Russ Fulcher is on track to win another term representing Idaho in the House. His Democratic opponent is playing the long game

WASHINGTON (Spokesman-Review) – For someone who expects to lose her second consecutive run for Congress, Kaylee Peterson is unusually optimistic.

Two years ago, the 34-year-old Democrat from Eagle, just outside Boise, won just 26% of votes in Idaho’s 1st Congressional District, which includes the Panhandle and the western part of the state, except for most of Boise. Rep. Russ Fulcher, a Republican from Meridian, has won a larger share of votes in each of his three runs for the seat, topping out at more than 71% in 2022.

Peterson, a stay-at-home mom of two who took a break from college to run for office, had no political experience when she first decided to challenge Fulcher, answering a call from the beleaguered Idaho Democratic Party for candidates to enter races where no Democrat was running. In an interview Monday, she described a long-term strategy aimed at not letting Republicans dictate how voters in the huge, largely rural district see her party.

“Of course we want to hold Russ Fulcher accountable and of course we want to flip the district, but the truth is that our district has kind of been long forgotten for two decades,” Peterson said. “It’s going to take real, long-term planning and investment and infrastructure and building to be successful. And so we look at the campaign as a platform and an opportunity to try and build that, while also kind of repairing relationships in rural districts with Republican voters who aren’t happy with the direction that their party has taken recently.”

The 1st District stretches more than 480 miles from north to south between Canada and Nevada. It historically included Boise, but recent population growth in North Idaho and the Boise suburbs resulted in the relatively liberal capital being almost entirely drawn into the neighboring 2nd district after the 2020 census, making the 1st District even more solidly conservative.

With the exception of a single victory by former Rep. Walt Minnick in 2008, Republicans have won every race to represent the 1st District since 1994, when former Democratic Rep. Larry LaRocco was defeated by former Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, a Republican who suggested during the campaign that “the white Anglo-Saxon male” deserved more protections than endangered species.

LaRocco, 78, said he has tried to serve as a mentor to Peterson, but he emphasized that the district has changed dramatically since he represented it 30 years ago. Although he thinks her strategy has been sound, he would have run a race more explicitly focused on women’s reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that overturned nationwide protections for abortion and let a restrictive Idaho abortion law go into effect.

“I think success for Kaylee would be to do better than she did in the last cycle, just to increase her numbers,” LaRocco said, adding that she could also help Democrats win local and state races in relatively liberal places like Latah County.

Fulcher worked in technology sales and commercial real estate, and spent a decade in the state Senate before he was elected to Congress in 2018, replacing now-Attorney General Raúl Labrador, who left the House for an unsuccessful run for governor. Fulcher sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Natural Resources Committee, two panels that he said are an especially good fit for the district’s priorities.

In a phone interview as he drove between campaign stops on Oct. 18, Fulcher said he doesn’t take winning the race for granted, but he feels that the differences between Republicans and Democrats are so clear that most voters in his district have made up their minds.

“We’re on a full-court press, but I would say, unlike previous campaigns, seemingly the battle lines have already been drawn,” he said. “Not just for my race but overall, across the country, with such stark distinctions because it’s a presidential election year.”

Fulcher debated his Democratic and Libertarian opponents in 2020, but he has refused to debate Peterson in 2022 and this year, saying that facing the Democrat on stage would give her free exposure.

“Giving her attention via a debate would be the biggest single contribution that she gets,” he said. “And if there’s no objective metric where she’s got a viable campaign, I’m not going to contribute to that by making it viable.”

Neither Fulcher nor Peterson faced a primary challenger in their respective parties, but they aren’t the only candidates on the ballot in November. Libertarian Matt Loesby didn’t respond to an interview request for this story, and attempts to reach the Constitution Party candidate, Brendan Gomez, were unsuccessful.

Fulcher, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus who nevertheless has good relationships with more moderate Republicans, said he’s proud of his work to expand funding for rural broadband and to preserve $41.2 million in Payments in Lieu of Taxes, or “PILT” funds, that the Interior Department provides to offset the lost revenue for tax-exempt federal lands.

“In a state where two-thirds of your landmass is federal, that’s a huge deal,” Fulcher said. “Going into Congress six years ago, one of the big surprises I had – which is still shocking – was the number of members who have no idea what it is like to manage in a state or govern in a state where you’re a tenant, not a landlord.”

Fulcher cheered the passage over the summer of the ADVANCE Act, a bipartisan law to spur the development of advanced nuclear energy production, and he said his office was involved in the approval in 2023 of a natural gas pipeline that passes through Kootenai and Spokane counties on its way from Canada to California.

He said he’s also optimistic about passing bipartisan legislation to expand Good Neighbor Authority, a program that lets states partner with federal agencies for forest management and other projects on federal land. If that bill passes, tribes and counties could have that same ability.

But Fulcher said he’s most proud of the work his staff has done to help constituents get money owed to them by the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs and other federal agencies. That “casework” is an important part of any congressional office, but Fulcher said it is especially challenging when he represents one of the most populous districts in the House. Idaho was the second-fastest-growing state in the nation between 2010 and 2020, and fell just short of gaining a third House seat in the redistricting process that followed the 2020 census.

In a state where migration from other parts of the country is a political flashpoint, Fulcher and Peterson tout their Idaho bona fides. He said he’s especially qualified to represent the district because his family has been in the Gem State for more than a century. She lives on a street named after her great-grandfather and said her family homesteaded in the area six generations earlier.

Peterson said that background has helped her connect with voters across the district, including at town hall meetings her campaign has advertised as a chance for Republicans to meet a Democrat. After the Idaho GOP sent a cease-and-desist letter threatening to sue her campaign for using their party’s elephant logo on flyers promoting the events – encouraging Republicans to “Question the Democrat! Idahoan to Idahoan” – Peterson said she removed the logo but kept advertising and holding the events.

“I know a lot of times it sounds idealistic, but we’ve had such a great response from just trying to get voters from all across the political spectrum focused on the things that matter,” she said. “And it’s simple. I mean, it’s just principled, bipartisan leadership focused on common-sense policy solutions.”

Peterson said the most common topic of conversation at the meetings is inflation and the cost of living, which she said Republicans have successfully blamed on Democrats’ support for federal spending. She counters that idea by arguing that greedy corporations have capitalized on the unsettled post-pandemic economy to boost their profit margins.

While she does talk about Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion and its impact on women’s health, Peterson has not made that the centerpiece of her campaign as LaRocco suggested. She said her support for abortion rights is the biggest cause of death threats she has received throughout the campaign.

In addition to her own town halls, Peterson has taken to posting videos of Fulcher’s town halls around the district on her Facebook page. She said that even if a Democrat doesn’t win the seat, she would like to see different kinds of Republicans running in the state.

“In an ideal world, what I would like to see happen is more and more of the everyday voters who are not politically engaged get involved, and we start seeing a higher-quality caliber of candidates being offered by the Republican side,” she said. “I would like to see extremists like Russ Fulcher no longer be guaranteed a seat in Congress. I would like to see extreme elements of the party have a Republican challenger who’s as committed to respect and civility and integrity as the people that I am proud to work with.”