Eileen Laubacher was ahead of Lauren Boebert in Colorado's 4th Congressional District on Thursday, but the race was still too close for the to call. With about 97% of the vote counted, Laubacher held 48.75% to Boebert's 47.95%, a margin of some 3,000 votes that kept the contest in suspense.
That narrow edge is why people are searching did Lauren Boebert lose today. The answer, for now, is not yet official. Boebert's campaign was still waiting on the count, while Scott Gessler said the team was investigating some very unusual voting patterns and expected the contest to head to a recount one way or another.
Laubacher's position carried extra weight because this race could flip a GOP seat in Colorado. She retired from the Navy in 2024 after 34 years of service, later registered as a Democrat in 2025, and built her campaign around a national-security profile that included deployment to Afghanistan and work as a senior director for South Asian on the National Security Council during Joe Biden's administration. Boebert, meanwhile, had won the seat in the 2024 general election with 53.6% of the vote.
The gap was small enough to leave room for a late shift, but not large enough to erase the pressure on both sides. A Libertarian Party candidate, Douglas Mangeris, had 12,506 votes, or 3.3%, and those ballots helped explain how the race could stay so tight even after nearly all votes were in. Boebert said she would accept any result, even as her campaign kept pressing its case that the remaining ballots still mattered.
Laubacher's campaign also had its own forceful note from the trail. In October, she told voters in a 9NEWS debate that the GOP had become "nearly unrecognizable," a line that fit the broader pitch of a Democrat trying to take a district Boebert had just won months earlier. On Thursday, the practical answer remained the same: the lead had changed, but the race had not yet become final.
If the remaining ballots do not close the gap, Boebert is on the brink of losing a seat she won in 2024; if they do, the recount fight that her campaign is already anticipating will decide whether that lead holds. Either way, Colorado's 4th Congressional District is headed for a final count that will decide whether Laubacher's narrow advantage becomes a victory or just the first round of one more fight.
