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I am Michelle Cottle, a correspondent for “New York Times Opinion.” And I cover national politics.

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House member Lauren Boebert is approaching the end of a primary fight for her political future. Boebert is the ultra-MAGA, over-the-top House member from Colorado who is known, depending on how you want to slice it, either for wanting to impeach Joe Biden and heckling him during his State of the Union speech or for getting thrown out of a Denver theater when she was caught vaping and playing “gropey” with her date.

So if she loses Tuesday’s primary, she will be probably by far the flashiest Trump minion to fall. If she wins, it will be in part because of her ability to modulate her message for different audiences, just like regular old politicians so often have to do. And either way, her fate is going to tell us something about the limits of extreme Trumpism by candidates not named Trump, and also how much room these kind of candidates have to maneuver within the strictures of the MAGA-verse.

The tricky thing about Colorado for the GOP is that it is a purple-trending blue state. And in 2022, she came just a few hundred votes close to losing a safe Republican House seat to a largely unknown Democrat. So she has since moved across the state to the east side and is now running in a district that is even more safely Republican. But in her new district, some of the voter-rich areas aren’t really that MAGA Republican so much as they are old-school Republican, like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney. All of this has her scrambling to tweak her image, expand her appeal, win over her new hopeful constituents.

So I felt like I just had to go out to Colorado just to see how she was doing. It was a tale of two Boeberts.

So I’m at the Wide Open Saloon in Douglas County, Colorado, talking with fans of Lauren Boebert.

The Wide Open Saloon Event was this upscale biker bar that was just Boebert fans and Trump fans.

Are you a big Boebert fan?

Yes, I am.

So how long have you been paying attention to her?

I guess I saw her on TV with Trump. And Trump is not perfect. But he’s my man.

He’s your man?

He’s my man. And she supports him. And we’ve got to get this country back on track.

There’s lots of biker gear and anti-Biden t-shirts and MAGA hats. And Boebert could really just “Trump it up” and appeal to the part of the party that the fans of hers on national TV and in conservative circles just absolutely adore.

We have patriots in the house! Todd, thank you so much for opening up the Wide Open Saloon and bringing so many wonderful, hard-working, red-blooded conservative Americans who are tired of the political persecution, the election interference, the demise of our country and our Constitution. Every one of us here is ready to take a stand and take back our state and take back our country.

But most of the stuff I saw when I was following her around was much lower key and was not that in-your-face, antagonistic, over the top attitude. She’s trying to convince her new district that she is more than just her MAGA warrior self, that when she needs to, she can be very pragmatic, she can be very productive, that she can work to get things done. I do think she is an interesting example of what do you do when you’re this MAGA person, but you’re too MAGA and you got to figure out can you de-MAGA without losing MAGA?

It is wonderful to be here in Washington County tonight. Thank you so much to the Farm Bureau for putting this on.

So there was an event way out in the middle of nowhere. It was this tiny candidate forum sponsored by the local Farm Bureau, where she was talking about forging compromises with Democrats to get stuff done, which was absolutely not the sort of thing that her MAGA national base wants to hear about.

Water, water, water — this is absolutely one of our most important issues here in Colorado. And when it comes to water, I have legislation that I have co-sponsored with our senators, forming coalitions with Democrats that is commonsense and does not compromise our Republican principles.

So in this campaign, she is looking to balance what feels irreconcilable, which is this persona as an uncompromising, over the top MAGA warrior hell-bent on destroying the libs and saving America from wishy-washiness and this message to skeptical Coloradans that she’s an effective legislator who is pragmatic enough to deliver on the issues they care about, even if that occasionally means collaborating with the political enemy. And this speaks to a bigger problem that the Republican Party is facing, which is that very few politicians other than Trump can get away with just hardcore Trumping all the time. And heck, even he lost the presidency in 2020.

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I specifically asked her about the tensions between balancing her national brand with her need to present a more pragmatic approach to local voters or whatever. And she dismissed the idea that there was any tension there. And in fact, when talking about the current race, she was very clear she has only one speed.

That I’m radically Lauren Boebert.

She’s radically Lauren Boebert, which, yes, this is absolutely true. She is radically Lauren Boebert. I don’t think anybody would dispute that. Of course, the question and maybe the problem is even in some of these conservative congressional districts, it’s not quite clear how far is too far with the Trumpism. Being radically Lauren Boebert may prove to be too much, even for many Republican voters.