Tanner vs. DeMordaunt

Do we need a new face in 14B?

I have found it difficult to choose sides in the race for State House of Representatives in District 14, Seat B.

I first met the incumbent, Gayann DeMordaunt, at the Republican State Republican Convention in 2020. I was her alternate delegate, so I had the opportunity to follow her for three days, watching her craft resolutions for the party platform as well as debate on the floor. I have kept in contact with Representative DeMordaunt ever since. She was the first Idaho politician I ever donated money to in 2020, and I even put out signs for her throughout my neighborhood.

I first knew Josh Tanner as a name on the ballot. He successfully ran for Eagle Fire Commissioner in 2018 and challenged Representative DeMordaunt in the Republican primary in 2020. Without even having yet met, he went out of his way to do something for my family that really impressed me with regards to his character. As I got to know him, I found Commissioner Tanner to be very passionate about the issues that are at stake in our state right now.

I said a month ago that I believe in primary challenges. We cannot let incumbents rest on their laurels; rather we should continually challenge them to defend their records and remind them of who they represent in the Capitol. After a spirited campaign, we can choose to retain our current representative, or replace them with someone new.

In a race like this, I am going to end up disappointing someone no matter what I say. Opinions have consequences. Staying neutral is not an option in this race; when an incumbent is being challenged, declining to endorse is an endorsement itself.

This is a revolutionary year, where dozens of conservative challengers have the potential to dramatically remake our legislature. Is it time for a new face in District 14B?

Josh Tanner was not born into conservatism. Raised in a left-leaning household by a single mother, he came to his positions through many years of hard work and experience. He earned both a Bachelor of Science in construction management and an MBA from Boise State University and currently owns his own business here in the Treasure Valley.

Tanner was elected as an Eagle Fire Commissioner in 2018. As chairman, he led the way in replacing the fire chief with someone who was more amenable to his plans to reduce spending and increase transparency. Under his leadership, the Eagle Fire Department has been able to avoid costly bonds or tax hikes, relying instead on impact fees from new construction to fund their operation. Commissioner Tanner successfully altered the way the fire department presents its budget so that citizens can know exactly where the money is going.

Commissioner Tanner lists three priorities on his website: government accountability, protecting the 2nd Amendment, and being pro-life. Of course, nearly every Republican shares these beliefs, at least in general. Having had a chance to sit down with Mr. Tanner and hear him speak at several events, I have learned that education is one of his biggest issues. He believes we need to take a hammer axe to the public school system, with the behavior of our school leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic being especially heinous.

Tanner has sent his children to both private and public schools. He found that private schools were more than happy to share details of their budgets with concerned parents, while public school administrators thought it was none of our business. He says that private schools spend less per student but often have higher achievement, and he supports school choice measures that would give parents more flexibility in where they send their children.

As the challenger, Tanner is naturally critical of the incumbent. He ran against Representative DeMordaunt in the 2020 primary, losing by just over 1,600 votes. He says that he barely campaigned that year and is convinced that he has enough grassroots support to win the rematch.

According to Commissioner Tanner, Representative DeMordaunt is not as conservative as she says she is. He believes that she is one of many legislators who use Christian and conservative terminology to cover much more moderate positions, and that she is too entrenched with the establishment in Idaho. Tanner claims that DeMordaunt takes over conservative bills in election years to prove her conservative bona fides but waters them down to the point of worthlessness.

Commissioner Tanner says he believes in term limits. Gayann DeMordaunt succeeded her husband Reed, who had served three terms in the State House of Representatives, in 2016, and she has now served three terms herself. Tanner thinks that is too much. He says that politicians who stay in office too long lose a sense of urgency about doing the peoples’ business, sitting on bills for years while building big war chests for their campaigns.

Tanner’s most common criticism of Representative DeMordaunt is that she is not responsive to her constituents. He recalls trying to work with the legislature in his capacity as Fire Commissioner and never hearing back from DeMordaunt, while the other representative in District 14, House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, always responded quickly.

Commissioner Tanner is confident in victory. He says that he meets people everywhere he goes who are ready for a change in District 14.

