Idaho media site Political Potatoes aims to answer, ‘Who are the real Republicans?’
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IDAHO FALLS — In speaking with multiple politicians and self-proclaimed commentators for this article, only one thing was universally agreed upon.
Political Potatoes is a one-of-a-kind Idaho-based website. Described in many words (polarizing, controversial, balanced, connecting the dots, conspiracy, grassroots, expose, etc.) the website describes itself as “your source for clear-eyed political analysis, exposing the tactics and misinformation that shape both Idaho and national politics.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it in Idaho politics,” says Greg Pruett, founder and president of the Idaho 2nd Amendment Alliance.
Pruett is a vehement opposer of the website’s content and its founder, Greg Graf, who in the last few years has attempted to shift the narrative of what it means to be a conservative in the Gem State.
Political Potatoes begs the question — who are the real Republicans?
Who is the man behind Political Potatoes?
Despite what many people may believe, Graf, who also operates idahovoters.com, never meant to be involved in politics.
After graduating high school in Southern California, Graf moved to the northwest in the mid-1990s, working in Utah before moving to Idaho Falls in 2013, securing a position as the Director of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at Melaleuca.
“Effectively helping protect and defend the brand from false information and misinformation,” Graf says. “Helping the brand image, which is something a lot of large companies do, and that work eventually led to me to people reaching out and asking for help with their political campaigns.”
According to Graf, he never actually wanted to be involved in politics; it kind of fell into his lap.
“I’d never been involved in politics before. I had nothing to do with any of this,” Graf says. “Suddenly, I’m this Republican who’s living in Idaho Falls, who had no clue who these people were, suddenly just thrown into this whole thing, this mess.”
What is Political Potatoes?
Even so, in 2017, Graf created the precursor to Political Potatoes, IdahoConservatives.com, to blog about Idaho Republican politics from a rare perspective: criticizing his own party and defining who the “good” republicans are.
Graf says the blog’s purpose is to clear up misinformation and deception in Idaho politics, the majority of which he believes comes from those on the far right.
“These groups of people use misinformation, dishonesty, and abuse of tactics to attack good people. I think so many good Republicans are getting run over by this,” Graf says. “And I saw this, especially in the east Idaho community and throughout the state, that people confuse conflict with contention. They’re not the same thing. They’re very different.”
During the website’s early days in 2018, Graf agreed to assist Doug Ricks in his race against Ron Nate for a seat in the Idaho House. (Ricks is now a state senator.)
Ricks won that election, and two weeks later, Greg was sued by Doyle Beck, a board member of the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
“In this race, we did something unique, in that we went directly after the Freedom Foundation and wanted to direct ties to the Freedom Foundation,” Graf says. “We explained how the narrative was how (Nate) was more interested in doing what they want versus what the voters want.”
Nate is now president of the Freedom Foundation.
EastIdahoNews.com reached out to Nate and the Idaho Freedom Foundation for comment, but has not heard back.
According to Graf, the lawsuit alleged defamation in the articles on IdahoConservatives.com, but did not directly name him as a defendant – causing him to eventually be deposed by Bryan Smith, a debt collection attorney and vice chair on the Board of Directors for the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
“That was almost six months of trying to get me in a deposition where they could compel me and grill me,” Graf says. “Smith grilled me for a couple of hours, and in the end, they realized there was no case right there.”
The case was dismissed in January 2019 and what we now know as Political Potatoes was born soon after.
What started as a blog during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 skyrocketed quickly, eventually developing into a Substack in spring 2024. After many social media arguments and multiple lawsuits with far-right Idaho Republicans, Graf has continued to air his grievances and opinions about many of the biggest names in Idaho politics.
“IdahoConservatives.com eventually became Political Potatoes with this mission, this idea that we need to call out bad behavior,” Graf says. “We need to call out things within our own party, as inconvenient as these truths may be. If someone is doing bad things within our party and making other Republicans look bad, when someone is being dishonest about who they really are, calling themselves a conservative, but then everyone else that is not on their team and not getting paid by their people, and are not following the will and wishes of the paid operatives telling them what to do, they’re called and branded ‘RINOs.'”
The word “RINO” stands for “Republican In Name Only” and insinuates that this person has only registered as a Republican to secretly vote for values that do not align with the party and wants to infiltrate and change beliefs — in short, a “fake” Republican.
Graf has become very well-informed about his term, as many have branded him a RINO, a leftist and many other terms that mean to indicate that Graf isn’t a “real Republican.”
Controversy
Graf and Political Potatoes have been the center of many lawsuits and arguments in the courts and online.
One of Graf’s primary sources of contention often coincide with Chad Christensen, a far-right Republican strategist, and former member of the Idaho House of Representatives.
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In 2020, a recorded phone conversation between Graf and Christensen’s supervisor at State Farm Insurance at the time sparked a long trail of arguments between the two, in which Christensen said Graf tried to get him fired from his job, while Graf said the phone call was created to destroy his reputation.
Two years later, Graf, along with four other Idaho residents, sued then-Rep. Christensen after he reportedly blocked them from viewing his Facebook page. In February 2025, Chief U.S. District Court Judge David Nye dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed in the future.
“The Plaintiffs in the Graf v. Christensen case recognized that Christensen’s actions in relation to his social media account were not state actions, and could not be attributed to the state,” said the Office of the Attorney General in a statement to EastIdahoNews.com at the time.
