Lauren Boebert, once a MAGA star, loses her Colorado seat

Lauren Boebert, the Republican representative from Colorado who rose to national fame as one of Donald Trump's biggest cheerleaders, has lost her seat in Congress.

The race was too close to call on election night last week, but after every vote was counted the Democrat Eileen Laubacher has been declared the winner by the AP news agency.

It means Boebert, who was one of the most vocal conservatives in the House of Representatives, will not serve a fourth term.

The 39-year-old was one of the faces of Trump's "Make America Great Again" - or MAGA - movement, when she burst on to the Colorado political scene at the end of 2019.

Like the president, she was not a career politician. Boebert first made headlines when she encouraged staff at her restaurant Shooters, located in a small Colorado town named Rifle, to openly carry firearms.

Her rallies focused on gun rights and fighting - fighting Democrats, fighting the establishment, fighting illegal immigration or fighting anyone or anything that could be deemed "woke".

"Speaking after Lauren Boebert was like the band that played after the Beatles - no-one remembered them," said Republican state representative Matt Soper, now Colorado's most senior Republican legislator.

He first met Boebert and her then-husband, Jayson, when she was gathering signatures for a state-voting initiative.

She arrived in jeans with a Glock on her hip, her husband "looking like a classic oilman" in blue jeans, boots, cowboy hat and belt buckle, Soper told the BBC.

It played well with her Western Colorado constituency - a mix of ranches, farms and tough terrain with a smattering of ski towns - which Trump won with 53% of the vote in 2016.

Those same voters embraced Boebert in the lead-up to the 2020 election, helping her unseat the five-term Republican incumbent in the party's primary.

Boebert earned her high school equivalency diploma right before that victory, then won the seat in November, just before her 34th birthday.

It was the start of a political career Soper did not anticipate after that first meeting with her and her spouse.

"If I had been told, you know, they're going to make not just national headlines, but international headlines, for years, and Lauren will be a member of Congress for six years, I mean, I would have put no money on that bet," he said.

Once in Congress, Boebert garnered constant airtime with her aggressive pro-Trump rhetoric. Along with fellow political provocateurs like Marjorie Taylor Greene, she established herself as one of the most outspoken MAGA cheerleaders.

Perhaps most notably, she joined Greene in heckling President Joe Biden during his 2022 State of the Union address.

But that knack for the limelight began to work against Boebert at home.

"I think, as that national profile grew, it made it much harder for her to be able to maintain that small-town fighter narrative that she had relied on," Justin Gollob, a political science professor at Colorado Mesa University, told the BBC.

Waning enthusiasm for Boebert became glaringly apparent in 2022, when a Democrat from Aspen challenged her for her seat and nearly won. Boebert eked out a victory by just 546 votes.

Colorado voters had initially liked Boebert's "straight talk and her direct, down-the-barrel approach" as well as her conservative Christian views, said Rich Wyatt, a county Republican chairman in Colorado and former reality star who served time in prison for tax fraud.

But that narrative became harder for her to maintain as the congresswomen was beset by controversies that were personal, not political.

She filed for divorce from her husband and, five months later, footage of Boebert and a man being kicked out of a Denver performance of the musical Beetlejuice went viral.

Staff accused the politician of vaping, taking pictures and "causing a disturbance".

Footage released by the theatre showed Boebert, in a gold cocktail dress, arguing with staff before twirling and dancing with her date upon ejection.

An incident report claimed she had told staff "do you know who I am?" and "I will be contacting the mayor," the Denver Post reported.

That December - facing another matchup with Adam Frisch, the former Aspen Democratic councilman who nearly unseated her - Boebert announced she would be switching districts altogether. She moved across the state to Colorado's easternmost constituency, which voted reliably Republican.

With Trump's endorsement, Boebert won the seat in 2024.

But she turned on the president during his second term in office, when she became one of four House Republicans pushing for the full release of the Epstein files.

Suddenly, her biggest champion was no longer in her corner.

The next month, Trump vetoed a water bill Boebert had sponsored. As she sought re-election this year, he took aim at her on social media.

The president invited candidates to run against her in the primary (though the deadline had already passed) and called his former cheerleader "dumb" and "weak-minded".

Trump eventually endorsed Boebert for the race, but Democrats had found a strong moderate candidate to take her on - Navy veteran Eileen Laubacher, who retired in 2024 as a two-star rear admiral.

Like several other Democrats who have emerged victorious after the 2026 midterms, Laubacher's win is as much about her qualities as a candidate - she was a former Republican with strong appeal to middle-ground voters - as it was a rebuke of Boebert's time in office.

Peggy Lozen, a constituent who voted for Trump in 2016 but not after that, was thrilled to see Boebert go. She had been turned off by the representative since her State of the Union stunt in 2022.

"I was sick over that," the 72-year-old told BBC. "I was raised in an era where you respect everyone, regardless of their opinion, and especially the president of the United States."

The mother of a veteran, she voted for the rear admiral and displayed a sign of support in her yard.

"You can't even compare the two," she said of Laubacher and Boebert.

While it remains to be seen what Boebert does next, there is a consensus among both politicians and the public that she is unlikely to vanish altogether.

"I'll leave you with this," Wyatt said: "You haven't seen the end of Lauren Boebert."