Who Killed the Presidential Primary?

Originally published on Substack on July 16, 2023

The Idaho Republican Party last hosted a presidential nominating caucus in 2012, and by all accounts it was a difficult affair. In response, the GOP worked closely with the Legislature to create a primary election in March of 2016.

Why March? Because by May, the presidential nomination is usually sewn up, giving candidates no incentive to visit Idaho nor to discuss issues that are important to Idahoans. The 2016 primary went well, but it cost the taxpayers a little extra to hold an additional election that year.

Incoming Secretary of State Phil McGrane had big plans when he took office at the beginning of this year. He asked the Legislature for nearly $2.5 million more in his budget than his office had last year, an increase of more than 50%. He also asked for a $10 million supplemental.

Perhaps he was looking to offset that increase, then, when he championed a bill to consolidate Idaho’s presidential election with the rest of our statewide primary in May of 2024.

McGrane worked with GOP caucus chair Rep. Dustin Manwaring on a bill to move the presidential primary to May starting in 2024. Unlike after 2012, there was little collaboration with the Idaho Republican Party.

I need to take a short break here to explain exactly how a bill becomes law in Idaho. Once a legislator has drafted a bill it is given an “RS” number (RS stands for “routing slip”). The RS remains the property of the legislator, and is not usually made public at this time. The legislator presents the RS to the appropriate committee in the House or the Senate, at which time the committee votes on whether or not to print the bill. If the vote is affirmative, the bill is officially printed, given a bill number, and posted online for the public to read.

The sponsor returns to the same committee on a later date to give a full presentation of the bill, and the committee then hears testimony from other legislators, lobbyists, and members of the public. After that is done, a member of the committee moves to send the bill to the floor with a “do pass” recommendation. The committee then votes on that motion. If they vote in the affirmative, then it moves on to the floor, but if the vote is negative, the bill is dead.

Bills must be read three times on the floor before they can be voted on. The first reading is perfunctory, and comes before the committee hearing. The second reading comes after the “do pass” committee vote, and finally the third reading is where we get debate and a full floor vote. The sponsor presents the bill to the whole chamber, and legislators debate back and forth. Some bills see zero debate, while others can be deliberated upon for hours. If the ensuing vote is in the affirmative, then the bill is sent across the hall to the other chamber, where it must go through the three readings and committee hearing all over again. If it is negative, the bill dies.

As you can see, there are five opportunities to kill a bill. There are also parliamentary procedures that can occur, such as moving to hold a bill in committee, or moving to send the bill to the amending order. The amending order is a special session of the entire chamber as a committee of the whole in which they vote on amendments to fix issues that came up after the bill was drafted. If one chamber amends a bill, it must then be returned to the other chamber for concurrence before it is passed.

Keep all of this in mind, because there will be a test. Actually no, but it is all relevant to how the story of the presidential primary played out.

Rep. Manwaring introduced H138 in the House State Affairs Committee on February 22 where it passed with no debate. It was read the third time in the House chamber on February 24, passing 61-6-3. After first reading in the Senate it was assigned to Senate State Affairs, where Sen. Mark Harris introduced the bill.

Idaho GOP Chair Dorothy Moon was out of town, so she sent her executive director Kiira Turnbow to testify on behalf of the party. Moon believed that the party itself should have been consulted before passing a law changing the date of the presidential primary, especially since the party had lobbied so hard to move the primary to March in the first place. It was not as if Moon was acting unilaterally either – most party leaders were unified in their opposition to this bill.

Despite Turnbow simply delivering a statement on behalf of Moon and the party, Sen. Chuck Winder subjected her to a barrage of questions, seemingly trying to trip her up and embarrass her and the GOP leadership. Idaho GOP Secretary Maria Nate also testified against the bill, and was subjected to a similar barrage. I’ve noticed that although Winder seems to take perverse joy in using his position to go after his perceived enemies, he doesn’t like being on the receiving end, complaining that people had called him a RINO.

The the most surprising testimony came from Rod Beck, former state senator and current Ada County Commissioner. He pointed out something that neither McGrane, nor Manwaring, nor anyone else noticed: H138 did not actually move the presidential primary to May, rather it simply removed it from March.

