By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
The day after an election is always exhausting. Win or lose, they’re stressful exercises that more often than not combine overthinking with overdrinking, unhealthy food and long hours. This one, however, seems to have hit particularly hard.
On one hand, watching the “blue wave,” “bluenami,” “blue earthquake” or whatever the talking heads decided to call it was regardless an exhilarating example of how much of the country is ready to shake off the MAGA fugue state and return some rationality, accountability and genuine public service to the system.
However, Democrats like former-Transportation Secretary and onetime presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg were wise to temper their enthusiasm on election night. As he and others rightly pointed out, it’s not like Americans woke up on Nov. 3 and suddenly decided they love the Democratic Party — they just woke up to the pain of President Donald Trump’s long con, which has left them desperate for affordable gas, groceries and health care while his plutocratic clique wallows in obviously ill-gotten lucre.
It’s tempting to respond to this apparently historic awakening with “no duh” or “it took you long enough,” but that’s just the curse of Cassandra — the mythical ancient Trojan princess who was doomed to always know what was really going on but no one would listen to her when she warned them about it.
It’s a case of “better late than never,” but also to Democrats: “Don’t screw it up.” Considering how difficult it is for U.S. voters to even understand what’s in their actual best interest, much less cast a ballot for it, they’re going to expect swift relief from this incoming congressional majority — up to and including investigations and charges brought against the administration’s many malefactors. If that’s not delivered, my Cassandra sense is that we’ll see a backlash in 2028 that will feel like the fall of the Ancien Régime.
So if there’s something like “hope” in the air across the country, it’s likely as much to do (or more) with the rejection of Trumpism than a general recalibration toward progressive politics. Though neither of those things are gaining traction in Idaho.
Having watched local, state and national elections for a living over the past 20-odd years, the feeling of enduring an Idaho election is singular. While I, along with millions of others around the nation, watched that “blue wave” roll across the map on Nov. 3, I also had the suspicion born of long experience that it would almost certainly break on the Gem State.
Sure enough, every incumbent Republican retained their positions among the highest constitutional officers from governor to state controller; voters returned all three of our Republican U.S. Congress members; the citizens’ ballot initiative Proposition 1 restoring abortion rights failed; we amended the Idaho Constitution to establish English as the official state language (which it already was by statute); and, for some reason, we now have a “state gun,” which 161,298 people thought should be the Winchester Model 1873, a.k.a., the “Gun that Won the West,” according to the ballot language.
Thankfully, the Trojan Horse of House Joint Resolution 4 — which would have given the Legislature a tidy end-run around the ballot initiative process under the guise of keeping drugs out of Idaho — didn’t succeed.
Locally, voters sent Scott Herndon back to the Idaho Senate for his second non-consecutive term (after losing in the last cycle to outgoing-Republican Sen. Jim Woodward), Cornel Rasor will serve another term representing District 1B in the Idaho House, while Jane Sauter is headed to Boise for a first term as the Dist. 1A House member.
No secret has been made in the opinion pages of this paper that a preferable outcome would have been sending Independents Steve Johnson and Kathryn Larson, along with Democrat Karen Matthee, to the Statehouse in January, but that didn’t happen — resulting in the familiar sensation of waking up the day after an Idaho election and climbing out of a smoking shell hole.
But there is palpable solace in the national results, carrying a good reminder that Idaho is but one of 50 states, and if the overall political environment is to shift toward more stability then the only option is to keep some faith that things might get a little better even in spite of ourselves.
