The Big Liedaho

The Big Lie that Trump "really" won the 2020 election is ripping up primary slates in several states, and that apparently includes the Gem State.

Idaho’s dominant Republican Party is at war with itself up and down the ballot ahead of its May 17 primaries.

It’s not just Gov. Brad Little, whose reelection campaign became national news when Donald Trump endorsed a primary challenge from Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin. The state attorney general is staring down a challenge from a former rabble-rousing member of Congress. The senior of Idaho’s two GOP House members is facing a primary that has drawn millions in spending. And contentious open races for lieutenant governor and the secretary of state — Idaho’s chief election official — echo some of the national divisions within the party.

There is bound to be some infighting in a state where ambitious pols only have a few routes up the ladder. But there’s more to it in Idaho, where the party’s longtime control over the booming state has bred sharp differences and fierce enmity between two wings of the GOP.

“Some people would describe it as conservative, and then far-right conservative,” said Tom Luna, the chair of the state Republican Party. That “far-right” camp, Luna continued, “would call themselves conservatives and everybody else moderates.”

“We’re probably a microcosm, in some ways, of a lot of places around the country,” said Tommy Ahlquist, a developer who finished third in the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary.

The normally invisible secretary of state race illustrates the situation. Two of the three candidates running in the GOP primary — state Sen. Mary Souza and state Rep. Dorothy Moon — said they did not believe that President Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane, who oversees elections in the state’s most populous county, said that Biden did win the election.

“It’s just this national rhetoric, and running to a narrative created by Trump that he started when he knew he was going to lose, and started telling the lie,” said Ahlquist, who is critical of the far-right slate of candidates. “And that filters down to Republicans in our state. And in a state as red as ours, that’s still the narrative because that’s what they do to get elected.”

In the state attorney general’s race, former Rep. Raúl Labrador — a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus — and his allies have cast five-term Attorney General Lawrence Wasden as a weak link in the national fight against Democrats.

The Club for Growth, a longtime backer of Labrador’s in Congress, has spent nearly $300,000 on TV ads in the race, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm. Though the group hasn’t formally endorsed Labrador, who finished second in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, they have gone after Wasden.

“Lawrence Wasden is no general,” the narrator of the Club ad says, knocking him for not joining multi-state actions that other GOP attorneys general backed — including the 2020 lawsuit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that tried to toss out the results of the last presidential election.

But it’s the governor’s race that will headline the GOP primaries in Idaho, with Little facing down a challenge from McGeachin after years of public feuding between the two, especially over coronavirus policies. Their horn-locking reached farcical levels: More than once, McGeachin used her power as acting governor while Little was out of the state to issue an executive order on the pandemic, which Little would angrily rescind shortly after returning.

Little is one of two sitting Republican governors whom Trump is opposing, joining Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, whose primary against former Sen. David Perdue is later this month. But unlike Kemp — who had a well-documented public breakup with Trump in 2020, over his unwillingness to help Trump overturn the election results — Little never publicly drew the former president’s ire.

McGeachin, however, was one of Trump’s earliest supporters. She also has ties to the far right, having appeared at the same conference hosted by a white nationalist that drew condemnation and criticism for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). (McGeachin accused a Boise TV reporter of trying to play guilt “by association” by raising the conference, saying she didn’t know the organizer before she spoke.)

Little contonues to have a pretty big lead over McGeachin, but you can't count her out, not with Trump, Michelle Malkin, and white supremacist domestic terrorist outfits like the Three Percenters behind her.

Understand that the only thing that matters in the Republican party anymore is loyalty to Trump.