A few days ago, I posted a diary titled "We are all Republicans now."
It discussed Idaho's far right attempts to restrict the Idaho primary in furtherance of their agenda, and it was very troubling to me.
I am less troubled now...
I am a Southern idaho native and have lived here almost all my life.
Southeast Idaho has always provided a fertile seedbed for Conservative extremism; From the early beginnings of the John Birch Society to the present, we have always had a few so extreme that their beliefs border on civic anarchy.
But this seedbed is also shallow and prone to drying up regularly, withering this extremism's flourishing, but never killing it completely. Like so much of the west, Idaho booms and busts, and there is nothing like a few good years of high profits to kill off a lot conservative discontent.
Even so, Idahoans know in fat times that lean years will be soon to follow, and this breeds an amount of conservatism and self-suffiency into us all, Democrats and Republicans alike. The result is a steady moderately conservative base that can swing in either direction, and sometimes does. Any successful politician must acknowledge this moderation if they expect to have a long political career.
I have kept my faith in our moderate ways, even though the 2010 election resulted in a state legislature that became much more far right than at any time in the last 50 years.
The far right has over-reached in many things here; education, state employee's unions, the welfare net, aid to dependent children, and many other common social aspects of our government have been attacked hard.
This primary was the first that followed the first Republican caucus, and the caucus produced a pretty good crop of extremists, some new to the game, and some who ran before. There is an announced attempt in the works to subvert the Republican convention delegation. I was very worried the attempt would succeed, and here, many offices are settled within the Republican party alone. I was forced to declare as a Republican to do my part in ensuring the moderates would not be driven out of office.
For me, a moderate Republican is better than a wing-nut Republican, and I kept faith with my notion that moderation still wins here.
My faith was proven on Tuesday. While the turnout was light, only one of the new extremists won in her race for an open seat. She was opposed by a moderate who had once served many years before as a declared Democrat and switched parties out of practicality, as I did. The win was very narrow- 51.5 % to 48.5%.
The tactics of taking over county Commissioner, Sheriff, Treasurer and other local seats also failed completely. While our local Republican Central Committee is in the control of extremists, they have not been able to forward their agenda for two elections in a row.
More importantly, all of the senior moderate Senators and Representatives were re-elected, and some face Democratic opposition in November. A few have drawn the ire of the far right over the past 2 years; one local Senator, who killed a bill that would have allowed college students to carry concealed firearms on campus, actually had to run a gauntlet of very angry wing-nuts afterwards as he and another left the Capital building. They had to be physically protected by some State Police.
The Republican party's divisions are very evident here, but moderation is still winning out, and the divisions are creating new opportunities for Idaho Democrats. Since many of our counties have very low population, many of the incumbent Republicans were unopposed.
Our goal is to have a Democrat opposing every Republican in every election. We are still far from reaching this goal, but our folks stepped up again, in larger numbers than I, and the Republicans, expected. Once more, the far right was largely thwarted down here.
For the moment, that's good enough. Sometime soon, our present state of affairs will swing to more Democratic favorability, and we are determined to make it happen.