PHOTO: Democratic candidate Adam Frisch at the start of his 2022 campaign.
This story by Quentin Young appeared on Colorado Newsline on November 18, 2022.
The race between Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert and Democratic challenger Adam Frisch in Colorado is over. During a live announcement Friday morning, Frisch said he had conceded the race, which remains exceedingly close but not likely to change in Frisch’s favor.
“I just got off the phone with Rep. Boebert,” Frisch said. “I called her to formally concede this election.”
As he spoke, Boebert had 163,758 votes and Frisch had 163,207 votes, according to the Colorado Secretary of State’s latest tallies for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.
Colorado law requires an automatic, state-funded recount if the apparent winner is ahead by a number of votes that is equal to or less than 0.5% of their vote total. At current vote totals, the recount threshold is 819 votes — which the race, at a margin of 551, meets.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold is expected to order the automatic recount, which she must do by Dec. 5.
“We are not asking for this recount. It’s one the citizens of Colorado mandate through our election system,” Frisch said. “However, the likelihood of this recount changing more than a handful of votes is very small — very, very small.”
He said it would be “disingenuous and unethical” for his campaign or anyone else to raise money for a recount.
“Colorado elections are safe, accurate and secure,” he said. “Please save your money for your groceries, your rent, your children, and for other important causes and organizations.”
The call between Frisch and Boebert was “cordial,” said Ben Stout, spokesperson for Boebert.
“She is solely focused on being able to work in this new majority to implement the policies that she ran on,” Stout told Newsline Friday. “Those being, at the top, reducing and curbing inflation, getting interest rates down, increasing domestic energy production, securing the southern border. Those are top of the list, and that’s what her focus is on.”
The midterm elections put Republicans back in a slight majority in the U.S. House. The Boebert-Frisch race was among a handful of House races yet to be decided in the country.
Colorado’s 3rd District — which encompasses the Western Slope and the southwest corner of the state, sweeping east to include Pueblo, Otero and Las Animas counties — typically favors Republicans by 9 percentage points. Many observers attributed Boebert’s difficulty in securing an easy win to her provocative style and Trumpian approach to serving in public office. On Jan. 6, 2021, on her third full day as a congresswoman, Boebert voted to reject the election results of Arizona and Pennsylvania. Frisch often called Boebert’s behavior “angertainment.”
“People were just tired of the whole Trump thing,” Kevin McCarney, chair of the Mesa County GOP, told Newsline on Thursday. “And so her campaign mirrored a little bit what Trump has done, and I think that hurt a little bit.”
Frisch has already filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for Congress in 2024. Asked about the prospect of a rematch with Boebert, Stout said Boebert was not even considering it yet.
“All of our focus is on conservative governance right now,” Stout said. “We’ve got more than enough time to deal with that. Her focus is conservative governance.”