Gayann DeMordaunt has represented District 14 in the Idaho House of Representatives since 2016, when her husband Reed DeMordaunt retired after three terms. While I am not necessarily a fan of keeping seats in the family, Mrs. DeMordaunt has been anything but a placeholder. She came to the legislature with many years of political experience, both as a party official and as a citizen activist. As a GOP district chair, she fought alongside future Congressman Raul Labrador and Representative Mike Moyle for a closed primary, earning them the ire of the Ada County Republican Central Committee at the time. She founded North Star Charter School in Eagle in 2003 and worked closely with legislators on education issues for many years.

DeMordaunt has championed several high profile bills as a member of the State House. She was the floor sponsor for H.666 in the most recent session, a bill which would have removed loopholes that allow librarians and teachers to distribute obscene materials to children. The Senate State Affairs Committee killed this bill without a vote.

DeMordaunt also worked on a bill that would prevent local school boards from appointing replacements for directors who were facing recall elections, but the Senate killed that bill too.

Representative DeMordaunt scored 80% on the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Index - not as high as rock stars like Heather Scott, Tammy Nichols, or Priscilla Giddings, but higher than conservative stalwarts Codi Galloway and Ben Adams. She scored 75% on the Spending Index and 88% on the Education Index.

Of course, the IFF’s indices are only one factor in evaluating the performance of a legislator.

Representative DeMordaunt worked for years to curtail executive and corporate overreach in our state. When Governor Brad Little declared an indefinite state of emergency in 2020, the legislature had already adjourned, and Idaho is one of a handful of states that require the governor himself to summon the legislature into a special session. I watched DeMordaunt work a measure through the state Republican Party that proposed a constitutional amendment allowing the legislature to call itself back into session if necessary. After its adoption by the party, DeMordaunt continued to work with fellow legislators to create the bill, which eventually became Senate Joint Resolution 102. This was passed a year ago, and the proposed amendment will be on the ballot for voters to approve this November.

When healthcare companies in Idaho began issuing vaccine mandates in the summer of 2021, voters demanded the legislature reconvene to address the issue. They had learned from their mistake in 2020 and had recessed rather than adjourned, which meant that Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Winder and House Speaker Scott Bedke had the ability to call legislators back to Boise at any time. We waited… we wrote letters… we bought billboards… still they ignored our pleas. Some legislators signed an open letter to their leaders asking them to reconvene. Representative DeMordaunt’s name was not on that letter.

This generated some controversy in District 14. One local activist believes that he was misled by DeMordaunt about signing that letter and vowed to unseat her. He is now enthusiastically backing Commissioner Tanner.

However, Representative DeMordaunt tells a different story. When I spoke with her, she reminded me that she had been working to stop vaccine mandates for months before the special session was even an option. She said that the issue with the letter was a miscommunication, and her goal was not to avoid association with the authors of the letter but to try and get an even broader base of support. In the end, the legislature did indeed reconvene for a special session, so the hows and the whys are somewhat mooted.

Other local activists were frustrated that DeMordaunt did not appear on the Capitol steps with Lieutenant Governor McGeachin before the special session. She explained that she was in Utah for her son’s wedding, which sounds like a reasonable excuse to me.

My biggest disappointment with Representative DeMordaunt was regarding her vote to censure Representative Giddings over allegedly doxing a young woman who accused former Representative Aaron Von Ehlinger of rape. (He was convicted of the charge yesterday, as of this publishing.) Despite the House passing several bills in the special session, the Senate refused to debate any of them, which meant that the only lasting accomplishment of the session was the censure, which was presided over by Speaker Scott Bedke, Giddings’ opponent in the lieutenant governor’s race.

I saw this as a politically-motivated witch hunt. DeMordaunt declined to speculate on such things, arguing that she and the rest of the legislature could only vote based on the evidence they were presented by the House Ethics Committee. She admitted it was a hard vote, and explained her reasons for voting the way she did. While I still disagree with the outcome, I can accept her rationale.

