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#Post#: 10790--------------------------------------------------
Idaho Elections in "the reddest of the red states"
DIR By: guest55
Date: January 24, 2022, 7:59 pm
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Why There’s a Civil War in Idaho — Inside the GOP
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> Idaho is the ‘reddest of red states.’ So why are Republicans
fighting so much?
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--- Quote ---
> STAR, Idaho — The Republican primary for governor was still
months away, but in the packed city hall chambers in this Oregon
Trail town 18 miles west of Boise, the campaign was already
heated.
>
> Six candidates — two each for governor, lieutenant governor
and secretary of state — had accepted the invitation from the
county Republican women’s club to make their case to the 75 or
so citizens who filled the folding chairs and stood at the back.
Cowboy hats outnumbered face masks.
--- End Quote ---
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> The stakes in Idaho’s primary next May are high: If it’s
anything like every other statewide primary in nearly two
decades, the Republican ballot will effectively decide the
general election here in what the previous governor, Butch
Otter, dubbed “the reddest of the red states.”
>
> The candidates sitting at the mikes tussled over traditional
Republican issues in some predictable ways, but they also spoke
of dire challenges that might seem out of place in rural Idaho.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> “We’re losing our freedom to foreign governments and foreign
corporations,” said one dark-horse gubernatorial contender, a
cowboy-hatted county commissioner from the state’s remote
northern Panhandle. As evidence, he cited the $1.4 billion in
pandemic assistance that Idaho had received from that “foreign”
power, the U.S. government, as part of the Cares Act.
>
> Another first-time candidate for governor urged a moratorium
on resettling Afghan refugees in Idaho because “it’s the United
Nations that’s driving refugee settlement, not the United
States.”
>
> As the forum progressed, the candidates directed their
resentment and scorn not just at Democratic adversaries but at
threats within the party — in particular, at the sitting GOP
governor, Brad Little. Although Republicans dominate the state,
these party stalwarts sounded strangely embattled and uneasy.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> The fault lines became evident soon. A former ER nurse named
Mary Souza from the northern city of Coeur d’Alene who’s running
for secretary of state inveighed against a threat that might
seem nearly as distant as the United Nations: election fraud.
Then-President Donald Trump won almost 64 percent of Idaho’s
votes in 2020, 5 points more than in 2016, and took all but
three small counties. Nevertheless, Souza called “election
integrity” the greatest challenge facing the state; she and many
other Idahoans seem to believe Trump should have won more.
“Raise your hand if you think the last election was fair and
clean,” she called out. Only five or six hands rose.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> Chad Houck, her opponent and the current secretary’s chief
deputy, tried to set the record straight on the last election.
He recounted how his office had hand-counted ballots for three
counties and found vanishingly small discrepancies — just one
vote in one of the counties. The real problem facing the GOP in
Idaho, said Houck, is “divisiveness.”
>
> Houck quit the race a few weeks later, opening up space for
another mainstream candidate. But he delivered a warning in Star
that still echoes in the march to the May primary: “The Idaho
Republican Party is injured and kicking itself while it’s down.
We’ve got a lot to do if we want to pull the Republican Party
together and keep Idaho from shifting into purple and blue as
other states have,” he said.
>
> That threat, that ruby-red Idaho could somehow turn purple,
may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. As recently as the
mid-1990s, Democrats were still competitive in Idaho, even as
many other western states, including Colorado, Nevada and New
Mexico, were more strongly Republican. Those three are now blue
spots on the electoral map.
>
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Entire article:
HTML https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/18/republican-infighting-idaho-527190?utm_source=pocket-newtab
HTML https://static.politico.com/dims4/default/eb5b4f9/2147483647/resize/1920x/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F34%2F6e%2Fbcdc5f0c494db4c25cdf624e5127%2Fap21007055191316.jpeg
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