UPDATE #2: Watch out, Lauren Boebert is throwing fellow Republicans under the bus:
Rep. Lauren Boebert, who is locked in an unexpectedly tight race with Democratic challenger Adam Frisch, said a lack of enthusiasm for other Republicans on the ballot may have cost her support https://t.co/DNKRjjAUH6
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) November 10, 2022
The problem couldn’t possibly be Boebert. That’s inconceivable!
—–
UPDATE: The latest statement from Adam Frisch as counting goes on:
The race to represent Colorado’s third congressional district is still too close to call with thousands of ballots, including from the military and overseas, remaining to be counted. On Thursday, Rep. Boebert’s opponent Adam Frisch issued the following statement:
“Everyone in this district deserves to have their voice heard, regardless of political affiliation, and I am confident that each and every valid ballot will be counted,” Frisch said. “In particular, we must honor and respect those who serve our country by ensuring that every military ballot is taken into account. Every vote matters in this incredibly close race and thousands of votes in Pueblo County and from military and overseas voters remain, and a considerable number of curable ballots remain as well. It is crucial for our democracy to count every vote and I have full confidence in the 27 county clerks in this district to conduct a fair count. While I remain confident, I will ultimately respect the results of this election regardless of the outcome.”
“The closeness of this race is a testament to the fact that the people of Western and Southern Colorado are growing tired of the angertainment industry that Boebert is a part of and want a representative who will fight for bipartisan solutions to the issues facing their families, their businesses, and communities,” Frisch added.
Boebert is lagging far behind expectations in CO-3, a district that election prognosticators and pundits widely considered to be safe for Boebert, particularly after a redistricting process that favored Republicans. The district favors Republicans by 7 points and elected President Trump by a 15 point margin in 2016. Voters in the district haven’t elected a Democrat to Congress since 2008. The historically close race points to the ability of Frisch, a conservative businessman, to build a coalition of Republican, Democrat, and Unaffiliated voters.
—–
The Pueblo Chieftain’s Anna Lynn Winfrey has the latest on ballot-counting in Colorado’s CD-3 race, where Democratic challenger Adam Frisch has led incumbent freshman GOP carnival of crazy Rep. Lauren Boebert by a steadily narrowing margin…until this morning:
Republican incumbent Lauren Boebert has now taken the lead from Democratic challenger Adam Frisch as thousands of votes are still being counted in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.
A new batch of data from Otero County, a rural community east of Pueblo, put Boebert up over Frisch by 386 votes.
Frisch was leading Election Day and maintained a razor-thin margin over Boebert through Thursday morning. Before the Otero County results were uploaded, Frisch was leading by only 62 votes.
Even though Boebert has pulled narrowly ahead with updates from small but deep-red Otero County, this thing is far from over:
Results from approximately 7,000 additional ballots are expected today from Pueblo County, the largest in the district by population. Frisch is up in Pueblo, with 54% of votes.
7,000 more ballots to drop in Pueblo could be enough if the current margins hold to flip the race back to Frisch. There is also reportedly some number of ballots yet to be counted in Pitkin County, Frisch’s home base and breaking heavily in his direction. Yesterday, 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark asserted that his team’s analysis of the remaining ballots to be counted indicates Frisch will prevail:
UPDATE: Democrat Adam Frisch is poised to upset Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert in CO-3, based on a 9NEWS analysis of remaining ballots, which are largely in counties where Frisch holds strong leads. #copolitics
— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) November 10, 2022
The sweeping victory for Colorado Democrats this year reached by what any reasonable pre-election analysis would have considered the best-case scenario with the secession concession of Republican Barb Kirkmeyer in Colorado’s brand-new CD-8. Even with Adam Frisch running a strong campaign and polling within striking distance, few expected Frisch to actually be in a position to oust Boebert in this Republican-leaning district. Whatever happens now, Frisch has blown away Boebert’s presumption of invulnerability after easily beating her Republican primary challenger Don Coram.
If Boebert survives this incredibly close race in what was supposed to be an adverse election year for Democrats, she’ll be a top target in 2024 now, perhaps from Frisch himself. But if Boebert does lose–and accepts the loss, of course–it’s the capstone achievement in an already historic election for Colorado Democrats. There would be nothing more Democrats could realistically have won in Colorado this year.
