This is ‘the biggest mistake’ traditional Republicans made against the far-right | Opinion

A decade ago, during the implosion 2014 Idaho Republican Convention in Moscow, longtime GOP operative Ken Burgess warned that the “tinfoil hat caucus” was on the verge of taking over the GOP.

A decade later at its convention in Coeur d’Alene, which took place this weekend, that prediction looks truer than ever. The far-right faction of the GOP holds a decisive majority.

Dorothy Moon, a former state senator with longstanding ties to the extremist John Birch Society, easily won re-election as the state chair. Efforts to remove planks of the party platform that would revoke voters rights’ to elect their senators and to end the federal reserve were unsuccessful, while planks to end funding for all post-high-school education programs and to count the destruction of embryos used for IVF as murder were passed.

Steve Taggart, a moderate political activist and attorney from Idaho Falls who served as a delegate from Bonneville County, called it “a freak show.”

“There was not one voter drawn into the fold by the GOP convention,” Taggart said. “It was, ‘How many people can we offend?’”

But Taggart sees a way out of the continuing yearly drift further and further right both within the GOP and the Idaho Legislature. There’s reason to take him seriously.

Taggart was one of a number of traditional Republicans who rallied in May to decisively take over the Bonneville GOP’s central committee, which had long been held by the far-right, led by people like Doyle Beck, Bryan Smith and Mark Fuller, none of whom are part of the county committee today (though Fuller was elected the state party’s first vice chairman, and Smith was elected national committeeman).

At the same time, eastern Idaho’s legislative delegation, which makes up about a quarter of the Legislature, has moved decisively toward the center in the last several years as far-right lawmakers like Ron Nate, Bryan Zollinger, Tony Potts, Karey Hanks, Chad Christensen and — if the current results hold up to a recount — Julianne Young have been shown the door one after another.

This stands in sharp contrast to much of the rest of the state, especially the Magic Valley and the Treasure Valley, where far-right gains have been significant and grown over time. And it stands in contrast to Kootenai County, where efforts by moderates to take back the party infrastructure narrowly failed in May.

But Taggart argues that the ground has never been more promising for traditional Republicans to gain ground because the dominant far-right wing of the party keeps taking deeply unpopular positions.

And there were some doozies during the convention. One resolution, if followed to the letter, would require defunding of all Idaho’s universities, community colleges, technical programs and even opposition to federal programs like the GI Bill, Idaho Falls Sen. Kevin Cook, who serves on the budget-writing Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, pointed out in an interview.

It would also require defunding medical school and residency programs designed to address Idaho’s doctor shortage, a program designed to plug the agricultural veterinarian shortage, agricultural research grants and grant programs to train students for careers in nuclear energy.

Cook said he will continue to vote to fund such programs, ignoring the party’s resolution. That’s the position you can expect nearly every lawmaker to take.

“They’re expecting Republican lawmakers to follow that line, or they’ll discipline them,” Taggart said. “And lawmakers are just laughing.”

Like much of the rest of the increasingly far-right state party platform, it’s a formula for losing elections, Taggart said.

“I’m trying to imagine someone in Ada County running on defunding (Boise State) or (College of Western Idaho),” he laughed.

Another resolution, if implemented, would mean that clinics in Idaho would likely cease providing in-vitro fertilization treatment — as happened recently in Alabama after the state supreme court ruled that frozen embryos can be counted as children.

Former Sen. Dean Mortimer, who had a reputation as one of the Senate’s arch-conservatives in his 12 years in office, was flabbergasted by that resolution in particular.

“As a family, we have experienced (IVF),” Mortimer said. “We have a grandson because of it. I’m grateful for it. I was really concerned with the way that platform was put together.”

That’s a view that isn’t unique to Mortimer. It’s hard to find a family who doesn’t have someone they know or love who exists because of IVF. Think voters will support a bill to effectively ban it?

To see how unpopular the positions of the far-right have long been in eastern Idaho, you just had to look at election results.

Nearly every time the Bonneville GOP took a position on a candidate or ballot measure — for example, opposing the creation of the College of Eastern Idaho, which voters supported more than two-to-one — the party was walloped. The problem with precinct committee officer races (the representative of each precinct who make up the rank and file of the party) is that nobody knows who the candidates are or what side they’re on.

So the strategy was to draw the line and stand clearly on one side of it.

Taggart said his message was, “If you like Dorothy Moon, Doyle Beck and Bryan Smith, vote for my opponent.”

He won with 74% of the vote, unseating the incumbent, Paul Voegeli, who supported efforts to investigate and censure local lawmakers, according to the Post Register.

That pattern repeated across Bonneville County, and in a single election, the longstanding dominance of the far-right in the county central committee evaporated. Today, 76% of precinct committee officer seats in Bonneville are held by traditional Republicans — a reversal about as profound as if the Democrats took a majority of the House in November.

Taggart said that strategy is a model for how old-school Republicans can take back the ground they’ve lost since 2014.

“Everyone is always afraid to say: ‘Here’s the good people; here’s the bad people,’” Taggart said. “That’s what you have to do. The biggest mistake people have made is to not run directly against them. You have to identify the danger. That’s the Dorothy Moon wing of the party. President (Ronald) Reagan wouldn’t recognize them. Their biggest enemy is Gov. (Brad) Little, not the Democrats.”

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.