After two years of campaigning, of fundraising, of messaging, of debating, of planning, and many sleepless nights for candidates and activists alike, the 2024 election is finally in the bag. (Or will be when Arizona finally finished counting!) It seems so surreal, doesn’t it? I’ve been working to convince Idahoans of the dangers of ranked choice voting for more than a year now, but it’s done. Donald Trump announced his campaign at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, November 15, 2022, nearly two full years ago, and now he’s finally president-elect.
I’ll dive into deeper analyses soon, but for now I wanted to run down the biggest winners and losers from November 5, 2024.
Losers
Prop 1 boosters: Luke Mayville, Jim Jones, Butch Otter, Marv Hagedorn, and many others spent the past two years pushing ranked choice voting (of course, they pretended it was simply open primaries) only to see it go down in a massive landslide defeat. The Republicans who staked their reputations on Prop 1 burned any remaining cachet within the party they had, while Mayville and Reclaim Idaho succeeded in uniting a fractured Idaho GOP. Heckuva job!
Idaho Democrats: Like their colleagues at the national level, Idaho Democrats made this entire election about abortion. Idahoans responded by reducing their already minuscule numbers in public office. The 68th Idaho Legislature will have 90 Republicans and only 15 Democrats. They also spent a lot of political capital supporting Prop 1, only to see it perform worse than Kamala Harris in Idaho.
Corporate news: The editors of the Idaho Statesman continue to have zero understanding of the people of Idaho. They published numerous editorials as well as straight news pieces about how awful Donald Trump, Dorothy Moon, Raúl Labrador, and other Republicans are. They urged Idahoans to support Prop 1 and reject Trump. Now, they’re reduced to whining and crying about the results. I suggest some serious introspection.
Mainstream pollsters: A few polling firms like Atlas called the presidential election correctly, but many others did their best to show a tie or even a Harris lead. Ann Selzer, called the “gold standard of Iowa pollsters,” put Harris up 3 in Iowa mere days before the election. Trump won Iowa by 14 points, and Selzer should be fined for not reporting an in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign.
Actors and celebrities: Remember when pundits confidently predicted that Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris would change the race? What about Beyoncé? Bruce Springsteen? Mark Hamill? It turns out that most Americans don’t care what celebrities have to say about politics, and rightly so. Not that this will inspire any of them to stop bloviating.
Winners
Donald Trump: The greatest comeback story in American history. Impeached twice, convicted on numerous sham charges, shot, only to return to the White House with the biggest Republican mandate since 1988. This man of destiny will preside over the 250th anniversary of the United States in just over a year. Just like we drew it up.
Dorothy Moon: A lot of people worked hard to defeat Proposition 1, too many to list here, but Idaho GOP chair Dorothy Moon has been on the front lines since Day 1. As far back as January of 2023, Moon was warning Idahoans about the dangers of ranked choice voting. As party chair, she mobilized Idaho Republicans to oppose Prop 1, which was a big reason it was defeated by nearly 40%. Jim Jones claimed that Prop 1 was a way to break Moon’s alleged stranglehold on power in Idaho, and others claimed the proposition was a referendum on Moon herself. If that’s the case, then she won, bigly.
Raúl Labrador: Idaho’s attorney general took heat from the left and the media for his vociferous opposition to Prop 1. Luke Mayville and Reclaim Idaho loved to mock him for losing court challenges to the initiative, but Labrador gets the last laugh as Prop 1 was utterly rejected by Idaho voters.
Republican challengers: Codi Galloway, Mike Pohanka, and Tanya Burgoyne each ran against a Democratic incumbent and won. Annette Tipton came within 227 votes of unseating Rep. Steve Berch. Benjamin Chafetz and Jazz Alexis came closer than anyone in recent memory to winning seats in the deep blue districts of Boise. The GOP bench is growing, not only numerically, but more conservatives are getting involved as well. The future is bright.
Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch: Despite neither being on the ballot this year, both of Idaho’s US senators stand to gain powerful committee chairmanships due to Republicans taking control of the Senate. Expect to see Risch chair the Foreign Relations Committee and Crapo the Banking Committee.
Elon Musk: The world’s richest man saw that the future of humanity was at stake and he decided not to sit on the sidelines any longer. By buying Twitter, he created a haven for free speech that would not be under the thumb of government bureaucrats, and by endorsing Trump, he opened the floodgates for other business and tech leaders to join the MAGA movement. Now he will have a chance to seriously cut government in the second Trump Administration.
President Biden: 2020 irregularities aside, Joe Biden remains the only person to defeat Donald Trump in an election. He rides off into the sunset with a sense of vindication, being able to claim that he could have won again if he wasn’t pushed out of the race in favor of the DEI candidate (though he likely would also have lost).
America: We’re going to make it great again!
Gem State Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
About Brian Almon
Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.