The senators on the committee did not appear concerned about this issue and voted to send the bill to the Senate floor. On March 8, the Senate voted to send H138 to the amending order, which would make sense if they wanted to fix the issue that Beck brought up. However, they returned it to the floor without any changes, deciding instead to fix the wording with a trailer bill.

Trailer bills are meant to follow another bill with clarifications or fixes. Why didn’t the Senate use the amending order to fix H138? Perhaps they were afraid that the House would not concur now that the Idaho GOP had made its opposition clear. In any case, the decision to use a trailer bill rather than amend the original would prove fateful.

The Senate introduced S1186 as a trailer to H138, passing them both on March 23. The new bill subsequently crossed the rotunda and was introduced in the House State Affairs Committee.

Dorothy Moon testified against S1186, hoping that defeating the trailer bill would convince Governor Brad Little to veto H138 and allow the Idaho GOP state central committee to deliberate on the issue and work together with the Legislature on a compromise that everyone could support. Maria Nate, Ron Nate, and Rod Beck also testified against the bill, while McGrane testified in favor. Once discussion was done, committee chair Brent Crane awaited a motion to send the bill to the floor with a “do pass” recommendation.

That motion never came. Crane waited five seconds and then declared the bill dead.

Now it was in the hands of the governor. H138 was on his desk, with no trailer bill available to fix it. Even so, Gov. Little signed the bill mere hours after S1186 died, and Idaho’s presidential primary was erased.

Considering that the bill was initiated by Secretary of State McGrane, sponsored by Rep. Manwaring, passed by both chambers of the Legislature, and signed by Governor Little, one would think these people would take responsibility for the consequences of the bill, intended or not.

No. Instead, politicians and pundits throughout Idaho have laid responsibility at the feet of Idaho GOP chair Dorothy Moon.

Please bear with me as I take one more break to explain how a president is nominated. When you vote in a caucus or primary election, you are not technically voting for a candidate, but for delegates who will support that candidate at the national convention next summer. Every state handles this differently – some are winner-take-all, some appropriate the delegates proportionally, and some use a hybrid system. By tradition, Iowa holds the first caucus and New Hampshire holds the first primary. Whomever wins these early contests often gains a lot of momentum in subsequent states, though 2016 and 2020 both broke a lot of precedents.

The reason that the Idaho GOP has so strongly resisted moving the primary to May is because of Super Tuesday. At least 12 states will hold their nominating contests on March 5, 2024, after which point it is likely that one candidate will have enough delegates to be assured the nomination. A May primary means that Idaho only participates once the race is basically over, at which points candidates have no incentive to visit our state, nor appeal to us with the issues that matter here.

The Idaho GOP was left in a bind when the Legislature and the governor bungled the process of moving the election. If they wanted Idaho Republicans to have any voice at all in the 2024 campaign, they had to act quickly and choose the best out of a set of bad options. Whatever decision they made must be ratified by the Republican National Committee by this October.

Leadership could have simply had the state central committee allocate our state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention, but that’s not very representative. They considered a state convention, but that would be enormously costly in time and money, and would still represent the will of only a few hundred delegates. A system of county and legislative caucuses really was the best possible option at this time.

Unless the Legislature reconvenes to restore the March primary before the RNC deadline in October, then we will caucus next March, just before Super Tuesday. Personally I like the idea of a caucus — it’s a great opportunity to meet your neighbors and engage with your community — but I appreciate the objections that it’s not as convenient as dropping off a ballot.

Numerous establishment figures have denounced the decision of the state central committee as an attempt to take away voting rights from Idahoans. Of course, they don’t give you the whole backstory that I just did, because they want you to believe it this was a dastardly plot by Moon and the Idaho GOP rather than something that was essentially forced on the party by the Legislature’s mistake.

Even if the Legislature reconvenes to fix H138 and create a May presidential primary, the Idaho GOP will still caucus in March. Nobody complaining about how a caucus represents fewer voters than a primary seems to care that by May the presidential nomination will likely be entirely moot. I suspect that this is simply one more excuse to go after conservative Republicans.

