For those not following, a huge shock came in Colorado tonight, with five-term incumbent Rep. Scott Tipton losing his GOP primary to a right-wing QAnon believer. Given the circumstances, I absolutely must profile Colorado’s 3rd district. It needs some analysis.

CO-03 is enormous, covering the state’s western third. It has a long history as a competitive district. Since 1985, it’s flipped from R to D to R to D to R again—a dizzying sequence. One of these Democrats was future Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who served from 1987 to 1993.

In 2010, Democrat John Salazar was knocked out of his seat by Scott Tipton (R–Cortez), the current representative. Tipton held off his Democratic challengers by double digits in 2012, 2014, and 2016, but in 2018 a tough match from @RepDMB held him to just eight percent.

This district is quite rural, but that doesn’t mean it exclusively votes Republican. This area has shown somewhat of a tendency to buck broader trends. Though it didn’t vote for any statewide Dem in 2018, none of them lost it by nearly as much as in other equally rural areas.

Diane Mitsch Bush is the Democratic nominee again this year. If she’s going to win in Nov., she’ll need to expand on her margins almost everywhere. There are no big cities she can bank on to rack up huge margins in. Pueblo is the biggest, with just 110,000 people.

Her winning strategy involves improving in Pueblo County, which she lost in 2018. A decent swing there will help but won’t be enough. The next key to her plan is La Plata County (home to Durango), which she won in 2018 by 14%. That margin must increase for her to have a prayer.

This neck of the woods has smaller ski resort-centered counties that do actually favor Democrats. In some of these, like Eagle County, she actually performed worse than Hillary Clinton in 2016. That’s a sign that there’s room for Mitsch Bush to grow in some parts of the district.

If she can bulk up in Pueblo and Durango, outrun Hillary’s 2016 margins everywhere, and improve even marginally in some of those rural Tipton-won counties that may be wary of voting for Boeber, this race could become seriously competitive.

Boeber is banking on a big Trump margin to carry her home here. He won CO-03 by 12% in 2016. Could he do better? Of course. But Colorado is nearly off the table for Trump this cycle and looks can be deceiving—not all rural areas are the same, and this district proves it.

What’s the bottom line here? In a matter of minutes, this race went from a heavy GOP favorite to a slight one. It’s still a rural district heavily divided by class. Regardless, here’s a projection I’m confident in: things for the NRCC are bad, and they’re only going to get worse.