The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane’s new elections data dashboard hasn’t really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the “Voters Moving to Idaho†map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn’t overstate his Gem State connections: “I cannot say with firsthand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I’ve never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans.â€
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later seventies Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d’Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn’t happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we’d paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today’s Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane’s new chart shows that as the Pacific states - California, Oregon, Washington - turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans - in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state’s population. However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that’s of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he’s posted so far.
(image/Rawpixel)