You can get a specific read on just how crazed the power struggle within the Idaho Republican Party has gotten by mentioning just one name: Damond Watkins.
The idea that he would be on the losing end of a bitter power struggle in the party’s upper reaches - for that matter, that he would have been involved in a party squabble at all - shows how much things have changed in the last few years.
He comes from one of the best-known and most solidly-established of eastern Idaho Republican families. His father, Dane, was a state senator and a Republican nominee for Congress who I covered for years, and one of the most even-tempered politicians I ever saw. (His father was a key Idaho Falls establishment figure for years before.) Damond’s brother, Dane Jr., was an elected (Republican) Bonneville County prosecutor for years, and now a judge
Damond worked for years (he has since moved on) at Melaleuca, a top executive close to its leader, Frank Vander Sloot; both Melaleuca and Vander Sloot have been well known regionally for many years as a top institutional private-sector centerpoint for the region’s Republican Party. Damond Watkins also put in many years of work for the regional and state Republican Party, chaired the county organization, and for the last decade he has been the Idaho state committee man - one of two state representatives - to the national committee, and has often paid for the travel out of his own pocket.
When last month Watkins abruptly announced his resignation from the position, the party released a statement that he “played a pivotal role in shaping our party’s vision and driving positive change … [and deserved] gratitude for his service and contributions over the years.â€
What the party didn’t say then was that the same leadership making that statement had pressured Watkins to quit.
A remarkable story in the Idaho Falls Post Register put together the pieces.
The party’s state leadership - its top officials and its governing bodies - have been changing over the last decade or so, moving away from more establishment leaders like Trent Clark and Rom Luna (both former chairs) to people more aligned with the extremist groups centered in party organizations like Kootenai County. It’s become a much more hard-core group.
The immediate excuse was that he wasn’t spending enough time in Idaho (he also has a house in North Carolina), but that was a pretext only: He’d been attending meetings and doing the work. Behind the scenes several months ago someone tried a challenge to his voting qualifications in Idaho, but the county clerk said he was a properly registered voter. After that, the party brought in an “investigative committee,†which the newspaper indicated collected whatever it could find as evidence against him, including a recording of him speaking in church.
At the June party meeting in Challis, Party Chair Dorothy Moon confronted him with the report, saying (he recalled), that “Everybody, when they see the truth, what’s in this report, they’re going to drop you like flies.†That included, she said, his friend Vander Sloot.
Not so. Vander Sloot rebutted: “I have the highest regard for him. I think what Dorothy Moon and her team did to Damond was abhorrently wrong, immoral, and dishonest. It’s extremely sad to me to see any leader stoop to these levels. It’s especially sad to me to see this happening in the Idaho Republican Party. We are better than this.â€
He wasn’t alone in support for Watkins. Clark and Luna (who had been ousted as chair by Moon) also released a statement (including one sent to the national party) saying much the same.
Moon was quoted by the Post Register about all this: “Some of this isn’t anybody’s business. It’s a private club.†This tells you what the leaders of the party running Idaho thinks of its relationship to the people of the state.
All of this was about one person and one party structural position. Here’s your sign of how far the current leadership of the party is willing to go to eliminate opposition.
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