ID-GOV 2022: Janice McGeachin In

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Why did McGeachin win many Idaho Panhandle counties despite being from Idaho Falls?

Wherever there are relatively new tracts of housing in northern Idaho, McGeachin obliterated Brad Little. This isn't a coincidence. Over the past two decades, an area in between Coeur d'Alene and Sandpoint has emerged as a "redoubt" of survivalists and other kinds of truly radical right-wingers.

Kootenai County has been a hub of right-wing migration for a longer period of time but the character of newcomers has shifted substantially. In the 1990s, it was attracting an Evangelical subculture and "retired" police officers from southern California. Beginning in the mid-late 2000s and accelerating afterwards, the migration became less about "white flight" and became more explicitly political i.e. people moved to places like Athol, Careywood, Spirit Lake and so on specifically to build survivalist compounds.

Bonner County, which is where I was born, has been torn apart by this. At this point, every Republican primary attracts wide participation among Democrats living there. There are precincts in Sandpoint where Brad Little received ~70% of the vote and precincts in the "redoubt" parts of Bonner County where McGeachin received ~80% of the vote. There is a kind of coalition between moderate Republicans, who tend to be long-time residents, and Democrats, who tend to be children of hippies or hippies themselves, that has tried to fight back. It hasn't really worked.

At this stage, I expect that we'll see Democrats moving out of the Idaho panhandle. It's becoming too crowded, the newcomers are seriously uncivil maniacs who make for the worst possible neighbors. They are the right-wing equivalent of bomb-throwing antifa members. Old-timers in the region, however radical they might have been, had an understanding that north Idaho was once Democratic, that this was not inconsistent with being Idahoan. The newcomers insinuate that if you vote for Democrats, "you should go back to California" (insane maniac stuff - the Democrats in the panhandle are long-time residents!!).

Are there enough survivalist nuts for them to be a dominant voting bloc in Northern Idaho? Or is it just that even the non survivalists are hard right because it's a more welcoming region for right-wing extremism? Hard to think that there are enough survivalists for Kootenai County to vote for McGeachin solely on that basis.

There are an unfathomable number of nutjobs in Kootenai County. Not all of them are survivalists but, to an unusual extent, Republicans there have “drank the Kool-Aid”, worshipping guns as icons and humping police flags. I recall someone in my neighborhood turning his flag upside down after Biden was inaugurated. It is one thing for leftists to do this. By default, we are opposed to nationalism. When right-wingers do it, it is a sign of real brain-poisoning.

Another way of thinking about this: in the 2000s, Republicans in the area were Bush partisans of the flag-saluting orthodoxy. This new breed is far more likely to fly a police flag, a Gasden flag, a Trump banner or even a Confederate flag. They do not simply own guns, they have large AR-15 decals on their truck. They do not display any reverence for religion. They are openly confrontational to Democrats. In many ways, they remind me of the various progressive fruitcakes that I live around today who cling to masks and other performative gestures “in this house we believe in love and gays and minorities” vs. large gun dildo.

Basically, we have to contrast people who live an ideological lifestyle or who are part of an ideological subculture with people who are part of a demographic that is naturally represented by an ideology. By and large, the vast majority of Americans are the latter but there are small bubbles in certain neighborhoods where this is not so. Kootenai County is such a place for the Right, just as Portland is for the Left.

I'm currently writing a story set on a rural compound called "Redoubt Asgard", with the sorts of people and ideologies present in it that that name implies. Initially I was going to leave it unstated where exactly this place was, but I ended up placing it in the Idaho Panhandle within the first couple of pages.