Rubber, Meet Road – Idaho Dispatch

Bannock County Republican Party, but more so, the closed nature of the GOP as a whole. By closed, I am referring to a party that disempowers its most active supporters, the base. I don’t pretend to know the reasoning behind these power plays. Yet many hypotheses can be made, from the desire to concentrate power to the misguided but relevant desire to maintain close association.

Nationally, the Republican Party faces real threats of ideological intrusion from groups that do not share conservative values ​​and seek only to destroy their opposition. We’ve seen this recently in Idaho with the rise of center-left antagonistic groups like the North Idaho Republicans and their strange bedfellows, the Gem State Conservatives. During Idaho’s May primary, these groups poured millions of dollars into statewide elections in an effort to regain power and tilt the state to the left. They failed miserably.

In Idaho’s May primary, powerful conservatives won about ten Republican nominations for the Idaho Legislature, including unseating incumbent Senate Pro Tempore Chuck Winder. Likewise, despite the alleged millions of dollars spent opposing them, conservatives gained a larger share of the county’s precinct officer seats. These constituency agents select representatives to the Republican and Democratic party conventions and determine their respective parties’ platforms at the state level. Most recently, they re-elected the increasingly conservative leadership of the Idaho Republican Party by a decisive margin of 62 percent to 38 percent in Coeur d’Alene last weekend. On a local level, Bannock County also saw another leadership reorganization.

A few years ago, current County Commissioner John Crowder, frustrated with the nature of local politics, formed a coalition of loosely affiliated, conservative-minded individuals called the Bannock County Conservative Coalition. This coalition aims to align like-minded conservatives in local politics and elect select conservatives to local positions. We meet regularly to discuss issues of local concern, break bread and find opportunities for local volunteer service. Although our opposition often portrays us as extremists, our ideological positions remain unchanged from conservatism’s past. This is the very nature of conservatism. We currently have over four hundred concerned Bannock County residents among our members and that number continues to grow.

As mentioned in a previous article, I was a candidate for precinct officer in our recent Primary. I lost my district race to a staple in our community and I made it a point to find her and congratulate her on her victory. When dealing with my Republican colleagues, I often hear the refrain: “We are not enemies.” Subsequently, I was asked to run for vice president of the Bannock County Republican Party. I was elected to this position by the majority of constituency elected officials. Local businessman Craig Yadon was elected president. The opposition in my race turned out to be a lovely woman and a great asset in ensuring that our county’s reorganization followed party rules and went smoothly. If we are to succeed in saving our state and our nation from the march of progressivism, we must understand who our opposition is and is not.