It would also be the end of an embarrassment to all of Colorado, without partisan distinction.
We’ll update with new developments as they come in. Stay tuned.
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Sorry to nag. "acclimation" means adjusting to climate change. Your vote was by acclamation.
If Frisch’s margins in Pueblo hold up, I like his chances. It looks very much like a recount either way, and that’s after the week-long cure period and time for military/overseas ballots to come in.
Democrats should take heed: Yes, Frisch has worked very hard, but it takes extraordinary talent in dumbshittery to be a Republican and come even close to losing this district the way it’s constituted. Boobert has managed to do so.
Any idea whether Jason’s O&G consulting contract has an “Act of Goddess “ clause so they can gracefully exit the relationship if Adam wins? This level of dumbshittery by BoBo and her team is clearly of biblical proportions.
They can escort him out of the office like they did at the bowling alley. He knows the drill by now. Style points for flashing his garbage while exiting.
How am I supposed to get any work done when all I do is update the ballot totals for this race, Nevada, & Arizona.
It's amazing that in a "red wave" and "midterm correction" we're looking at a Dem increase in the Senate and possibly holding the House.
And I need to get off the political news and get some work done…
And if Frisch loses, the second he announces he's running again in '24 I'll give him the maximum donation.
Pueblo vote update increased Boebert’s lead!
Boebert up by ~800
I read the link to that Chieftain article. It appeared that Boebert was expanding her lead, and that was several hours ago.
Holy MAGA JEBUS with a statistical AR15 this is a nail biter……love it. Boobert must be feeling just like Trump now.
Ugh, Boebert now up by 1200 as of 4:40pm MST
If she does manage to eke out a win, she'll be like "Mandate! God wanted me to win!"
There is no possibility that she will try to represent all her constituents, instead of just the Magats.
Ugh. Yeah a well-functioning person would think something like "I barely won. I should do more to represent everyone in my district so I can win their vote next time." But Boebert is a full-on MAGA moron so her thinking is gonna be "THEY almost got me! I need to unleash EVEN MOAR CRAZY while I still have time!"
She may be an idiot. But she's not wrong about the top of the GOP ticket sucking. That's not why this race is close.
Boebert is leading by 1,136 votes. Pitkin County has about 700 uncounted votes. No other county is less than 95% reporting. So, looks like it’s time to turn out the lights – the party’s over. But it was fun while it lasted. Amiright?
End of day look at the Sec of State's "Unofficial Results" — November 10, 2022, 6:39:14 PM
Fritsch … 49.82% … 159,315
Boebert .. 50.18% … 160,451
No clear aggregation of ballots yet to be processed, how many need to be "cured," So, we'll wait.
Considering most counties are sitting at 95% done rather than 98 or 99 suggests to me a lot of curing going on. It is a downside to all-mail ballots: people forget to sign their envelopes, spouses sign each other's by mistake, they drop them in a different county's drop box.
These are all curable things, but those cures are typically counted last among regular ballots. Then there are UOCAVA and lastly provisionals.
I know in Denver we had a large number of voters with ID-related problems who seemed to come to the vote centers in larger numbers in the last couple of hours on Tuesday. These were mostly new-to-Colorado folks who still had the driver's license from their old state and did not understand they needed other ID to vote. This generates provisional ballots. If other counties were seeing the same phenomena, there could be a large number of provisionals this year.
In any event we are in this for the long haul.
One note on the CD3 race:
In the week leading up to the election I tried to find polling on this race. Found none. What I did find was every national political ranking source listed CD3 as either likely GOP or solid GOP and paid no further attention to the race. None of them had it listed as a district "in play". Well, here we are.
When voters are told a race is unwinnable, they tend not to care as much about showing up, or voting past the top race or two. It will be interesting to see how many undervotes there are in this race. Perhaps if any of these "political guru sources" recognized how tight it was going to be (which I did say about a month ago), the extra attention on the race might have driven more voters to care to vote and make the outcome a little more decisive, one way or the other.
A stellar example of not writing off candidates too soon.
Just a thought.
One thing you gotta say for Frisch, he said from day one that Boebert was vulnerable. And he never dropped that message, The trick is to convince the media to not be lazy in their analysis.
