a lawbreaker. As for smoking a vape pen? Boebert strenuously denied vaping in the theater through staff, claiming that the “heavy fog machines” from the production were responsible.

Two days later, 9NEWS obtained footage from a security camera in the theater that literally blew Boebert’s denials out of the metaphorical water:

Here you can see Boebert obviously hitting her vape pen with children around her, exhaling into the patrons seated in front of her, proving that she had ordered her staff to not only lie but to call the numerous fellow theatergoers who complained about Boebert’s behavior liars. But before Boebert even had the chance to acknowledge that she had not been truthful about the vaping, something else emerged from the security camera footage obtained by 9NEWS that came to define the scandal well outside the scope of Colorado’s Indoor Clean Air Act:

Like the image above of Boebert hitting her vape pen, this is a cropped close-up of the same wide-angle security camera footage from the Buell Theater as obtained by 9NEWS. For reasons that should not be necessary to explain in adult company, the lewd behavior shown in this clip became an instant global viral sensation on social quickly followed by traditional media, far beyond the reaction that a simple case of vaping indoors would have garnered. “Groping” was the descriptive term that polite media outlets generally used, along with other more profane descriptions that might exaggerate the subject at hand somewhat. With or without creative liberties taken, the salacious element of the “Beetlebert” incident is what undeniably propelled the scandal from the usual small-time misdeed into something that even for Colorado’s most scandal-adjacent member of Congress could be career-ending.

After the full extent of Boebert’s misbehavior at the Buell on September 10th became public, Boebert’s decline steepened into a freefall as Republicans rushed to endorse Jeff Hurd over Boebert in the 2024 CO-03 primary. Already disaffected by Boebert’s embarrassing bombast and general ineffectiveness as an advocate for her district. “Beetlebert” gave Republican the pretext they had been long waiting for to come out publicly against Boebert with less fear of reprisal. Throughout the fall and into December of last year, Boebert limped along on a sort of “apology tour” of the Third District, seeking forgiveness and promising to tepid support to do better.

In the end, in a course of events we could not possibly have predicted on September 10, 2023, Lauren Boebert’s political career survived via one of the most audacious lateral moves in the history of Colorado politics. Rep. Ken Buck, who had represented Colorado’s deep-red Eastern Plains in CO-04 since taking over from Cory Gardner in 2014, had announced his retirement from Congress in early November, having spent the latter part of his time in Congress as an unreliable gadfly bedeviling his fellow Republicans–at least in some part over Donald Trump’s assault on the democratic process in the 2020 presidential election. Recognizing that she was on track to lose the CO-03 June 25th Republican primary to Hurd, Boebert announced two days after Christmas that she would switch to run in the already-crowded CO-04 GOP primary to determine Buck’s successor. Boebert brought a war chest and name recognition that outmatched her opponents in this race, prompting Buck to announce in March his immediate retirement in hope of an appointed successor having a leg up against Boebert in the primary.

That successor was supposed to be former state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, who picked up big-name Republican endorsements upon jumping into the race in early December. But Sonnenberg proved incapable of consolidating the majority opposition among Republican primary voters to Boebert, and the vacancy committee to appoint a temporary successor chose perennial loser candidate Greg Lopez to serve out Buck’s term instead of a candidate running against Boebert in the June 25th primary. That set the stage for Boebert to win the primary with a 44% plurality of the vote, short of a majority–and we’ll never know what might have happened if a viable alternative to Boebert had emerged from the pack.

One year after a night that should have ended her political career, Boebert is now the Republican nominee for the state’s most solidly Republican district, having defied the Republican brass who came at her knives-out after the Beetlebert incident and taken Ken Buck’s much safer seat against their will. Boebert is also the only successful congressional candidate who allied with embattled Colorado Republican Party chairman Dave Williams while he meddled in her primary, although Boebert tried to cover her backside afterward with a sternly-worded letter. Boebert will most likely continue to underperform in her new district relative to just about any other Republican, counting on the additional padding in the state’s redistricting “Republican dumping ground” to take arithmetic pressure off her re-election. Boebert’s outrages will in turn continue to attract capable Democratic challengers aware of the long odds to challenge her, with Democrat Trisha Calvarese doing her best to replicate Betsy Markey’s underdog win against Marilyn Musgrave in this district back in 2008.

What’s clear today is that Beetlebert, while it may be a story that defines Lauren Boebert, is not the end of Boebert’s story like we and just about everyone else believed it was a year ago. No one should entertain much hope that Boebert has learned from these experiences and will mature into a more effective representative, in fact the experience has most likely made Boebert believe even more strongly that her career in politics is the result of divine providence.

But like Mark Twain famously said about carrying a cat by the tail, the rest of us have learned a lesson that can be learned no other way.