How decent Republicans can campaign to take their party back | Opinion

The election is finally over. You get a bit of a break from campaigning.

And there are few things more annoying, when you at last have all that noise behind you, than thinking about an election a year away.

Nonetheless, Republican voters with common decency should start thinking right now about how they can take their party back. It’s a hard, complicated fight — but recent history shows it can be done.

You should start thinking about it now because of the rotten thing the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee just did to a woman named Christa Hazel, who committed the cardinal sin of disagreeing with them.

Hazel has long worked against the political interests of Kootenai Chairman Brent Regan and his friends through the group North Idaho Republicans. In response, the Kootenai GOP doxed her (that is, published sensitive personal information online) by posting documents containing her unredacted Social Security number, followed quickly by a statement from Idaho GOP Chair Dorothy Moon attacking Hazel’s group.

“I believe it completely crosses a line of decency,” Hazel told the Statesman’s Sarah Cutler.

Of course it does. And it isn’t a matter of what you think about tax policy or what books should be allowed in libraries. It’s a simple moral matter: You should respect people’s privacy, whether or not you disagree with their political positions. Exposing their Social Security number doesn’t just violate that privacy, it exposes them to identity theft.

Regan told Cutler that there was no way to confirm what the party had released was her Social Security number. How cute.

What this shows is the kind of moral rot that has taken hold of the Kootenai GOP, and not just there.

Recall that former Rep. Priscilla Giddings was censured in 2021 for doxing a rape victim, presumably because the perpetrator — now serving a 12-year sentence — was her political ally. Moon, then serving in the House’s far-right flank, testified in the perpetrator’s defense and voted against Giddings’ censure.

Moon was rewarded for it by being tapped as the leader of the Idaho Republican Party.

But this isn’t always the cast of characters who’ve run the GOP, and there’s no law of nature that says they’re the ones who will run it forever.

Political parties in Idaho are not private clubs. They are creations of Idaho law, sort of quasi-governmental institutions. The state has laws about how to form a party, what is required to certify a party and what kinds of things parties can do.

And the existence of a certified political party creates all kinds of obligations for the state government. The state finances and runs the elections that decide who the party’s nominee will be, and, most importantly, it finances and runs the elections that decide who runs the party.

These elections, the often-overlooked precinct committeeman or party committee officer (PCO) races, are the smallest elections in Idaho. The PCOs are the people that run the party. They elect its leadership, decide what its platform says and coordinate its political activity.

There are usually fewer than 200 votes cast in a Republican PCO race, so it’s entirely possible that your extended family has enough votes to swing one. If you organize your neighborhood, you can most likely swing a race.

And just this strategy was used last year to wrest control of the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee, long a power center for the far-right faction of the GOP, back into the hands of more traditional Republicans.

There wasn’t any secret trick. The trick was just consistent, long-term, on-the-ground organizing involving community leaders, elected officials and dedicated citizens who were tired of the extremism on display from the county party. It was the basic work of retail politics.

But that’s also what makes the task difficult. Winning one PCO race isn’t enough; you may have to win a dozen or more to swing control of a central committee. That means coordinating dozens of individual precinct-level campaigns — recruiting candidates and making sure voters know who they are.

So find a decent Republican in your neighborhood. Get them to put their name in for PCO. Go door to door and talk to your neighbors. Convince 100 Republicans to vote for them, and you’ve just won a race.

Coordinate with like-minded people in other neighborhoods around your county. Win a majority of the PCO races in the county, and you’ve won the ability to control the county central committee.

Coordinate like that across the state, and your faction could win control of the state party.

But all that coordination and neighborhood-level campaigning is very complicated.

And that’s why, if you’re fed up with the things people like Regan and Moon have done with your political party, it’s time to start organizing your efforts now.

Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto.

This story was originally published November 6, 2025 at 4:00 AM.