In my last column I wrote about the larger than usual number of Democrats running this year for the legislature, which jumped out at me as the most notable aspect of the just-finished candidate filings, but I don’t want to leave Republicans out of the picture. They have lots of candidates too, heading into this year’s primary election.
Their situation is a little different from the Democrats, though. Idaho Republicans normally have filed candidates for not necessarily all but close to all of the partisan seats up for election, passing up few legislative seats even in strongly Democratic areas (meaning, mostly, Boise) and they’re doing that again this year. That sheer comprehensiveness has been one of the elements of their overall success.
What feels a little different this time, at least on the legislative level, is the depth of primary contests involving incumbent legislators.
As a comparison to recent elections, that’s a judgment call rather than a slam dunk because 2022 also saw plenty of primary action among Republican legislative candidates, and notably with incumbents targeted by challengers who frequently ran serious campaigns. By my count, putting aside contests developed where redistricting pitted incumbents against each other, I saw at least four incumbent Republican senators and seven Republican House members lose to challengers four years ago. And those were a small minority of the contests overall involving incumbents. Plenty of other challengers fell short but still scored respectable votes.
In 2022, both Senator Chuck Winder and Representative Mike Moyle, today the leaders of their respective chambers, won their primaries by margins that were slender, in the range of surprising, for such well-established and veteran incumbents. And the many serious contests emerged from all different directions.
While some of these primary contests involved extreme candidates ousting mainstream incumbents (losses for Senators Jim Woodward and Fred Martin, for example) the reverse happened too (Representatives Ron Nate and Chad Christensen, for example). The stories behind these races were widely varied.
And this year?
We appear to be seeing something like more of the same, only maybe a little more of it.
A whole lot of the survivors in 2022 are facing challenges again, sometimes from the same candidates. The District 1 race between Woodward and Scott Herndon, so heated last time, is getting a repeat, as now-challenger Woodward tries to oust now-incumbent Herndon. That could be among the most watchable races in Idaho this year.
Local Republican central committees have started making a practice of censuring legislators whose floor votes they have disagreed with, and most of those legislators have drawn challengers. Representative Lori McCann at Lewiston has two challengers (which from an incumbent’s standpoint usually is better than one). In Idaho Falls, Representative Stephanie Mickelson has two challengers as well; state Senator Kevin Cook has just one.
The other legislator in the Cook-Mickelson district, Wendy Horman, is co-chair of the budget-setting Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which presumably made her an almost automatic target for someone. In fact two someones are opposing her in the primary, and one of them, Bryan Smith, is a former congressional candidate and well-known and well-connected figure in the region. That will be another of the hottest races in Idaho this season.
The other JFAC co-chair, Senator C. Scott Grow, has a primary challenger too.
And so, once again, do both Winder and Moyle.
This is happening all over the state, not in just one region. There’s not any single trend line in all this, other than that distinct pieces of the Idaho Republican Party have continued to grow and do battle with each other, and neither has obtained a conclusive dominance over the other. If you look at legislative races (and you can extend the point to major offices as well), both sides have scored significant wins.
Which tends to suggest another split decision in May.