Democratic victories piled up across the recent midterm election, but few inspired as much liberal delight as the defeat of Rep. Lauren Boebert. She lost a supposedly safe Republican district in Colorado to Democratic challenger and retired Rear Adm. Eileen Laubacher.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined the celebration with a social media post reading, “Bye, Felicia,” invoking the dismissive line from the 1995 movie “Friday.” The jab carried extra weight given the contrast between Clinton and the political persona Boebert cultivated.

Clinton has long enraged conservatives by refusing to accept the boundaries of traditional femininity. Since entering Congress in 2020, Boebert presented herself as a kind of anti Clinton, offering the MAGA base an exaggerated vision of a woman who was sexually provocative yet supposedly demure, Christian and devoted to family.

That performance attracted intense attention when Boebert reached Congress at age 35. Her tight jeans, short skirts, heavy makeup and prominently displayed gun holster departed from the way conservative Christian women had traditionally presented themselves.

Boebert simultaneously portrayed her gun loving family life as wholesome and chaste. She met her husband when she was 16 and he was 22, left high school to have the first of their four children and later used her Christian image while attacking women’s rights, including access to birth control.

She became an early model for a familiar Trump era type: Republican women who gain prominence by embracing extreme beauty standards while insisting they remain pious and proper. Observers labeled the mix of heavy makeup and rumored plastic surgery “Mar-a-Lago face.”

That look, paired with loud declarations of traditional values, helped several women rise within Republican politics. Karoline Leavitt, known for an oversize cross necklace and lips enhanced with filler that the president regularly praised, became White House press secretary.

Kristi Noem was appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina repeatedly drew headlines, including for bragging about her active sex life during a prayer breakfast in 2023.

Conservative activist Laura Loomer, who possessed the same highly stylized appearance associated with Noem, became a frequent traveling companion of Trump. The contradiction was always glaring: These women presented themselves as overtly sexual while supporting politics hostile to women’s sexual freedom.

Boebert’s carefully managed facade did not survive contact with her increasingly public personal life. Her turbulent marriage ended in 2023, and later that year she was removed from a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” after camera footage showed her and her date apparently groping each other near other theatergoers.

Facing a potential defeat in her more competitive Colorado district, Boebert moved to a nearby district and won a safe Republican seat in 2024. Even that maneuver could not protect her during the 2026 blue wave.

Her defeat capped a year in which several women associated with this MAGA style were removed from power, either by voters or by male Republican leaders seeking convenient scapegoats. Noem publicly celebrated her marriage of 34 years to Bryon Noem before rumors involving aide Corey Lewandowski helped lead Trump to fire her, though both denied having an affair.

Mace will leave Congress in January after her unsuccessful campaign for governor of South Carolina. Leavitt gave up the White House podium in August, while Loomer placed her podcast, “Loomer Unleashed,” on hiatus after the midterm losses.

Katie Miller, the wife of White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, dropped her family values podcast this month. Katie Zacharia lasted only a few days this year as White House press secretary, despite her conspicuous Christian presentation and standard Mar-a-Lago appearance.

These women looked markedly different from the buttoned up conservative women who preceded them, but their sexual presentation did not amount to liberation. Instead, they promoted an oppressive standard that expected women to fulfill male fantasies while surrendering basic reproductive rights and personal freedom.

The prim church women of the Republican past could be irritating, but their presentation generally matched their stated values, allowing figures such as Phyllis Schlafly to sustain long careers. Modern MAGA women tried to be flamboyantly sexual while opposing women’s sexual liberation, and Boebert’s defeat exposed how difficult that contradiction was to maintain.