Trisha Calvarese, the Douglas County Democrat who lost a bid to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert last year in Colorado’s most reliably Republican seat, announced Tuesday that she wants a rematch in the 4th Congressional District.

Calvarese told Colorado Politics in an exclusive interview that she’s running “to retire” the incumbent, who she accused of caring more about top presidential advisor Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and President Donald Trump’s leading financial backer, than she does about the district’s residents.

“I served as a federal civil servant at the U.S. National Science Foundation, and when you take that oath, I know what it means to work hard for our country, and I’m not seeing Lauren Boebert working hard for us,” Calvarese said. “Straight up and down, she’s missed votes, she won’t face voters in a real town hall, and people here are struggling with the cost of living. There’s real concerns.”

Boebert, the state’s senior GOP elected official, has been among the Trump administration’s most vocal supporters and regularly cheers on the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, an organization that has suggested steep spending and personnel reductions across the federal government since Trump took office for the second time in January.

“We have just witnessed the most productive and successful 100 days of a presidency in American history!” Boebert tweeted last week as Trump’s tenure in office passed the traditional milestone for the start of a presidency.

Calvarese, in contrast, said she’s met Republican voters who are unhappy with the administration’s performance as she’s traveled across the district in recent months. These include veterans worried about increasingly lengthy waits for mental health care at the VA and farmers concerned that Congress hasn’t produced a Farm Bill while new tariffs are raising prices at home and squeezing export markets.

After winning a three-way primary last year, Calvarese, a first-time candidate, trailed Boebert by 11.6 percentage points on election night. At the same time, Trump carried the district over Democratic nominee former Vice President Kamala Harris by 18.3 percentage points.

One of the Democrats Calvarese defeated in last year’s primary, John Padora, an engineer and addiction-recovery advocate who lives in Severance, launched his second campaign for the seat last month.

Anchored by Douglas County and portions of Larimer and Weld counties along the Front Range, the 4th CD stretches across Colorado’s Eastern Plains to the Kansas border, including all or portions of 18 additional counties. Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than two-to-one in the district, although there are more unaffiliated voters than members of either major party. The district was last represented by a Democrat for a single term following the 2008 election, when its boundaries included most of Democratic-leaning Larimer County.

Boebert moved into the district at the beginning of last year after coming within fewer than 600 votes of losing her bid for a second term in the Western Slope-based 3rd Congressional District in 2022. Calvarese grew up in the district — first in Sterling and then through high school in Highlands Ranch — before moving to the East Coast as an adult. She returned to care for her ailing parents in late 2023 after both were diagnosed with terminal illnesses.

According to the Cook Political Report, Colorado’s 4th CD has an R+9 score on its Partisan Voter Index scale this year — down from R+13 two years earlier — meaning that its electorate votes 9 points more favorably for the Republican than the nation as a whole at the presidential level. The election forecasting site rates the seat as solid Republican ahead of next year’s election.

Calvarese said the district could be primed to flip, however, citing Boebert’s underperformance compared to Trump in nearly every precinct last year, as well as the Democrat’s lead over Harris among the same voters. Without Trump on the ballot in next year’s midterms, Democratic strategists have told Colorado Politics, the 4th CD’s largely suburban voters — concentrated in Highlands Ranch, Castle Rock, Parker and Loveland — could swing,

more than usual toward a Democrat, like similar voters have in the handful of special elections and off-year elections held since Trump’s inauguration.

Calvarese said her success with small-dollar donors last year — she raised $4.3 million from about 200,000 individual donors, mostly in the four months after winning the Democratic nomination — means she’ll have the resources to take her campaign throughout the sprawling district.

“You know, Lauren can pull a fast one on voters last time, right — she ditched one district for this one — but people are busy, they don’t necessarily know about her, about her record, about what she’s not doing for us in Washington, so there’s going to be time to really get into communities, to really meet with people to listen, to hear them. We’ve got a longer runway this time,” she said.

Boebert pulled in $4.8 million across the entire 2024 cycle, outraising Calvarese by about $500,000, though her challenger routinely outraised Boebert by increasing multiples once Calvarese had secured the Democratic nomination. Before Boebert switched districts last year, her Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, who was seeking a rematch after his narrow loss in 2022, repeatedly set state fundraising records and was among the top House fundraisers in the country.