As Colorado’s 2022 general election returns began to post minutes after the polls closed on Nov. 8, none were more surprising than initial results showing Democrat Adam Frisch beating U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Republican incumbent in the largely rural, Republican-leaning 3rd Congressional District.

Elsewhere on the state’s ballot, Democratic incumbents were cruising to wins up and down the ticket, including by margins unseen in statewide races for decades, but hardly anyone had Boebert’s bid for a second term on their radar.

Boebert won election to the seat two years ago by 6 percentage points after stunning the district’s five-term GOP representative a few months earlier in the primary. The brash Second Amendment advocate – she used to own a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle – has careened from one spectacle to the next, whether it was clashing with Capitol Police after setting off metal detectors outside the House chamber or heckling President Joe Biden during this year’s State of the Union Address.

When she declared her candidacy, Boebert said she wanted to be the Republican answer to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the New York Democrat universally known as AOC. Since her arrival in Congress, Boebert has been among the most vocal and visible members of a cadre of no-holds-barred conservatives.

Her challenger, a wealthy Aspen businessman and former member of the ski resort town’s city council, ran as an antidote to Boebert, saying he would focus on representing the district rather than chasing cable news hits and controversy.

Frisch stayed on top for about 36 hours as the sprawling district’s 27 counties continued counting ballots, but Boebert pulled into the lead two days after the election and held it by the slimmest of margins, though Nov. 18 when clerks reported final, unofficial results.

That same day, something nearly as surprising happened, when Frisch – who trailed Boebert by just 554 votes out of 337,110 cast, or just under 0.17th of a percentage point – conceded the race even as the wheels were set in motion for a mandatory recount under Colorado law.

Considering the outcome was exceedingly unlikely to change after election officials run the ballots through the counters a second time in a few weeks, Frisch said he didn’t want to convey a sense of “false hope.” He also said he didn’t want the legions of small-dollar donors who had flocked to his campaign – and to outside groups that had been hauling in cash on claims they would “hold Lauren Boebert accountable” – to continue forking over their hard-earned dollars to chase a mirage.

“Colorado elections are safe, accurate and secure,” Frisch said. “Please save your money for your groceries, your rent, your children and for other important causes and organizations.”

While a handful of vote counts are still underway, Colorado’s 3rd CD race stands as this cycle’s closest congressional contest, and Frisch appears to have outperformed expectations – based on the district’s partisan registration, the electorate’s voting history and other factors, including Boebert’s incumbency – by a wider margin than any other House candidate in the country.

In an interview with Colorado Politics, Frisch reflected on his campaign, what he hopes national Democrats learn from his run and what could be next. Boebert’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for an interview with the congresswoman.

“I think one of the reasons we did well is people saw me as authentic and sincere in an environment that’s not always looked upon that way,” Frisch said. “And I know that the chances of more than a handful of votes changing in the Colorado state election process was almost zilch.”

As the count dragged on and the prospects of a recount grew, Frisch said he heard from plenty of people who urged him to take advantage of the opportunity to keep his campaign going.

“I was starting to get a lot of support-slash-pressure from some people with sincerity, (saying), ‘You’ve got to fight every last minute. There’s all this passion to defeat Lauren Boebert and the extremism,’ and I appreciate all that, but they just didn’t know that if more than 15 votes change, it’d be a shock.”

In the end, Frisch said he faced facts.

“When winners lose, they admit defeat, and when losers lose, they look to blame other people, and I’m not looking to blame anybody,” he said. “I’m a realist. It’s great to get this passion, it’s great to get the support. Some people are probably upset that we’re not fighting on, but I just can’t look people in the eye and say, ‘Have faith, we’re going to pull this off.'”

He contrasted that to the message he delivered over the last year, trying to persuade people to back his run.

“I’d look people in the eye and say, ‘I have faith that we can make a really good go of this,'” he said. “‘If we win, we’re going to win by a very little bit at the very, very end.’ And we almost won by a little, little bit at the very, very end. And so while the moral victory is great – I think it did send a message across the entire country, and I know that we woke up a lot of people in D.C. and elsewhere about probabilities that a lot of people completely blew off – I just can’t tell people to raise a lot of money over something where there was no chance of pulling off.”

Frisch said he wasn’t surprised that he came so close.

“I like math,” he said. “I laid out a mathematical path to victory. No one really believed me or us until the end, but I knew we were going to run a very competent campaign, I knew we were going to run a campaign with a great team, which we did. I knew that a lot of people are frustrated in the country beyond what happens on Twitter or on cable news networks that are really into the more partisan stuff. … We knew that she was mathematically vulnerable. We tried very, very hard to bring other people into that conversation – donor class, political class, media class – and very, very few people returned the phone calls, let alone understood what we were talking about. They do now.”

Frisch said he hopes his near-win demonstrates that there’s an appetite among voters to move beyond the country’s increasingly polarized politics.

“I think our campaign was a big shot across the bow for less extremism and less ‘angertainment’,” he said. Referring to the stretch when it looked like he might defeat Boebert, Frisch added: “I take what happened on Tuesday night, Wednesday, there was a big push against Trumpism, but also just against extremism.”

Frisch, who attended new-member orientation in Washington, D.C., last week, along with other House candidates on both sides in races that were too close to call, said he was looking forward to returning home.

“Putting on 10 pounds since February, enjoying 23,000 miles, was enough of a campaign,” he said with a chuckle. “We’re going to go back, spend Thanksgiving week with the family, smell some fresh mountain air, spend some time in Colorado. There are all sorts of ideas, requests, suggestions, mandates about trying to do different things in different ways – elective office, runs for different things and starting different organizations.”

Added Frisch: “I love the country. I would love to see rural America and working class America have more of a focus from the Democratic Party, because I think both parties should be fighting over every single county in every single district, and that’s not happening right now. And I don’t think we’re getting the best version of either party when they have almost a monopoly – the Dems have the urban and the Republicans have the rural, and neither party is delivering the best of what they can. And I want to focus on that.”

As for Boebert’s close call in a race that should have been a cake walk for the incumbent, Frisch said he hopes his better-than-expected finish resonates.

“We took some lessons from over-performing by 12 points,” he said. “I think a lot of people in the country did, on both sides, because I had conversations with the Republicans as well as Democrats. Whether Rep. Boebert does or not, we’ll see how that plays out.”