That morning, Boebert had driven to her old house to retrieve the last of her things from a farmhouse on their property, which she’d moved into as their marriage began to fall apart. He still lived in the main house and, according to Boebert, when she called him ahead of her arrival he told her she could find her stuff “at the bottom of the pond.” That turned out not to be true, but he had removed her stuff and put it into a storage trailer without her consent, she said. Boebert called the police and got a temporary restraining order. (Jayson Boebert’s lawyers did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Last year, dealing with a messy divorce and a real threat of being tossed out of the U.S. House by fed-up voters in Colorado’s western slope, the far-right congresswoman decided to relocate to a more conservative district on the other side of the mountains. “I needed to get away,” she told The Washington Post in an interview. “Absolutely away. I didn’t want to even be in the same county as him. It just was not healthy, obviously.”
She landed in the town of Windsor, a four-hour drive east, and moved into the first house that struck her fancy (“I’m very impulsive,” she said). She found a local charter school for her boys and has been looking for the kind of church that wouldn’t mind her rowdiness.
“People were freaking out about me dancing in the seat at ‘Beetlejuice,’” she said, referring to an incident, caught on a security camera, in which the congresswoman was escorted from a Denver theater after vaping and getting handsy with a male companion. “Well, they should see me in church.”
It’s a chance at a fresh start, but there are some things she’s not ready to leave behind. Like being a congresswoman.
Her new district is red enough that whoever wins the Republican primary in June is expected to prevail in November, and as a quasi-incumbent with a national profile, Boebert, 37, became a top contender for the nomination as soon as she arrived. This has complicated the Welcome Wagon: Her new GOP opponents — there are about nine of them (the number fluctuates depending on the day) — are keen to label her a carpetbagger with too much baggage. And members of Boebert’s own team had expressed concerns about how the move from her old district might look to voters: the MAGA warrior running away from a tough fight with a Democrat. (Her campaign says there was a “robust internal discussion” but everybody’s now fully onboard with the move.)
“I’m not dumb,” Boebert said. “I knew all the attacks that would come my way. But I talked to God, I asked ‘How do I address this? Will this be perceived that I’m not fighting?’ And God said, ‘Do you have more faith in your ability to fight or my ability to open a door?’”
It was the day after the Pond Scare, and Boebert was sitting at the Wide Open Saloon ahead of a campaign event in her new district. She had traveled through a blizzard to get back here, passing abandoned cars on the side of the road. She wore a belted Stetson hat and bold red lipstick, and marveled at how many people had braved the weather to see her speak.
These were her people — a few dozen folks who like to talk about how there are only two genders and one rightful president. Some of them wore shirts from Shooters Grill, Boebert’s old gun-themed restaurant where servers carried trays in their hands and firearms on their hips. They cheered when Boebert bragged about carrying a loaded Glock pistol through the halls of Congress, and again when she spoke about being a leading…
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