A state political party convention is useful - from the standpoint of participants and close watchers - for networking and, for the party, building unity, along with creating the case for why that party should be entrusted with political office in the upcoming general elections.
There’s a traditional script. A platform and statements about the issues consistent with both the party and broader public opinion usually are offered. The winners in the primary election are celebrated: They were the choices of the party’s voters, right? And they will in any event be the party’s standard bearers in the approaching campaign. Primary losers will be consoled, given a little outreach to keep them in the fold, but generally placed on the back bench. Party leaders, as long as the party seems to be functioning well (within its capabilities) and barring anything scandalous, usually are kept in place, at least while the cameras are rolling.
This applies to national conventions as well as state. There are reasons: Mainly, this approach works. It links the party’s voters and their choices to a program intended to appeal to the larger electorate. Nearly all of the political conventions of both parties I’ve observed have held to the plan, or tried to.
This month’s Idaho Republican Party convention was a massive exception to the rule.
The upshot of the convention is that primary winners were in effect trashed and the losers feted - on grounds that the winners of the primary got there with the votes of non-Republicans. The whole party leadership slate was thrown out, in decisive votes, though there was no indication those leaders (Tom Luna and the others in the group) had done less than a capable job of managing the party and its activities; certainly there were no scandals or any egregious issues of the kind that usually would lead to an overthrow.
This was a startling disconnect between the Idaho Republican Party’s organization and its large voting constituency. The two have become decoupled.
The hard evidence of this is the primary election. There are no sensible arguments that crossover voting from Democrats and others, or anything else out of norm, threw the elections: Relatively few Idaho Democrats actually re-registered to switch over, and in nearly all cases, the results were decisive enough that they clearly represented the views of people who think of themselves as Republicans. Self-identified Idaho Republicans were the nominators of Brad Little for governor, Mike Simpson for representative, and most of the rest.
But the convention was a festival for those who contended this election (like the presidential in 2020) was somehow rigged.
It was also a contest to see how much more extreme the party’s policy positions could be. For example: Until recently, an anti-abortion policy allowing for absolutely no exceptions - not even saving the immediately-at-risk life of the mother - would have been a non-starter at an Idaho Republican convention. Anti-abortion, yes, but not this absolutist. At this convention, the vote to toss mothers’ lives overboard wasn’t even close. And so it went down the policy line.
Not to mention the effort to try to exclude from Republican primaries anyone who is considered insufficiently Republican - according to the standards set by the governing clique. (Whether that proposal, aiming to exclude even anyone who has recently contributed financially to a Democrat, could stand legal challenge is another issue.)
Nor is that likely to be all. Steven Thayne, a long-time Republican state legislator who not so many years ago reasonably could have been described as on the Republican right fringe, now warns things are going too far: “My concern is a purge has begun … What you see here is basically wanting to achieve unity through purity.â€
That sounds accurate, and once such a process has started - as we’ve seen for some years now - the purity tests become ever finer.
The extremism of 2022 was almost unimaginable only a few years ago. So on reflection, the next question - assuming actual Idaho voters continue to fail to choose party leaders who more accurately represent them - will be: What will the Idaho Republican convention two years from now look like?