Traditional Idaho Republicans want to take back control of GOP from extremists. Let’s hope it works | Opinion

Across Idaho, there are efforts by traditional Republicans to wrest back control of the Idaho GOP from the far-right.

As the Spokesman-Review reported, the North Idaho Republicans have organized a challenge for nearly every one of the 73 GOP precinct committee officer seats in Kootenai County. The Gem State Conservatives are likewise organizing efforts around the state, as the Idaho Capital Sun reported, including a push to challenge nearly every seat in Bonneville County.

Organizing such a massive slate of candidates is a herculean undertaking, much more difficult than working on ordinary statewide or legislative campaigns, and organizers should be commended for their efforts. The question this May is: Are Idaho voters equal to the challenge these groups have put to them?

Moderates are at a natural disadvantage in races like these. It takes a lot of work and political engagement to figure out what candidate you want to back in these tiny races that often have next-to no publicity or campaign advertising. Extremist political junkies, whose lives often revolve around politics to an unhealthy degree, often find it easier to organize in such a low-information environment than do moderates who are mostly focused on their jobs and families, and whose positions are more nuanced and not as easily reduced to sound bites and slogans.

But it’s work that traditional Republican voters should commit to doing this year.

Because if moderates can take back central committees in Kootenai and Bonneville — two of the most important strongholds of party control on the far-right — it will go a long way toward reining in the outsized influence that faction holds on Idaho’s public institutions.

True, party control has frequently failed to turn into electoral victory — a pretty good predictor of many elections in Bonneville County for years has been to bet against the local central committee, and the Kootenai GOP has also seen some significant defeats in recent years — but that doesn’t mean these races aren’t important.

Here’s why: The far-right often fails to win elections because its positions are extreme and unpopular with voters. They can’t win elections based on attempts to defund public schools, to end the popular election of senators, to put doctors in jail for administering vaccines or on a platform of reinstating the gold standard. Their voters either don’t like these ideas or don’t care.

The far-right’s main asset is its control of the GOP brand.

The brand matters because the typical Republican voter in Idaho has nothing to do with the state party. They’ve never been to a party meeting or convention; they don’t know or care that Dorothy Moon is the party chair; and they’ve never read or given one second of thought to the increasingly fringe state party platform.

They are Republicans because national party affiliation has become integral to political identity. That’s the team they root for in politics.

This is why the far-right has tried to expand its ability to discipline and coerce Republican elected officials, and why their favorite epithet is to call more moderate members of the GOP “Republicans In Name Only.” Their most effective political move is to single someone out and say: “They aren’t really on the home team. They’re playing for the other guys.”

That threat allows them to push your representatives and other elected officials to respond to their interests and preferences rather than to yours. As a result, this was the first year that a plurality of Idahoans said the state was on the wrong track, according to the Idaho Public Policy Survey.

So why not take that weapon out of their hands?

If these campaigns succeed and the far-right’s grip on the party brand begins to break open, the far-right will return to their recent status as side players rather than the central problem of Idaho’s political life.

And this election offers you a better chance to do that than any other in recent memory.

Your vote is more powerful in a precinct committee officer race than in any other. There’s a precinct committee officer for every precinct — and there are well over 900 statewide, as the Capital Sun noted — which means the number of votes needed to swing a district is tiny.

In Ada County in 2022, for example, few precinct committee officer races were decided by a margin of more than 10 votes, and some were decided by just a single vote. There’s a substantial chance that if you and your family do the research needed to pick a candidate, you could swing the outcome of one precinct committee officer race.

It’s a kind of power you rarely get as a voter, and you should use it.