Posts published in May 2026

Primary elections in Idaho are not only about political parties. School districts, and the students they serve, typically have a big stake in them too.

And uneasy sit any sweeping predictions about what the voters in those districts will do.

This year, in the tally assembled by the Idaho Ed News, around the state 24 supplemental levies won voter approval, and four failed. Some plant facilities levies failed too.

Two districts, at Kimberly and Rockland, asked voters for bonding authority for building additions and renovation. Neither came close to passing; in Rockland only about a third of voters were in favor while in Kimberly only about 14% voted yes. That's of a piece with recent history; in the last couple of years just one school bond proposal out of 15 has passed, and it succeeded only after its district (Salmon) had tried a dozen in times in a row unsuccessfully to get the money to fix some extremely unsafe and unhealthy conditions at schools there.

These different categories of funding measures - and there are more than that: Idaho’s school funding system can be, from a taxpayer's point of view, a complicated mess - have different kinds of track records when it comes to passage. (Remember that all of them reach the ballot only after locally elected school boards sign off on them.) The money for all comes from property taxes.

These various types of levies have different rules concerning how the money is raised and how it can be used. The greatest needs often fall in the category of major building or renovations, and those improvements can make a big difference in learning and even test scores.

Education Week magazine concluded “facilities improvements such as HVAC system replacements and plumbing and furnace upgrades can lead to statistically significant test score increases equivalent to 10 percent of the gap between high- and low-income districts’ academic outcomes. In other words, the right kind of school facility upgrade can effectively close 10 percent of the academic achievement gap between high- and low-wealth school districts.”

And often to pay for those, you need bonding authority. Supplemental or plant levies often will not do the job.

And here’s the catch: While supplemental levies need for passage only a simple majority (50% of the vote plus one), and plant facilities generally need 55%, bonds need the extremely high approval bar of two-thirds of the vote - 66.7%. That’s really tough, frequently over the years a killer requirement, since each negative vote counts twice as much as every yes vote.

Idaho is a major outlier on this. A 2023 study found that while three states and the District of Columbia require no election for bonds at all, most do and require a simple majority. Those simple-majority states include Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Oregon. Of the others, 10 states require affirmative votes of from 55% to 60%; one of those is Washington state, where the 60% requirement has been under attack by activists for years. But only Idaho requires more than that.

Lowering the threshold to 50% or maybe a little more wouldn't, of course, guarantee bond passage. Many of them would fail anyway, as witness this year’s Rockland and Kimberly requests. But bear in mind that many of those supplemental levies, which require only a simple majority, do in fact pass.

But the proposal at least wouldn’t seem so far out of reach for so many. And you wouldn’t think, even in Idaho, that building and maintaining decent schools would be so terribly controversial.

On the other hand, take it to the Idaho Legislature and see what happens.

Of all the primary election results in Idaho this week, the one that jumped out at me was not in a contest for senator or governor or any federal, state or local government office at all.

It was for a humble county-level party precinct committee election, the lowest-level and usually least-noticed contests on the ballot, in just one of many hundreds of voting precincts in the state. Unless you’re really active somehow in politics, you probably don’t know the names of your precinct committee representatives (assuming those spots even are filled where you are). Most people don’t.

But they can be important, and the incumbent on the ballot in this case, named Brent Regan, is the best such example in the state. He has been an elected member of the county central committee since 2014, and much of that time as chair. Under his leadership the central committee has become so powerful in Kootenai County across a wide range of political and social areas as to become a dominating force. Regan for years has been one of the leading figures in Idaho Republican politics, closely aligned with the state party leadership, the Idaho Freedom Foundation and the more hardline conservative legislators and other public officials.

So here’s the shocker: On Tuesday, Regan lost that precinct office to a dental anesthesiologist named Rick Montandon, and possibly (not certainly) with it his chairmanship, by 14 votes.

That was not the only change on the central committee, though a few weeks probably will be needed to settle what direction it will take next, and who will lead it. The committee is scheduled for a full meeting on May 28.

In Kootenai County, many people are likely to see this as the end of a political era. They could be right. But in context it looks more like a break in what has been a steady rightward ideological shift, in that county and in the state. The Idaho primary election as a whole seemed to say much the same.

Some early reaction to the results included pronouncements that state politics - meaning for this purpose the Republican Party - had shifted to the point of going into reverse, heading back toward the center and empowering mainstream candidates and officials. (I’ll use here the “mainstream” and “hardline” descriptions that  seem to have caught on of late; substitute your own if you prefer.) You can find evidence for that.

