Idaho has had one of the longest “Trifectas” among the fifty states. A Trifecta occurs when one party controls both state legislative houses and the Governor’s office. In Idaho, the Republican Party has had a Trifecta since 1995. No state governed by a Democratic Trifecta comes close to the length of time of the Idaho Trifecta and only a few other Republican-governed states can match the one party dominance in Idaho. The Idaho legislature is currently 86% Republican, a super-supermajority.
Were the recent legislative primaries indicative of any permanent shift within that super-supermajority? One election doesn’t signify a trend, except perhaps a trend of more money thrown at legislative elections. So what changes did the recent primary election signal? North Idaho is clearly moving rightward, and Eastern Idaho is obviously moving leftward. The region in between is up for grabs. The toughest place for an incumbent to be is on the rightmost side of the spectrum, followed by the leftmost side, followed by being in the middle. In other words, to retain one's seat, the safest play is to vote like a moderate in the legislature, especially if you are not in the northern or eastern parts of Idaho.
But playing it safe and voting in the middle does not make Idaho a beacon for conservative ideas. There are a number of reasons why.
For starters, there really isn’t a political movement in America that can define what conservative governance looks like. We acknowledge nobody has a monopoly on what this definition is, including Idaho Freedom Foundation. But as the late, great, author and political commentator Samuel Francis pointed out in his book, Beautiful Loser: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism, conservatism’s failure was openly revealed during the 1992 presidential campaign and the election of Bill Clinton . While President Reagan had united Main Street, Wall Street, social conservatives, and even blue-collar workers, the coalition wasn’t durable. Ideas like limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and deregulation were trumpeted on the campaign trail, but seemed to die in the D.C. swamp.
Further, opposition to Soviet-style communism morphed into “The New World Order” of President Bush. Sure we got tax cuts, but government spending continued to grow, as did regulations, while Republicans largely ignored the thorough takeover of educational and cultural institutions by the political Left. And, of course, until President Trump came along, stopping illegal immigration was never a Republican priority. Multiculturalism thrived and eventually spawned DEI.
How is this analogous to Idaho, you might ask? And how did this impact the recent legislative primaries? No state operates in a political vacuum and in recent years the legislature has been forced to push back against DEI, transgender politics, and illegal immigration. We use the term “forced to push back” because the idea of a male routinely using a female restroom or changing room is intolerable to historical notions of civilizational norms.
These actions define a necessary and reactionary movement, not a conservative one. And, just as importantly, these actions allow legislators to side-step tough fights on actually restricting the growth of state government and its intrusion into more and more areas of family life — like expanding state-funded child care.
What has emerged in Idaho is a Republican caucus driven by factionalism, regionalism, and cronyism. We get “cowboy hat” conservatism — mostly hat and no cattle. As proof of this concept we have yet to observe any meaningful attempt to scale back state government. The Commission on Hispanic Affairs should be an easy target for a Republican legislature to eliminate — right? Wrong, a bill draft repealing the commission failed to even get a hearing. There is also the problem of the growth of state budget appropriations, from under $9 billion in Fiscal Year 2020 (FY20) before COVID to over $14 billion currently. This growth rate significantly exceeds population and inflation combined.
Some might argue this is what the Republican base actually wants: a “political cognitive dissonance” where conservatism is spoken but not practiced. Idahoans need to ask if this is so, because it is what they are getting.
Ask yourself what that achieves. Some predictability and continuity, perhaps? But change in a more conservative direction, not likely. Voters don’t have perfect information about candidates, but we encourage voters to judge legislators by the tongue in their shoes, not in their mouths — “do they walk the conservative talk?” How do they vote? What is their Freedom Index score? The question should be asked in terms of durable conservative policy achievements including, but not limited to, scaling back unnecessary programmatic spending, defunding services for illegal aliens, and allowing families to flourish by freeing them from dependence on government rather than fostering it. Show us the durable conservative results!
