Lauren Boebert Lost. Mike Johnson Says Voters Chose Wrong

Photo: U.S. House of Representatives / Public domain

Lauren Boebert lost. The congresswoman from Colorado, the one who built her whole career on noise, on guns, on saying the most outrageous thing in the room, lost her seat. The voters of her district decided they had had enough. And the response from the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, tells you everything you need to know about where the Republican Party stands. He said the voters chose wrong.

Read that again. Not "I disagree with the result." Not "We will do better next time." He said the voters chose wrong. As if the voters were the ones who made the mistake. As if the people who live in the district, who pay the taxes, who send their kids to those schools, do not know their own minds. The Speaker of the House looked at an election result and decided the problem was the voters.

Boebert's story is the story of a certain kind of politics. She came to Congress as an outsider, a gun shop owner, a firebrand. She made headlines. She made scenes. She voted no on almost everything. She treated governing like a talk show, and for a while, the attention was enough. She was famous. But famous is not the same as effective, and the people back home noticed. Roads still need fixing. Schools still need funding. Health care still costs too much. And Boebert was too busy making noise on cable news to do the work.

So the voters made a choice. They chose someone else. That is how elections work. The people decide. The loser accepts it and goes home. At least, that is how it is supposed to work.

But Mike Johnson does not see it that way. The Speaker said the voters chose wrong. That is not a slip of the tongue. It is a belief. It is the belief that there is a right answer, approved by the powerful, and the voters' job is to agree with it. When they do not agree, they are wrong. This is the same thinking that said the 2020 election was stolen, that said the courts got it wrong, that said every result they do not like is rigged. It is the politics of sore losers with power.

Here is what the voters actually chose. They chose a representative who might show up, who might listen, who might do the job. They chose to move on from a congresswoman who treated their district as a stage. They chose competence over spectacle. That is not wrong. That is democracy working the way it is supposed to.

The question now is whether the Republican Party will learn from it. Will they hear what the voters said, or will they keep telling the voters they are wrong? The voters have spoken. In Colorado, they said the noise was enough. If the party cannot hear that, the losses will keep coming.

Lauren Boebert lost. The voters chose. And the voters are right.

WEAR YOUR VOICE.