Boebert vs. Laubacher: Douglas County's November Congressional Race Is Set

It has been a foregone conclusion for months, but Tuesday made it official: Lauren Boebert and Eileen Laubacher will face off in November for Colorado's Fourth Congressional District, the sprawling seat that counts Douglas County as its population anchor. Neither had to sweat the primary. Boebert ran unopposed on the Republican side, and Laubacher cleared her own field, turning back a write-in challenge to lock down the Democratic nomination. The matchup was set. Now it is real.

The challenger is not a normal Democrat

On paper, this looks like a mismatch. CD-4 is one of the reddest congressional districts in Colorado, the seat Boebert strategically moved into for 2024 after nearly losing her old Western Slope district, and she won it comfortably. An incumbent Republican in a district drawn this red is, by any normal reading, a heavy favorite.

Laubacher is betting she is not a normal challenger, and her resume backs it up. She is a retired two-star Navy rear admiral with 34 years in uniform, a Naval Academy graduate who served on the National Security Council under President Biden and spent three years as the senior U.S. defense official in India. That is not the profile of a long-shot protest candidate. It is the profile Democrats reach for when they think a red district might actually be in play: military, serious, and hard to caricature.

Here is the part that should make Douglas County pay attention. Laubacher is a former Republican from Highlands Ranch. She is not running as a national-Democrat import; she is running as a local who switched parties, which is precisely the pitch aimed at the moderate suburbanites and right-leaning independents who decide close races in this county. If there is a version of CD-4 that is competitive, it runs straight through the Douglas County suburbs, and Laubacher was recruited to speak to exactly those voters.

Boebert's real problem: she underperforms her own district

Here is what should really interest Douglas County. Boebert's track record is the opposite of dominant, and the numbers are stark:

• 2022: survived Adam Frisch by just 546 votes in her old CD-3, a district that should never have been close
• June 2024 special election: Republican Greg Lopez beat Democrat Trisha Calvarese by roughly 24 points
• November 2024 general: Boebert beat that *same* Calvarese by only about 10 points, running some 14 points behind a generic Republican against the identical opponent
• Douglas County, 2024: Boebert won the county by 0.57 points (48.2 to 47.7) while Donald Trump carried it by about 7

That last line is the tell. In a presidential year that broke Republican, in the exact county that decides how competitive this seat is, Boebert barely hung on.

She ran more than six points behind the top of her own ticket in Douglas County. That is not a candidate cruising. That is a candidate who nearly lost the county in a good Republican year.

Why Douglas County is the whole ballgame

Now put that next to the calendar. 2026 is a midterm, and midterms historically punish the party that holds the White House, which right now is the Republicans. Add a challenger built specifically for Douglas County moderates, running against an incumbent who already underperforms here, in a national environment tilting the other way, and the honest read shifts.

Boebert is probably still favored to hold CD-4 as a whole, because the rural stretches of the district are deeply red. But Douglas County itself is very much in play, and on the 2024 numbers, Laubacher has a real path to carrying the county even if she falls short district-wide.

This is the marquee federal race on your ballot, and it doubles as the cleanest test we will get of the question this whole county keeps circling: still a Republican stronghold, or a purple suburb? A retired admiral and former Republican, from Highlands Ranch, running against a chronically underperforming Lauren Boebert, in a midterm, is about as clean an experiment as anyone could design to find out.

We will be covering it all the way to November. For how the primary shook out on both sides, see our Republican and Democratic rundowns, and follow every race on our live results page.