The election of November 2025 nationally has gone down in the books as a Democratic wave, which it was in places where state-level partisan elections were held, as they were in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Did any ripples of that, however subtle, touch Idaho?
Idaho had plenty of local elections on Tuesday, but all were for non-partisan offices, which puts the Gem State a little outside the national partisan framework.
Still. There seemed, among those people who did vote (a smaller number in the off-year elections, as always, than in the even) a few points of general commonality apparently matching with the national mood. For the most part it was a good night for incumbents. Broadly, voters seemed to lean toward stability and competence, and away from the ideological and chaotic.
The contest you might reasonably mark as the top-line for the state could be one piece of evidence for that. The major races were held mostly for city offices. In Boise and Meridian only council offices were on the ballot, and relatively non-controversial incumbents (entirely unopposed in Meridian) easily were swept back in both cities.
Nampa, where the two-term mayor was retiring resulting in an opening at the top, was a more notable case. Four candidates ran for mayor, three of them outsiders and prospective boat rockers. The fourth was Rick Hogaboam, who had been an administrator in Nampa city government, and more recently has been serving as Canyon County clerk and had the endorsement of the last mayor.
What would voters in Nampa, who has elected some of the state’s most ideological legislators, do? The question was in what vote level Hogaboam would get; he might well come in first, but if he was a narrow plurality winner, that would be an indication that voters mostly still wanted to upset a few applecarts.
But no: They went for the known and experienced quantity, Hogaboam, by 62.9% of the vote – an impressive rollup against three opponents. The full speed ahead message seemed quite clear.
In smaller Garden City, something similar happened as a long-time council member, Bill Jacobs, was elected in a competitive race to replace retiring 20year mayor John Evans – who had endorsed Jacobs.
The election for Coeur d’Alene mayor was in some ways even more on point. It’s a little more subtle, since the voters did turn out the incumbent, Woody McEvers, who was appointed to the top job by the council several months ago. The winner, Dan Gookin, who served on the council since 2011 (who does have some Republican background), won the four-way race with just 34.2% of the vote. (Compare that with Hagaboam’s numbers in Nampa.)
But there’s also this: The second-place finisher, Debbie Loffman (with 28%), was an outsider, and would have been new to city government. Centrally for our purposes here, she was the endorsee of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (and not Gookin). This matters, because that group (involved in numerous non-partisan races, including famously that of the governing board of North Idaho College) is the political dividing point of the region.
Loffman’s website looked professional but anodyne (though note the high prominence it gave to describing her as a “devout Christian”) but all the indicators of a hard-line approach were there. You have to read between the lines, but consider her statement for the Watchmen Ministry: “I want to be a voice for people in our community who don’t feel heard. I want to bring a Christian perspective to Coeur d’Alene government. I have a servant’s heart and I want to serve the people in our community. I am a conservative Republican.”
Message received – evidently by the voters. The fact that the endorsed candidate of the overwhelmingly dominant party in the area got 28% says something.
Not everything in Idaho fell in one direction. Just west of Coeur d’Alene, voters in Post Falls ousted their three-term incumbent mayor (in another three-way race) with a candidate endorsed by the KCRCC.
Still, even in Idaho some of the distant echoes of changing national moods seemed to find some reverberations.
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