Are nonpartisan elections doomed? Idaho GOP head calls them a ‘farce’

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) — After the November elections, Idaho Republican Party Chairwoman Dorothy Moon celebrated the “strong conservative campaigns” she witnessed in Caldwell, Post Falls and Pocatello.

Those were all nonpartisan races, she acknowledged — but that label is a “farce,” she wrote in a Nov. 6 post.

“Let’s be honest: there’s no such thing as a ‘nonpartisan’ race anymore,” she said.

For years, the Idaho Republican Party has advocated to turn more races into partisan ones, arguing that party labels offer voters critical information about the candidates. Now, some lawmakers are making a push to eliminate nonpartisan elections altogether.

House Speaker Mike Moyle told the Idaho Statesman that lawmakers have been drafting legislation to make every race partisan, which would require party labels on every candidate’s name on election ballots. He said there are several proposals in the works but declined to say which lawmakers were leading the efforts.

Moyle, a Republican from Star, said he’d have to wait to see the bills’ specifics before offering his support – but said he broadly thought making more races partisan was a good idea.

“In a way, they already are,” he said. “The community knows who’s what and where, so why don’t we just be honest about it?“

It was a sentiment echoed by a May resolution from the Ada County Republican Central Committee, which said that nonpartisan elections “obscure the ideological and moral frameworks guiding these elected officials” and allow these officials to advance partisan politics “under the guise of neutrality.”

“Nonpartisan elections fail to provide voters with clear information about the moral and political stances of candidates, leaving citizens unable to hold officials accountable to a consistent party platform,” the committee wrote.

“Let’s have every candidate lay their cards on the table for all to see,” Moon wrote in November. Allowing candidates for traditionally nonpartisan positions – such as mayor, city council and highway district commissioner – to run on a party platform will let voters know “exactly what they stand for and what they’ll bring to the job.”

Moyle has also argued that partisan races garner more public engagement. In April, he sponsored House Bill 471 to turn Ada County Highway District Commissioners’ positions into partisan, countywide races that “would match the process by which county commissioners are elected,” according to the bill’s statement of purpose.

“There will be more involvement because they are partisan,” he argued while presenting the bill in the House State Affairs Committee. “It’ll also put the locals back in control” by encouraging greater voter turnout.

That bill made it out of the House but died in a Senate committee after an hour of public testimony, mostly in opposition, the Idaho Statesman previously reported. Opponents argued that roads and infrastructure are not political issues, and that the bill’s proposal to make ACHD elections countywide would impede local control.

Partisan candidates look to score ‘political points,’ some say

Thad Butterworth, the chair of the Ada County Republican Central Committee, said partisanship in nonpartisan elections is nothing new. “It’s just more visible now,” he told the Statesman by email. His committee gets requests for voter guides in all races, he said.

“We always want to help more solid Republican candidates win, just like the Democrats want to help their candidates win, even in ‘nonpartisan’ elections,” he said.

Republicans are more likely to win elections in Idaho if they can identify with their political party, Moon told the Statesman.

“Thousands of people moving to Idaho do so because of our conservative values,” she said. “To know who is a Republican on the ballot will help them to make more informed decisions. Voters trust the Republican brand and what it communicates about a candidate’s fundamental worldview.”

Candidates in nonpartisan races always have the option of telling voters “exactly who they are and what they stand for,” said Lauren Necochea, the head of the Idaho Democratic Party. But Democrats in the state want local elections to “stay focused on the needs of local communities” rather than on party affiliation, she said.

Voters “care about public safety, bringing down housing costs and keeping good teachers, not party labels on local ballots,” she said in a statement.

Moon in her November post argued that organizations with well-known political affiliations across the spectrum released voter guides and spent money supporting their preferred candidates: “It was obvious to anyone paying attention which way these supposedly nonpartisan candidates leaned.”

Candidates in some recent races said partisanship’s rise should worry voters.

In 2020, the first time Alexis Pickering ran for a seat on the Ada County Highway District, she was “very proud” to receive bipartisan support for her campaign, she said. In the nonpartisan race, she avoided any kind of party affiliation. She wanted her campaign to be “accessible” to people from different political backgrounds, she said, and the approach seemed to work. She won the race against the 16-year incumbent, Rebecca Arnold, by two votes.

But when she ran for reelection in 2024, the landscape had changed. Arnold, in a rematch, branded herself as a “conservative leader” and, Pickering said, the “Republican choice” for the role.

“It got a lot more politically motivated,” said Pickering – who won again, this time by a wider margin.

Pickering is also the director of Conservation Voters for Idaho, which focuses on protecting the environment. The group supported Boise Mayor Lauren McLean, the most prominent elected Democratic official in Idaho, in her 2023 re-election bid against former Police Chief Mike Masterson.

Partisanship can distract from the actual issues at play, to the detriment of voters, Pickering said.

“When you center partisanship, it’s really hard to elect folks that actually care about solving those problems, because they are trying to win political points rather than get things done,” like focusing on how long it takes to fill potholes or remove snow, she said. People who argue that a political party is candidates’ defining feature are “losing the plot,” she said.

Chris Hadden, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for the nonpartisan Eagle Sewer District in May, decried the Ada County Republican Central Committee’s “vetting processes” for candidates in nonpartisan races. The committee asked candidates to fill out surveys about their policy positions and alignment with Republican and conservative ideology. The questions did not directly relate to sewer-district management.

Hadden said partisanship in that race produced some candidates whose focus was on “Making Eagle Sewer Great Again,” a nod to President Donald Trump’s agenda, rather than delving into the inner workings of the sewer district. The candidates, Deborah Kowalcyk and Angela Stoppello Russell, each received about 20% of the vote, not enough to claim the two seats they sought. Voters returned incumbents James Gruber and John Bennett to office.

Those surveys, Butterworth argued, were simply “letting the candidates give their positions on issues so that the voters can see where they stand.”

That transparency, Moon has argued, is the point.

“Partisanship is not a bad word. On the contrary, it’s a clear way of identifying what principles a candidate stands for,” Moon wrote in 2023. “A candidate’s principles show through in every situation.”