In an attempt to drain Republican coffers and force incumbent lawmakers to compete in races, Democrats have placed challengers in every Idaho district for the first time in three decades.
The Republican-dominated state, which has only 18 Democrats in its 105-seat legislature across two chambers, has faced renewed vigor from the opposition party because of infighting between strict and centrist Republicans, along with the Idaho Republican Party’s fixation on cultural matters, such as a strict abortion ban.
Democrat Loree Peery decided to run when her state House representative, Heather Scott, introduced a cannibalism bill that Peery told Politico shows “she isn’t a serious lawmaker.”
“You can’t win if you don’t run,” Peery said. “It forces the Republicans to work, it forces [Scott] to get out there and talk to people so they can see what she’s about. It forces Republicans to spend more resources on the races.”
Chambers in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been flipped from red to blue in recent years, but Idaho Democrats have no such delusion that their state will go in the same direction. They have set a goal of diminishing the state’s Republican supermajority, though.
Idaho House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel said, “[Republicans] have really overshot the mark in a big way, and we’ve seen in other states when Republican supermajorities do this, they can lose.”
Overshooting the mark with voters could include the aforementioned abortion ban, as the Republican Party faces shifting viewpoints on the topic as a whole. The only firm evidence of voters shifting in Idaho is a Boise State University poll released in January in which a majority of Idahoans felt the state “was on the wrong track” for the first time in the poll’s history.
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A February memo from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee did not include Idaho as a long-term target for a blue flip but did name other states, such as North Carolina and Kansas.
“Democrats just can’t win in this state because their ideas don’t resonate with the people,” Republican state Sen. Brian Lenney said. “Most of Idaho rejects Democrat ideas because they’re bad ideas and they don’t correspond to reality.”