I wonder how much of a difference it would have made if there'd been polling showing this to be a legit close race. I know I would have donated more, maybe GOTV would have been more robust…
Western Slope is also changing so it is possible that it won’t be forever red in the future. She might escape this time but a whole lot of Republicans and Independents voted against her radical hatred. The writing is on the wall.
The district might be changing some. But I am pretty confident that Frisch convinced enough business-not-ideology Republicans that he was pro-business and local focused and they voted for him, just this once, specifically to get Boebert out.
I think a lot of Republicans on the Western Slope are furious that we have a water crisis and major other issues around growth and wildfire, O&G decline, Ag economy, etc etc and she's parading around on the stage in other states being a noisy jerkoff with Trumpian nutjobs and completely ignoring the district.
Unless Frisch tacks right, I fully expect he would be facing Coram (or similar) in 2024.
While I agree that Coram would likely beat Frisch, would Coram get the Republican nomination if Bobo ran again? I think she'll do whatever it takes to keep on grifting.
That's kind of what happened with Musty Musgrave in CD 4 in 2008. Enough non-crazy Republicans voted for Betsy Markey to get her elected.
Two years later, they had the smiling Con Man Cory who was a kinder-gentler right winger as their candidate, and had no problem voting for him.
All those yet-to-be-counted Dem votes are looking downright chimerical at this point. Either way, though, massive ups to Frisch and the people who ran his campaign. They fought hard and well against long odds, and convinced even intractable Eeyores such as myself that CO-3 is winnable for Dems.
"Chimerical"–do you mean the remaining votes are from furries?
Yes, the 3rd CD has changed. That jerk face TFG turned much of the Pueblo blue-collar crowd against the Democrats, but so did our
“progressives.’’
As far as missing the call on the outcome? The Front Range never pays attention to the Western Slope. Why would it start now?
Note to Dano: one thing about your analysis on votes that need curing is that it’s unimaginable to drop your ballot in another county’s ballot box over here. You’d have to drive many miles to do so.
I’ve had hopes for years that all the growth Mesa County has been getting would result in more Democrats, but every election the vote remains overwhemingly Republican.
Sigh.
Which west slope media covered the call on the outcome? No one paid attention.
The Chieftain (not Western Slope but largest county in the 3rd CD, the Sentinel in Grand Junction, Durango Herald, Glenwood Springs Post Independent, both Aspen dailies and Montrose Daily Press. Paywalls make it difficult to read their stuff. Teevees and radios don't count.
They're doing the best they can. btw, there's no call yet. I've been around the 3rd CD, as V and others on this blog know, and I remain optimistic Frisch can pull it out. I think it's almost certainly going to a recount.
I thought you meant that front range media got it wrong – which somehow made them unique. Practically everyone got it wrong.
I sort of feel like Frisch has a Will Bailey working for his campaign.
Frisch does have an interesting staff.
BTW, the West Slope media, such as it exists, is short-handed, inexperienced and underpaid. At least the ones I saw were careful to stick to reporting not predicting.
As for competent polling, even the well-paid big boys said it would be a red wave. Nobody competent polls the 3rd CD for any independent entity such as a newspaper or a college because a) they can’t afford it, and b) cell phones wrecked the accuracy of polling.
The only polls I’m aware of are two by the Keating Group, a Dem-leaning outfit said to have done Frisch’s polling. The last of the to showed him two points down, well within the margin of error. I have no idea if Boobert’s campaign did any polling.
Two important things. First, Frisch came within 1% of Boebert. That is absolutely amazing. Two, as soon as Frisch announces he's running again, we need to contribute to his campaign.
Don't write Adam Frisch off yet. "Cured" ballots and outstanding mail in's from Military and overseas TBD. It's still a race.
You bet it is. Military and/or overseas could be 5,000-6,000 ballots and they have until Wednesday to arrive at county clerks' offices.
The fat lady hasn't even started to warm up.
+ 546 military & overseas
+ 1,411 misc. (mistaken county, random review)
+ 966 cured ballots returned
+ 2,570 ballots out to cure (signature didn't match)
5,493 total outstanding ballots
Frisch needs 61% to prevail
American Muckrackers source.