An energized GOP party kicks off early with big wins throughout the night
On Tuesday night, the GOP gathered at the Courtyard by Marriott Hotel in Meridian for what turned out to be a jubilant party. From the start, energy levels in the tightly packed room were high.
“Look at this crowd. Do you feel the energy? Do you feel that? Aha! You do!” said GOP Chairwoman Dorothy Moon before results were in. “We're excited to see Trump win. And hopefully we defeat Prop 1.”
While people kept an eye on local races, defeating the ranked choice and closed primary proposition were high priority. Numbers showing Idahoans rejected Proposition 1 came in early.
“Things are going really well,” said Attorney General Raúl Labrador.
“As you can hear in the background, people are clapping. People are excited. People are happy. Proposition 1 is going down in a big way. And it's just a strong message that Idaho is not for sale.”
Throughout the election cycle, polls speculated women would turn out to cast their ballots against anti-abortion laws and legislators, both nationally and perhaps locally, but Labrador dismissed that idea outright.
“One-issue voters don't usually win these great national elections,” he said.
Lisa Massimino, a party attendee from Boise agreed.
“I think they overcalculated on what they thought the women's vote was going to do. I don't think that it was actually accurate,” she said. “I think there's plenty of women that are very pro-life.”
Attendees dressed to the nines took pictures next to a life-size cutout of Donald Trump and mingled with the likes of Speaker of the House Mike Moyle and newly re-elected U.S. Congressman Russ Fulcher. When the right-wing cable network Newsmax called Trump’s victory at 11:30 p.m., hours before any other outlets, the room exploded in cheers and “USA! USA! USA!” chants.
Jenni Gudapati got emotional after the announcement and credited Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk support for his win.
“I think previously there was a lot of people that didn't like Donald Trump for being Donald Trump,” she said, “I think he did a very, very good job to listen to his critics and ask for advice from people that weren't always on his side.”
District 14 GOP Chair Brian Almon said Republicans won because they went back to the fundamentals of campaigning, like focusing on voter registration.
“It looks like the changes that the Republicans and other conservative PACs made over the last four years, getting out the ground game, doing ballot chasing, early voting has really made a difference,” he said.
Tuesday night was a tough one for Idaho Democrats.
As of early Wednesday morning, Proposition 1 was heading for a resounding defeat, and several of the party’s seats in the state legislature were set to be flipped, according to unofficial results.
Several hours before results painted a clearer picture of the disappointing results for her fellow Democrats, Boise Mayor Lauren McLean told those assembled at the Grove Hotel in downtown Boise that “regardless of what happens tonight, you'll wake up in the morning, you'll watch the sunrise. We will all live to fight another day.”
Bette Carlson volunteered for the Proposition 1 campaign because she felt closed primaries excluded many voters. The measure would have ended closed party primaries and created a ranked-choice voting system for the general election.
“I’m not feeling really great about it,” she said late Tuesday. As of 2:00 a.m. Wednesday, the measure was going down by a more than two-to-one margin. “I thought that we did a good job and people worked hard. And I think that maybe people that voted against [it] really didn't understand and didn't take an opportunity to really understand what [the proposition] is, because it's really not that complicated.”
Mirroring the despondent mood in the steadily emptying room, she said she was “scared” of what then seemed like Donald Trump’s likely victory.
“I think people should take this as a wake up call that we really need to practice our democracy,” she said. “We really need to get out there and get in charge of what's happening and not just sit back and just ignore things. We've really got to get out there and work hard.”