Don’t bother looking for significant evidence in any of the top-of-ballot races, such as they were; the incumbents in the top offices all drew opposition, but none of it was strong enough to come remotely close to seriously threatening any of the incumbents.  Look rather to legislative races, and below.

Maybe the strongest such result was the renomination of Senator Jim Guthrie of McCammon, who was challenged from the hardline side (his race reverberated statewide) after he stood up to that faction on the Senate floor.

But there is much more. The hardcore Gang of Eight is down to a Gang of Three after the primary. Around southern Idaho quite a few from that side either lost their seats, or lost bids to defeat mainstreamers.

The story does not end there, however. You may notice that all these races were in southern Idaho. Up north, several premiere Republican contests went the hardliners’ way. Look for example at Senate District 1 (where Scott Herndon beat Jim Woodward, a reversal of their match in 2024, which reversed their match in 2022 …) and Senate District 6, where very hardline Dan Foreman turned back a strong challenge from Representative Lori McCann. The string of hardline wins in the north goes on from there, the Regan precinct loss notwithstanding.

For those Republican mainstreamers wondering whether the hardcore right tide could ever be pushed back, this election doesn’t constitute a loud shout. But it does equate to a measured: Not easily but yes, it can.

If Idahoans want to look at an important part of today’s top political headlines and evaluate how their state stacks up on that front, they can justifiably say at least in one area: We’re among the best.

At least have been. Maybe will continue to be.

The subject is redistricting, which used to be a hot topic (among political junkies if not most people) just once for a brief time every ten years, and only then. Now reapportionment has become a never-ending battle that makes our already junky standards for politics even worse.

The drawing of lines between political districts for purposes of electoral advantage is almost as old as voting. The word gerrymander, either as a noun or verb, referring to corrupt mapping of districts for political gain, goes back to this nation’s founding and a genuinely illustrious founder: Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the fifth vice president of the nation. He was also governor of Massachusetts and as such signed a state redistricting law including a legislative district so twisty its critics compared it to a salamander, rather, a gerrymander.

As then in Massachusetts, legislatures over the years have done much of the work of remapping districts, which has to be done to keep up with changes in population. (Point of interest: Look up the state legislative district map for the 1970s and compare it to today, and see the fast-declining number of rural districts compared to urban.)

Legislators, having personal interests in these maps - what politician wouldn’t want to choose his own voters? - have in many places often succumbed to the temptation in redrawing districts to benefit themselves or their parties. Sometimes the maps are so bad they’re thrown out by courts.

After the 1980 census the Idaho legislative redistricting process was unusually bitter, and after the 1982 election the Idaho Supreme Court 86’d it and imposed its own, an odd (some thought bizarre) plan that imposed two layers of legislators, one regional and one more local, increasing the number of legislators overall to 126 compared to the 105 the state otherwise has had since the mid-1960s.

Following that fiasco, support grew for turning redistricting over to an independent, bipartisan commission. In 1994 voters approved that idea in a change to the constitution. While some legislators from time to time have explored the idea of retaking control of the process, the commission seems to have general support.  Idaho today is one of the 21 states with some kind of redistricting commission, along with such nearby states as Washington, Montana and California.

The commission system does work well. In Idaho, the maps from these commissions usually generate disagreements from someone, but that’s probably inevitable: The shape of the state and the contours of its population mean that at least a few counter-intuitive districts probably are inevitable. Overall, the maps have been reasonable.

They’ve been fair too on a partisan level: Idaho’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature isn’t that way because of how the districts are drawn, but rather because Idaho just has a lot of Republican-leaning voters. If anything, it would be more possible to draw maps that wipe out most of the few small scraps of territory (Boise and some smaller-population areas) where legislative Democrats do have an advantage. (Idaho’s two congressional districts both already are so Republican there’s almost no way to draw a map to make either of them much less so.)

Therein, in today’s environment, runs the risk: There’s now a growing movement among high partisans (mostly but not exclusively Republican) to wipe out every trace of the opposition, wherever possible. Watch the headlines and you’ll see it in places like South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana. In Washington state, where Democrats already hold eight of the 10 congressional seats, there’s some talk about trying to add a ninth, by splitting the super-Democratic Seattle area between a half-dozen or more districts. (No, it’s not likely to actually happen.)

Start down that road and madness ensues, and a whole lot of people who feel unrepresented start to sue, and worse.

Idaho can avoid all that simply by keeping in place the smarter approach it already has.