When asked about his relationship to Graf and opinions on Political Potatoes now, Christensen tells EastIdahoNews.com that he believes Graf’s purpose is to produce “negative propaganda” about him.
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“From what I’ve seen is just negative propaganda, lots of attacks on people like me. I’m very conservative, I’m very constitutional, very freedom-minded. He doesn’t like those kinds of politicians or legislators or anybody,” Christensen says. “I believe he likes establishment people, the people that are go with the flow and do what the governor wants, whoever in leadership wants. That’s the kind of guy I think Greg is.”
Graf acknowledges his mistakes in arguing with people on social media, but says it’s vital to the state of Idaho that he not back down when people come after him for what he says is clearing up lies from the far-right.
“I’ve made mistakes in the way I handled things online. I initially took things personally, and it’s hard not to when someone is attacking you personally, lying about using vicious things, posting pictures of your kids on the internet, sharing your home address, death threats,” Graf says. “But over time, I learned how to deal with that.”
Pruett, the president of the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance, also disagrees with Graf and the political rhetoric on his website.
Pruett says his first impression of Graf was online, where he often saw Graf engaging with far-right Idaho politicians and activists in comment sections on various news websites and social media platforms.
In response to the photo of the mug, Greg Pruett told EastIdahoNews.com: “Graf said in deposition that his wife made him the mug with my name on it. Who does that? Who is so obsessed with another human being in politics that you have a mug printed with their name on it? It’s disgusting. This is the guy you want to trust that in Idaho politics, when this unhealthy obsession leads to creating creepy items like that?”
From Pruett’s perspective, Graf spews misinformation on Political Potatoes about people he disagrees with — not the other way around.
“Graf has put out more misinformation probably than anyone else I could think of in the state,” Pruett says. “This is honestly why I just stopped caring about his stuff so long ago, because he would write these entire 3,000-word diatribes, and he would attack me on stuff, and there would be so much stuff in there that was so blatantly false. I just I couldn’t wrap my mind around what I was reading because there was stuff that you could easily prove was not true.”
Graf, who described Pruett on IdahoVoters.com as a “A One-Man Fake News Machine”, says mainly the same thing about him and his far-right friends.
“Any time you look at any article I’ve ever written, any post I’ve made, I always include screenshots and include verifiable facts. I share the evidence because that’s so important. Because these guys want to say, ‘Well, you just said this,’ their default position is always, ‘Well, he’s just a liar, he’s spreading misinformation,’ and it’s pure projection,” Graf says. “That’s part of the confrontational politics playbook.”
At the end of the day – it’s up to the you, the viewers to decide who’s telling the truth.
Political commentator or political agitator?
Part of the intrigue behind Political Potatoes is how it’s definition is altered depending on who is asked.
If you ask Graf, he is a political commentator who uses his platform to discuss misinformation and deception by people who he claims aren’t good Republicans.
“I am aiming at people who call themselves conservatives and people who call themselves Republicans, who then call everyone else that’s not on the team RINOs. At the end of the day, they’re not,” Graf says. “I can prove through data that the positions (his detractors) take and support are not conservative. They’re not who they say they are. They’re gaslighting people.”
Christensen agrees with those who have defined Graf as an agitator, saying he doesn’t understand Graf’s political purpose.
“Activism is about making change with policy and law. I don’t think he does. I don’t think he really wants to, you know, make changes to laws or, you know, I haven’t really seen much of that,” Christensen says. “So yeah, to me (he’s) more of an agitator.”
One of Graf’s closes friends, Jennifer Ellis, a cattle rancher and chairwoman of Take Back Idaho, is a big supporter of the website, and says it is unfair to call Graf an agitator. And if you call him that, maybe everyone else is one too.
“If agitating is showing the nuances within policy discussions or within positions that the party or others have taken and viewing it in a different way, as an agitator, or then I guess maybe everybody that’s ever been involved as an agitator,” Ellis says. “So I think that’s kind of painting things with a broad brush.”
Ellis was involved with Political Potatoes since the beginning, and says the mission has always been to clear up “well-funded attacks” from wealthy groups on any side of extremism that try to spread lies – something they say few people have tried to accomplish against these groups in Idaho.
“There was literally no one in this space that I’d be aware of that was trying to counter the provocative, well-funded attacks on normal conservative Republicans in this state,” Ellis says. “We’ve always kind of operated under the assumption that the 5% of the far, far right and the 5% of the far, far left is what galvanizes politics. And most of Idahoans lie somewhere in the middle.”
Pruett has different views on Graf’s political career. He calls it “bold” and believes that Graf deserves the title of commentator, but mentions the articles often come off as agitating for people in far-right political positions.
“He has commentary on things that are happening, so he is a commentator in that aspect,” Pruett says. “However, he also spends all of his time attacking people. Before he started Political Potatoes, I couldn’t tell you what Greg Graf stood for.”
What does Greg Graf stand for? If you ask him, he aims to keep Idaho voters informed.
“Because the site’s gotten bigger and more attention, people are working with me now. Legislators, organizations and leaders recognize that I’m not the problem, and they were lied to,” Graf says. “I’m actually easy to work with and helpful, and I can help give them a platform and an audience of thousands, and thousands, and thousands of voters who need to hear the message.”