Can a Jewish moderate beat a Qanon superfan in one of America's most important elections?

The RealClearPolitics website rates the district as a “likely” Republican win, indicating that it’s not yet securely in the bag for Boebert.

The result could help decide the battle for the House of Representatives.

With barely three weeks left until Election Day, the Republican attempt to overturn the Democrats’ wafer-thin majority and eject Nancy Pelosi from the speaker’s chair hangs in the balance.

If not a stronghold, Boebert’s Texas district – which is over 70 per cent white and nearly two-thirds rural – leans towards the Republicans. It has backed the party’s nominee in every presidential election over the past two decades and plumped for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by six points in 2020. J Miles Coleman, an election analyst with the University of Virginia’s Centre for Politics, terms it “a conservative seat with a libertarian streak, especially on guns, taxes and government regulation”. The congresswoman, he notes, “checks a lot of those boxes”.

But Frisch doesn’t believe it’s a lost cause. While recent boundary changes have tilted the seat more Republican, it isn’t averse to sending Democrats to the House of Representatives, and last did so in 2008.

Moreover, as Frisch suggested to the Jewish Insider in an interview in June, his Trumpite opponent may well prove to be his trump card.

A come-from-behind victory for the Democrats would derail Boebert’s notoriety-fuelled rise. A political novice, she attracted national attention after she challenged and comfortably defeated long-serving Republican congressman Scott Tipton in a primary election in June 2020.

Boebert, a restaurant owner who allowed her waiters to carry guns and openly flouted lockdown regulations during the pandemic, accused Tipton of being insufficiently supportive of Trump, earning herself lavish praise from the former president.

Boebert’s opposition to abortion, gun control and LGBT rights (the proposed Equality Act, which is designed to bar discrimination, promotes the “supremacy of gays”, she charges) is standard conservative fare.

But Boebert’s record is one to make far-right hearts swoon.

While claiming she is not a follower, she has flirted with the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory – “Everything that I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values,” she claimed – and, critics allege, publicly peddled nonsense about fictional scandals linked to it.

Unsurprisingly, Boebert has parroted Trump’s false claims about the “stolen” 2020 contest and continues to express pride in having objected to the certification of Biden’s election.

But Boebert has also been accused of having ties to extremist groups which played a part in the 6 January assault on the US Capitol and, like others, tweeted references to “1776” – the year of the outbreak of the US revolution – on the morning of attacks.

In the week after the assault, she made a show of refusing to have her handbag searched as she entered the Capitol – Boebert had previously suggested her unfettered right to bear arms extended to the floor of the chamber – and attempting to push through newly installed metal detectors. Boebert’s defiance, noted the New York Times, was a “made-for-Twitter moment that delighted the far right”.

Despite her isolationist foreign policy outlook, the congresswoman claims to strongly support America’s relationship with Israel. “I believe that there have been two nations that have been created to glorify God. Israel, whom we bless, and the United States of America,” she argued in a speech at a Christian gathering in Colorado, in June.

But it was Boebert’s other comments, which appeared to echo the key dogmas of Christian nationalism, which drew most attention. “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church,” Boebert claimed. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.” (Boebert’s spokesman later clarified that she doesn’t support a theocracy).

Praising the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v Wade, she went on to describe Trump as having been “anointed” to the presidency. Last month, Boebert doubled-down on her remarks. Evoking the Evangelical notion of the end of times when Jesus will return, she called for Christians to “rise up and take our place in Christ and influence this nation as we were called to do”.

Frisch’s approach stands in stark contrast to Boebert’s far-right firebreathing.

The former member of Aspen city council, who is making his first bid for Congress, is sticking firmly to the middle of the road in his effort to unseat Boebert.

In their second head-to-head encounter last week, he pitched himself as centrist who hadn’t swallowed all his party’s liberal orthodoxies. “I’m not running to be the voice of any party,” Frisch argued. “I’m going to be hired and fired by the citizens, families and businesses of [the district]. I don’t report to Joe Biden. I don’t report to Nancy Pelosi, and I won’t be reporting to anyone in DC.”

While touting his pro-choice credentials and support for gun control, Frisch has also made clear his preference for local control over Washington-led big government programmes and decried the fact that “the extremists on either side have been driving the conversation” on immigration reform. A strong supporter of US security assistance to Israel and opponent of BDS, Frisch has also expressed scepticism about Biden’s efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal.

Frisch’s gamble is that faced with a choice between “a moderate, pragmatic Jew” and “a QAnoner”, he might just pull off a win.

Certainly, polls suggest he is a less polarising figure than his opponent. While 47 percent of those questioned had a favourable view of Boebert, 49 percent viewed her unfavourably. Frisch’s lower favourability rating – at 38 percent – was offset by a 28 percent unfavourability rating.

His campaign has also been buoyed in recent days by the decision of Don Coram, a Republican state senator who unsuccessfully challenged Boebert in a primary election in June, to endorse Frisch. “Let’s elect someone who cares about representing the majority of people in the middle that are fed up with extreme partisanship and juvenile antics,” Coram said in a statement which also described the Democrat as “decent, honest, and persistent”.

There is, however, a perhaps more likely – and depressing – outcome to the race: that Frisch falls short while the Republicans nationally eke out a narrow majority in the House. And, in Washington next January, the new Republican House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, will find himself hostage to the prejudices, conspiracy theories and fantasies of Lauren Boebert and her gang of fellow far-right kooks.