Case in point: an absurd perspective courtesy of a group of moderate-to-liberal Republicans calling themselves the “Main Street Caucus” who published an editorial accusing Moon of single-handedly ruining the primary:

The legislation signed by Gov. Brad Little did end the presidential primary in March. But a technical loophole meant the primary didn’t get moved to May. The Senate passed a simple fix. Then, when the bill arrived in the House, Dorothy Moon, the Republican state party chair, objected in public testimony.

…

Last weekend, Moon’s refusal to support a cost-saving election consolidation led the Idaho Republican Party to adopt an expensive presidential caucus as an alternative during its summer meeting. A caucus in place of a primary carries a hefty price tag for our county central committees. It also limits participation.

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It really is absurd, isn’t it? Dorothy Moon didn’t write H138. Dorothy Moon didn’t silence the House State Affairs Committee when the time came to send the trailer bill S1186 to the floor. Dorothy Moon didn’t force Gov. Little to sign a bill he knew was fatally flawed. Yet the so-called Main Street Caucus would have you believe this is all her fault, a nefarious plot to take away your voice!

Rep. Rod Furniss, fresh off his impassioned plea on the House floor for taxpayers to buy tampons for public school bathrooms, severely twisted the truth last week on Twitter:

The screenshot he’s posted is from H292, the property tax relief bill. One of the components of that bill was the elimination of the March election date for school bonds and levies, since the bill compensates schools for lost property taxes. Recall that Gov. Little vetoed it for that very reason – the teacher’s unions and public school bureaucrats love low-turnout elections because they make it easier to raise taxes – but the Legislature overrode him.

On the other hand, every single Republican did not in fact vote to eliminate the March presidential primary — many debated and voted against both H138 and S1168 — but Furniss does not seem very concerned with facts.

Legislative leadership and the governor seem to have pulled off a one-two punch here against the state party, with the help of compliant media: First they undid the hard work of moving the primary to March, and then they blamed Dorothy Moon for their own mistakes.

There is a legitimate conversation to be had regarding how far the state government and the taxpayer should go in supporting partisan primaries. The fact that the state and the various counties currently host primary elections has blurred the line between the parties as private organizations and the government’s role in securing free and fair elections. This confusion is currently being exploited by groups such as Reclaim Idaho and fellow leftists like Jim Jones who are pushing a citizen’s initiative to completely open up the GOP primary.

I’ll surely expound further on that endeavor in a later piece – this one is long enough already. But you can see how this works. Average citizens who aren’t as plugged into politics as you or I can easily be persuaded that the Idaho GOP was unreasonable when they closed the primary to only registered Republicans. “How dare they take away my right to vote,” they often say. But a partisan primary is exactly that – a contest within the party, a private organization, to decide who is the nominee for the general election.

So where does that leave us? The best thing for the GOP and Republican voters is a March primary, before the nomination is sewn up. The best thing for the taxpayer might be consolidating the elections in May. (Lawmakers would never go for a March legislative primary, since they wouldn’t have any time after the session to campaign.)

Of course, concerns about the costs of the primary ring hollow when the same legislators rubber-stamped a $14 billion budget, including massive increases in public education, Medicaid, and, of course, the office of the secretary of state.

This discussion about who is responsible for partisan primaries should be had at some point, but that’s not what the secretary of state and legislative leadership did. They simply decided, and in their haste they screwed it up. Rather than admitting their mistake and calling the Legislature back into session to fix it, they’re using the situation as an excuse to attack an enemy to their right, Dorothy Moon.

Taking out Moon and the conservative leaders of the Idaho GOP seems to be top priority for the old establishment right now. Folks in the Main Street Caucus shoot rightward with much more zeal than they ever show when they fight the left. This is revealing, isn’t it? There is a strain of Republican who is always eager to find common ground with the far left, but fights tooth and nail to keep anyone on their right from gaining power and influence. It is perhaps the most frustrating thing I have seen as I have become involved in local politics.

No matter where you come down on the issue of the presidential primary, you deserve to know the truth, but you’re not going to hear that from the Main Street Caucus.