Opinions among close and careful observers of the Idaho Legislature I know differ on whether the chambers of the Idaho Legislature readily divide into two, three, four or five distinct political parties.
The point behind that observation has a real bearing on some of the most critical decisions Idaho voters will make in this month's primary election. Bear with me.
On a formal level, each chamber of the Idaho Legislature includes members of two political parties, the Republican (around four-fifths of the total) and the Democratic. But almost no one who watches the legislature thinks it’s that simple, because the super-majority Republicans in each chamber are not one coherent, consistent caucus.
You could say the Republican caucuses split into two: The traditional conservatives, along the line of most Republican caucuses from decades past, on one side; and the more extreme or less willing to compromise group, aligned more with the state Republican Party leadership, sometimes called (in line with the U.S. House of Representatives Republican group) the freedom caucus.
The picture is not quite as clean-cut as that, however. Not all of the House or Senate Republicans fit neatly or consistently into the traditional/freedom framework (I use those descriptors under some protest for lack of something better), and some bounce back and and forth. For that reason some people see a fourth or even fifth group splitting up that overall Republican group.
So while Republicans overall have absolute, dominant control, on any given controversial issue majorities can shift unexpectedly. Sometimes the trad group cobbles together a majority with the in-betweeners, and sometimes the addition of Democratic votes is enough to get to a win. Sometimes the free people get it done, and there have been a few, albeit rare, instances when they have aligned with Democrats to prevail. (A key vote on the University of Idaho deal with the University of Phoenix was one example.)
The point is that the situation is fluid, and what now matters in the vote count of the Idaho Senate and House is not so much how many Republicans there are, but how many of which faction. Issue after issue has risen or fallen on that calculus in recent years.
That is why the Republican primary election this year has become so crucial.
That’s partly because there are so many Republican legislative primary contests, more than usual. More than half of all Republican-held Senate seats (17 out of 28) are being contested, and the same is true in the House (35 out of 59 R seats).
In not all but many of those contests there’s a clear split between the trad/free contenders, some incumbents and some challengers; sometimes candidates position themselves in the middle or as straddlers, and voters will have to step carefully to assess what kind of legislators they will be.
But in many cases the choices are clear. In the Senate District 1 contest, for example, the gap between the two Republicans now in a rematch - more traditional Republican Jim Woodward and the hard core Steve Herndon - couldn't be easier to figure out. You can find other sharp divides in most of the other 35 legislative districts, in both chambers. Some are more subtle.
The net pickup of only a few seats by one faction or the other would be enough to make a difference on a wide range of votes.
You can look back at the most recent legislative session to see how that plays out. There were a string of close votes on important and highly controversial subjects, with wins and losses on both sides. Compared with how it might have looked, had the composition of the Republican caucuses been a little different, this session was much more restrained on a number of budget, education, social and other issues that it might have been.
A few seats shifting from one faction to another within the Republican Party could make a big difference in which legislation succeeds or fails next term. The candidates from these factions have no letters next to their names to help voters discern where they’re coming from.
Voters are going to have to listen and read carefully, and figure that out for themselves.