SLAGBOOM: LD6 Representative Race: Trish Carter-Goodheart’s Out-of-State Checkbook

Heavy out-of-state travel expenditure. 65% of contributions from outside Idaho. Paying family members using campaign funds. Is this a local candidate spending locally raised campaign dollars in her district, or even in her state? Not really.

Trish Carter-Goodheart is the Democrat running for House Seat 6A against Republican nominee Colton Bennett. Her filings tell a clear story about whose money funds her campaign and where it goes.

Four checks totaling $2,050, filed under “Broadcast Advertising,” made out to the candidate personally. That is what you find when you read Trish Carter-Goodheart’s campaign finance reports line by line. I read all 28 of them, from her 2023 Annual Report through the August 2026 report her treasurer filed on September 6. Every number below comes from her own filings on the state’s Sunshine portal, and any reader can pull the same records in a few minutes.

Let’s start with where her money comes from. In her 2024 run, 65% of her contribution dollars came from outside Idaho. If you benchmark every Idaho legislative candidate in that 2024 cycle you will find that the median candidate raised 12% from out of state. Nobody else cleared 51%. Carter-Goodheart holds the highest out-of-state share of any candidate committee in Idaho, and it is not even close. Of her 847 individual donors in 2024, 678 lived outside Idaho. Most of it arrived through ActBlue in a late-October wave of small national gifts, $45,685 in a single month, from people who will never drive a Legislative District 6 road or pay a Legislative District 6 tax bill. During that October surge, her California donors outnumbered her Idaho donors. That platform is under active congressional investigation over whether it adequately prevents fraudulent and foreign donations (cha.house.gov/actblue-investigation-timeline).

As with everything, you should “follow the money.” When you follow Trish’s campaign money you will find abundant non-standard campaign expenses reported on her campaign’s Sunshine portal. Since this election cycle began in January 2025, her committee has paid the candidate herself $4,617.78 across ten checks; counting 2024, the total reaches $5,390.96 across thirteen. Four of them, $2,050 in round numbers, are filed under “Broadcast Advertising” and made out to Trish Carter-Goodheart personally. Does radio time get paid to the candidate’s own bank account? Two more checks are filed as wages. She put herself on her own campaign’s payroll.

Dayne Goodheart, her husband, gets paid too. Dayne has collected $2,650 across eight checks. The filings label them advertising production, management services, and yard signs. A family business!

Then there is the travel. This cycle her campaign has spent $9,915.63 on travel, a third of everything it spent, the third-highest travel share of any legislative campaign committee in Idaho. The hotel bills come from everywhere but District 6: $1,582.55 at Coast Hotels in Seattle, Washington; $1,252.55 at a Hyatt in Chicago, Illinois; $504.68 at the Hilton in Portland, Oregon; $139.19 at a DoubleTree in Orlando, Florida; plus $1,451.10 in airfare on Southwest, Frontier, and Alaska. Some of these trips track tribal-organization conferences. Her filings do not say which, and the donors footing the bill cannot tell either.

Other entries raise simpler questions. The campaign has bought from Big 5 Sporting Goods twice, filed as general operational expenses. It pays $165 every month, month after month, for a storage unit in Lewiston. And this February it sent $780 of donor money to the Idaho Sierra Club. Some or all of that may be lawful. Idaho’s personal-use statute carries a maximum penalty of $250 and has no known enforcement action against any candidate on record. The statute is a suggestion box. The question for her donors is different: did the people mailing five- and ten-dollar checks from California think they were funding a storage unit and the Sierra Club?

After the national money flooded in during October 2024, she banked roughly $30,000 and lost the election anyway. In all of 2025 she raised $173.59 through fourteen small gifts, mostly five and ten dollars. Against that she spent $12,085.20. Her account has fallen from $29,487 to $8,101 as of August 31. This is a campaign that spends like the money will always be there, funded by people who aren’t.

Her Sunshine filings follow the same pattern as her spending: late, amended, corrected, and haphazard. Seven of her reports were filed late, some more than six months past the deadline. One payee is listed at “123 Temp Street.” Another is listed as “Unknown Vendor.” One vendor’s address field contains an Instagram handle. Google appears on her donor schedule as a $39.99 contributor, which is what happens when a refund gets filed as a donation. On February 20, 2025, her treasurer amended five reports in a single day and restated the campaign’s balances retroactively.

Fairness requires saying what her filings do explain. Her Las Vegas hotel charges in October 2024 line up with a national tribal convention held at that hotel, and her 2024 payments to her mother are annotated as childcare under a state advisory opinion she requested. She knows how to document spending when she wants to. The state’s forms even include an optional description field; she used it to label a loan and the childcare payments, and left it blank on every check to herself and her husband. That is exactly why the unexplained entries matter. The candidate who obtained written state guidance for childcare offered no explanation for round-number advertising checks to herself, eight payments to her husband, or a Sierra Club donation from campaign funds.

If this were a first-time candidate figuring out the system, that would be one thing. This is not Trish’s first campaign, and the anomalies should not be this rampant for someone hoping to earn the trust of LD6 voters to manage their tax dollars.

Carter-Goodheart is asking District 6 to promote her to a Legislature that appropriates billions of Idaho taxpayer dollars a year. Her audition budget was thirty thousand dollars of other people’s money, most of it from other states. She spent it the way people spend money that is not theirs. Boise would give her access to far more, and that is something everyone, Republican and Democrat, should be concerned about.

Check every claim yourself. Go to sunshine.voteidaho.gov, open Campaign Finance, search Carter-Goodheart, and open the committee Trish for Idaho.

About John Slagboom

John Slagboom is a Moscow resident who runs slagboom4moscow.com, an independent, self-funded civic project that reads Idaho's public records line by line and publishes them in plain language.

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