Will Conservatives Shoot Themselves in the Foot Again?
As the conservative candidates line up for Idaho’s gubernatorial primary I have to think back to the 2014 primary election when Otter beat out Fulcher by less than 8% of the vote and eventually won a third term. That was the year that Labrador said he was going to run and held up Fulcher’s campaign launch by 4 or 5 months before deciding not to run. This put Fulcher at a complete disadvantage when running against an incumbent like Otter.
In 2018, we had Doctor Alhquist turned developer join in the 3 way primary with Labrador and Little only to give Little the governorship by winning only 37.3% of the vote in the primary. Ahlquist said he spent almost 3 million of his own money and only got 26.2% of the vote but enough to kill Labrador’s chances of winning. To this day I still believe that Ahlquist entered the race to stop Labradors from becoming governor. Tommy has proven time and again that he is not a real conservative but one of the elitist cronies who use taxpayer money to help themselves get wealthy and powerful with his urban renewal projects.
This primary is setting up to be another opportunity for the republican conservatives to shoot themselves in the foot yet one more time. We now have 3 conservative candidates running in a race that is sure to hand the governorship once again to Chicken Little. We have Eddie Humphries who is supposedly a financial wizard with other people’s money but has never held a public. He speaks well on the radio but where is he going to come up with a million dollars which is just the entry fee for this race.
This guy seems to have some good ideas but no one knows him around the state which means he is going to have to do a lot of traveling and talking just to get his name out there so people will recognize it on the ballot. This is just what happened to Tommy Ahlquist he had to get people to know who he was and why he was running but when you spend 3 million and only get 26.2% of the vote you have to wonder how will someone like Humphries get himself recognized without a bankroll like Tommy’s? He is certainly involved in the Republican Party but does anyone think that the good old boys are going to support this newbie to the political arena. I doubt it. If “Fast Eddie” is going to run for anything it should be for Lt. Governor to get his feet wet and see if he can handle the heat from our liberal press for four years.
Then there is Ammon Bundy who had a lot of name recognition both state-wide and nationally but again where will he come up with the million bucks for the entry fee. Ammon is certainly a man of principle and a devote Christian so he will have a decent following but I still doubt that he would be able to win the independent and the moderate republican vote to take down Brad Little.
He will certainly garner the right-wing conservative vote but will that be enough to win in a 4-way race. Possibly but the governor’s race has always been a money game and if you don’t have the money to play you can’t win. Bundy also had no political experience and although I would consider him a very smart man we are talking about running the state of Idaho with a budget of $9 billion. I happen to like Ammon as a candidate but adding himself into the mix is only going to help Little win in a 4-way election.
My money would be on Janice McGeachin who had been engaged in the political arena for almost two decades. She was a member of the Idaho House of Representatives from 2002 to 2012 as chair of the state House Health and Welfare Committee, she cut Medicaid funding and voted against legislation to create a state-based health insurance exchange. An ally of the Tea Party movement, McGeachin was considered a possible Republican primary challenger to U.S. Representative Mike Simpson in 2010 but chose not to run.
McGeachin participated as a delegate for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention and was vice-chair of Trump’s Idaho campaign committee. While McGeachin has a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and Accounting from the University of Arizona she also runs two successful businesses with her husband. She did take federal money to keep both of those businesses alive and her employees working. She fought Governor Littles emergency powers takeover of Idaho’s government and has been highly critical of the way he has used those powers to suck up as much federal money as possible while leaving the peoples’ representatives out in the cold when it came to spending the federal money.
Janice is not a member of the elitist cadre of Idaho but understands how they work and why they keep winning elections year after year. She is someone we would call a proven true conservative by her actions for the past 20 years. She has stood up for many on the far right and understands that government is of the people by the people and for all the people. Many are saying that she could be another Kristi Noem the current governor of South Dakota. Personally, I believe she can be even better than Noem when it comes to conservative government, but it is the voters of Idaho who will ultimately make that decision.
In any case, we can tell you right now that if Idahoans want as conservative governor they had better let the other two candidates know that they need to find another race to get into because if they say in the governor’s race you can bet Little will win another 4 years. Keep in mind something I have been saying for years that the Governor controls the purse strings for all of the public employees of the state and most people tend to vote with their wallets. If you do some digging you will find that the number of state employees is somewhere in the neighborhood of 36,000 when you include those in public education. That, my friends, adds up to a swing vote with husbands and wives of over 70,000 votes.
Aside from Tommy Ahlquist, this is the only reason that Little won the last primary for governor. Little thinks he is king of Idaho and it is time to remove him from his phony throne and let him go back to chasing cattle and leasing his land to oil and gas companies. After four years of Little Idaho has found out what happens when you put someone in office who was never qualified to do the job. Remember this is the man who was the chairman of IACI the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry the most powerful lobby in the state and you can bet they want to keep the power they currently have with him in office. It’s time to throw the bums out and bring in some real conservatives who are not tied to big-time lobbyists. Why would conservative Idaho want to reelect a governor who believes in climate change and calls Columbus Day Indigenous Person Day? Little is about as conservative as Mitt Romney and we don’t need a Romney clone running Idaho.
Remember People, “We Get the Government We Deserve”.
Published with Permission of gemstatepatriot.com