Perhaps the thing that impresses me the most about Representative DeMordaunt is her appreciation for the amount of work that it takes to shepherd a bill from beginning to end. Conservative candidates are always promising to go to the Capitol and change things, but all too often they arrive and find themselves tangled up in Byzantine procedures, finding legislating easier said than done. It is one thing to have a desire to disrupt the system, but quite another to actually work through the legislative process. DeMordaunt understands that process, and has been willing to do the hard and thankless work behind the scenes that is necessary to accomplish anything in Boise. She told me she does not care to grandstand, to take actions designed to get likes on Facebook, rather she wants her accomplishments to speak for themselves.

So what of Commissioner Tanner’s specific critiques?

I have no idea if Representative DeMordaunt works with the leadership to take on conservative bills merely as a facade. I have not been invited to the smoke-filled back rooms where these deals are allegedly concocted, so I can only base my decisions on what I can see. I want to stay away from rumors and hearsay and focus on what is real and tangible. I look forward to learning more about how the sausage is made, but for now this is the best I can do.

As for the charge that DeMordaunt is non-communicative, I cannot speak to that either. I have heard it from others as well as Mr. Tanner, so perhaps there is something there. DeMordaunt says that she often stays up late into the morning answering emails from citizens and tries to prioritize answering messages from her District 14 constituents. She refuses to use staffers, interns, or automated systems that give boilerplate responses, but tries to respond substantively to as many people as she can. As for me, I have found DeMordaunt to be the most responsive out of all the legislators I have ever tried to contact. Perhaps that is due to having worked together at the convention.

Commissioner Tanner accuses Representative DeMordaunt of using Christian and conservative terminology to cover for non-conservative positions. As the challenger, he can make all the promises in the world about how much better he would be, but until he is in the arena, they are just words. This is not a knock against him, just reality. Representative DeMordaunt has a record, and that record is pretty good.

Tanner presents himself as the true conservative in the race, but the fact that he is endorsed by The Idaho 97 is pretty damning. I briefly mentioned this group last week, and I will dig deeper soon, but for now recall that they are one of many progressive organizations that present themselves as common sense conservatives. The Idaho 97 supports forced masking and vaccinations, opposed Dr. Ryan Cole’s appointment to the Central District Board of Health, and called for the expulsion of Representative Priscilla Giddings from the Legislature. Why would a group like this support a true conservative?

In their recommendation, they claim that “Fire Commissioner Tanner has had a lifelong career in public safety and supports public schools and responsible curriculum.” On the other hand, they say “Gayann DeMordaunt has proven her anti-public education stance.”

From my perspective, I take this endorsement less as a condemnation of Tanner and more of an admission that this left-wing group fears Representative DeMordaunt. Conservative voters of Idaho should take this as assurance that she is on the right track. If you are taking fire, that means you are over the target. Both candidates agree that our public school system is in awful shape, but DeMordaunt has a long record of trying to reform it.

(EDIT, 5/8/22: Josh Tanner posted a video yesterday in which he unequivocally disavowed The Idaho 97.)

I like Josh Tanner. I think he is friendly, intelligent, and passionate about issues that are important to the voters of Idaho. He demonstrated his honorable character to me when he had no reason to expect anything in return. I agree with most everything he stands for. In the end, however, I have to agree with the PC who responded to him at a recent meeting, saying, “This is all great. Why are you running against someone who is already doing these things?”

I wonder how much of the energy in this campaign is driven by personal animosity, rather than substantive disagreement. Is it possible I am missing something? Am I too new to the region to understand the nuance and context behind this race? Maybe, but I can only tell you what I know. One thing is sure: I will be watching this seat closely next year, no matter who wins this race. I will work hard to keep you informed about his or her performance as your representative.

This is indeed a revolutionary year, and there are many incumbents who deserve to be replaced by good conservative challengers. I hope that Gayann DeMordaunt is not among them. Based upon her body of work, I believe she is on our side, and I want her to continue working to protect faith, family, and freedom in the legislature for another two years.

I will have no problem supporting Josh Tanner in another race in the future. Today, however, I endorse Gayann DeMordaunt for reelection in District 14B.