Spend a few decades tracking elections and nearly every contest in each new crop falls into a well-defined box. Occasionally, you come away surprised, but not often. So Idaho has been this way for many years.
Now comes a major race that fits no comfortable category. Enough about it is different from what came before to make it hard to evaluate or its results to predict.
This singular unicorn race is the contest for U.S. Senate, between (primarily; also including two minor candidates) three-term incumbent Republican Jim Risch and independent Todd Achilles.
Idaho of course has had plenty of contests for the U.S. Senate, but since popular voting for the office began in Idaho in 1914 the main contestants, and only plausible winners, were a Republican and a Democrat. Only nominees of those parties, and only some of those, have run serious campaigns – meaning substantial and with a realistic shot at winning – in all these years.
Through that period, while Democrats have won at times, Republicans most often had a major advantage. Since the New Deal years, no Republican has run for re-election or (as party nominee) for election in a year when Republicans are at a sweeping national disadvantage. (The closest might be 2008, when Risch was elected to his first Senate term; it was a rough year for Republicans nationally but not really in Idaho.)
And there’s a third point applying to the last three decades or so: The Democratic label has become thoroughly toxic, to the point that a statewide win for anyone but a Republican has seemed quixotic.
This year’s Senate race upends all of that.
Achilles is a presentable, energetic and skillful candidate who has gotten good reviews from many appearances around the state. He has been at work on this race for more than a year, as opposed to the many last-minute entrants. He has a decently funded and well organized campaign, even with a campaign office open to the public. He has generated support from both Democrats and Republicans (he has considered himself both of those at various points before his current independency) as well as others. This is much the most serious, by a long distance, non-major party candidacy in Idaho for a major office in the last century.
Is that enough to win in Idaho?
You won’t find a prediction here that the election result will be upended as well, though it could be. The point is that it’s hard to know.
National political analysts mostly have tagged this race as “likely” to stay Republican; but that’s a notch down from the “safe Republican” standing Idaho Senate races normally rate, and pays close heed to historical trends. The reason is mostly not necessarily an expectation that it’s close, but that it’s hard to tell.
The analyst Rachel Bitecofer put a finer point on this, when on September 8 she called the Idaho race, alongside other Republican-independent matchups in Nebraska and South Dakota, as toss-ups. She explained, “electorally, these races give us an extraordinary test of the Republican-defection thesis. If 2026 produces only the ordinary polarized midterm effect, these states remain extraordinarily difficult territory for a challenger. But if there really is a meaningful bloc of habitual Republican voters looking for somewhere else to go, removing the Democratic label gives them somewhere else to go without asking them to become Democrats. I don’t know what happens in these races.”
That gets to the real “theory of the case” for Achilles’ race, as well as those in Nebraska and South Dakota (both of which are just about as Republican as Idaho is): That there may be substantial numbers of voters who have supported Republicans before but this year either might switch sides or not vote. Might the fact that they aren’t voting for a Democrat be enough to get them to move? There are some indications that some voters may shift their votes for that reason, but the evidence isn’t conclusive.
So here we are. Polls have been conflicted in their assessments. I don’t much consider them dispositive, because the only really important measurement is one we can’t reliably see until the vote comes in: Whether, as Bitecofer said, “there really is a meaningful bloc of habitual Republican voters looking for somewhere else to go.”
Only then will we know whether this race really was a unicorn or not. But if it’s a real sighting, you can probably guess it won’t be the last.
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