Politico published a fascinating article about Idaho’s extremist Republican politics. The story focused on one former Republican state legislator, Jim Woodward, who is anti-abortion and pro-gun in a state where Democrats are a tiny minority, only 12.6% of registered voters.
Idaho has one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation.
Woodward was elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2020. But he lost in 2022 to Scott Herndon, an extremist who wants to criminalize abortion and codify it as murder; who wants vouchers for religious schools; and who wants guns everywhere.
This year Woodward is running as a moderate Republican, still anti-abortion but supporting exceptions like the health of the mother.
Idaho’s ban, which automatically took effect when Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, begins at conception and doesn’t make an exception for the future health of the mother. In 2020, Woodward, a Republican, voted yes on a law that requires physicians to prove that a mother’s life is at risk before performing an abortion or face fines, lawsuits, jail time and revoked medical licenses. In March of 2022, Woodward voted yes on another law that allows family members, including those of rapists (although not rapists themselves), to sue providers for performing abortions.
But Woodward is now running to moderate the law, having realized belatedly that physicians are fleeing the states and the hospital in his own district has closed its labor and delivery service, leaving 50,000 women without access to OB-GYN health services. Democrats can’t vote in the Republican primary. So Woodward must reach out to moderate Republicans.
His opponent Scott Herndon opposes any exceptions to the ban on abortion. Herndon believes that there should be no abortion allowed even for a child who has been raped. Instead, the child should view her pregnancy as “an opportunity.”
Woodward beat Herndon in a close election by 52-48%. But in the same election, other moderate Republicans lost their seats to extremists, who picked up two Senate seats and five House seats.
The Politico article uses the contest between Woodward and Herndon to illustrate the close link between extremist views on abortion and on vouchers. They want to ban all abortions and destroy public schools.
The Recall Replace Rebuild West Bonner County School District (RRR) group was started by a group of Priest River moms — both Republicans and Democrats — when their school board was infiltrated by far-right culture warriors in the 2022 election. In June 2023, those members, who held a majority as three of the five trustees on the board, elected a superintendent, Brendan Durst, with zero state-required education certifications and ties to the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a far-right political activist organization that aims “to defeat Marxism and socialism”; it has called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism.” Militia members began showing up at school board meetings, the school levy that funds basic operations failed to pass as residents became divided into camps “for” or “against” public education, curriculum slipped out of state compliance, and Durst began working to have intelligent design taught in biology classes and offer an Old Testament course (neither came to pass). The resulting chaos, social and political division, and lack of resources sent nearly 50 teachers, counselors and a principal fleeing the district. Many families left as well. Durst told one reporter that “his takeover was a ‘pilot’ others could learn from.”
Less than three months after Durst was hired, RRR gathered enough signatures to hold a recall election — framed not along party lines, but as those who cared about a functioning school district for their children against those embracing extremism. An astonishing 60.9 percent of voters turned out, and two of the three far-right board members were voted off. Durst resigned the following month when the State Board of Education blocked his certification.
“Eight hundred people voted in the 2022 election where those three board members were elected, and they won by a handful of votes, literally single digits,” Woodward says as we pull up to the community center. “But when 2,100 people showed up to vote in the recall election, then two of those same people were told to pack their bags. When you get a bigger slice of the population showing up, you get a decision that really reflects the values of the community.”
The RRR meeting tonight is attended by at least 50 people, in a town of only 1,700 on a rainy Monday night; there’s a lot of work to be done still to pass a levy to fund the school district. It’s clear that there’s no love in the room for Herndon. People say he escorted Durst into the first school board meeting where Durst was considered as superintendent, which was packed with militia members (Herndon says he was at the meeting, but did not escort Durst). After finishing the meeting agenda, Dana Douglas, one of the group leaders and a self-described conservative Christian, introduces Woodward with a reminder to the group that in the 2022 election, “only a third of Priest River turned out to vote. And of those votes, 75 percent went to Herndon and 25 percent went to Woodward. We want to flip that this time, and we need your help.”
Even if Woodward does win this race, it’s doubtful how much he can accomplish in a legislature with a far-right caucus bullying legislators into voting in lockstep. But he’s optimistic that a stronger moderate showing in the election will empower more moderate lawmaking.
“It takes leadership and a few strong individuals to do the right thing,” he says. “If the voters are supportive of a more moderate position, then legislators can step forward and do that. The party’s controlled by the minority position, so that silent majority needs to step up and let people know that they want to be represented.”
The article is a stark reminder of the deep divide that splits the nation and the rise of extremist politics in the Republican Party.
Exceptions to an abortion ban are meaningless. They are always contested and the battle (which often ends up in court) takes so long abortion is no longer possible. Anyone who opposes abortion, regardless of so-called exceptions, is an extremist.
This illustrates something that few people unfamiliar with Christians understand. While it is true that most Christians are conservative, it is not true that the body of Christ is in anyway unified or even Christlike. The contrary is true. The more conservative Christians are, the more likely their organizations are to disagree. One guy I knew joked 40 years ago that Baptists reproduce by fission. Sectarianism in Christianity is true not just in Protestantism, but in more Episcopal (centralized in leadership) Churches as well.
When Christians are written off as unapproachable by political leaders, they tend to collect with more extreme elements within the community in a cycle I have witnessed my whole life. It was not always so. Politics during the reform movements of the Ante-bellum period saw great opposition to slavery in some quarters and apologists in others.
A couple professors at the Gordon Theological Seminary (I knew some of these folks) estimated that there were 36,000 different Christian denominations.
And, of course, there were many Christianities in the first couple hundred years after the death of Christ.
For some reason, WordPress doesn’t want to allow me to make Christianity plural. It is. LOL.
Some years ago, I read a book about opposition to evolution among Christians. His thesis was that there were actually many divergent opinions as to why Darwin was wrong. Because political operatives are not aware of these differences, they often lose the opportunity to fight against the most distant right-wing ideas by lumping them together with all Christians.
As the MAGA fascist cult takes over red states and drives them off a cliff, the day will come when someone asks, “Where did all the people go?”
The answer will be, where sanity still leads.
With global warming and climate change combined with MAGA fascist extremism, those states will become unlivable even for the fascists that are probably starting to drive out moderates, progressives and liberals (who are few anyway in those states). When I saw few, I mean single number ratio like 2% or less. MAGA sees liberals everywhere but in reality, they are one of the smaller political factions, almost half of the Democrat Party that represents about 25% of registered voters or about 12% for the liberals.
In time, I think those states will become wastelands populated by mostly MAGA MADMAX lunatics.
I don’t think the fascist MAGA cult will take over all the red states, but once they do, it isn’t going to be easy for real conservatives and moderates to take them back.