April 26, 2026
The Map Is Red. The Votes Are Purple.
Why are RINOs squirming?
By: Stop Idaho RINOs
It’s been pretty fun seeing many of the RINOs squirm over the past several weeks because of the results of our “Votes With Dems” scorecard.
Several Idaho legislators are pushing back with their own spin. The arguments are nearly identical, almost like they had a Zoom workshop together. Same complaints, same percentages, same misdirection.
Here’s our response. Once. For everyone.
What this scorecard actually measures
Idaho is called a red state. The map says so. The registration numbers say so. The presidential results say so.
The voting record inside the Capitol tells a different story.
Bills that conservative voters expect their Republican representatives to support are dying or getting watered down because Republicans are crossing over and voting with Democrats (or are essentially Democrats themselves). Not occasionally. Not on close calls. Often enough that conservative legislation routinely fails in a state with a Republican supermajority.
The map is red. The votes are purple. This scorecard exists to show voters the difference.
That’s it. That’s the whole project. We’re not measuring party loyalty. We’re not measuring how nice someone is in caucus. We’re measuring whether the people Idaho elected to represent conservative values are voting like they actually hold those values.
How the scorecard is built
Before we get to their arguments, one thing needs to be clear, because every rebuttal we’ve seen depends on misunderstanding it.
This scorecard includes every single bill that received a recorded vote this session. Every single one. We didn’t pick favorites. We didn’t curate. We didn’t sort bills into “ones that count” and “ones that don’t.” We took the entire session.
Then we removed the unanimous votes from the percentage calculation, because a vote where every Republican and every Democrat agreed isn’t measuring anything ideological. More on that in a second.
That’s the entire methodology. Take every vote. Remove the ones where there was nothing to disagree about. Show voters how their legislator voted on the rest.
Their three arguments, and why all three fall apart
Argument one: “You should include unanimous votes.”
A bill that every Republican and every Democrat votes for isn’t a partisan bill. It’s a road name. A license plate design. A technical fix to existing code. There’s nothing conservative or progressive about it.
Asking voters to judge their legislator on those votes is asking them to evaluate a candidate based on bills with no ideological content at all. You can’t measure where someone stands on issues by counting votes that aren’t about issues.
There’s also something worth noticing here. Including unanimous votes in the calculation also raises their own “Votes with Dems” percentage. Democrats voted for those bills, too. The math doesn’t actually help them. They just hope nobody runs the numbers.
Argument two: “Compare Republicans to Republicans, not Democrats.”
This is the most popular line right now, and it’s also the most revealing.
It sounds reasonable until you think it through. Under this methodology, 40 Republicans could vote with Democrats on a bill, and all 40 would still score as loyal Republicans, because they voted together. The Democrat position won. The bill became law. The scorecard would say everyone passed.
That’s not a scorecard. That’s a participation ribbon. It lets the entire caucus drift left without consequence as long as they drift together. Voters aren’t that easy to fool, and they shouldn’t be.
Argument three: “Democrats only influenced the outcome a few times.”
This argument moves the goalposts from how someone voted to whether their vote changed the result. Those are not the same question.
“My vote didn’t change the outcome” is not an explanation of why you voted that way. It’s an excuse for voting the wrong way and getting away with it. A vote is a public statement of position. It is on the record forever. The bill passed or failed for a thousand reasons, but the only thing on a legislator’s record is how they personally voted.
If “outcome influence” became the standard for accountability, no Idaho legislator would ever be accountable for anything, because the math will usually work out one way or the other. That’s the goal of the argument, and that’s why we reject it.
The 5% problem
Some legislators are now publishing their own numbers. One representative announced he was “only against my party 5% of the time” and “95% with my party majority.” Others are running the same math on themselves and getting similarly flattering results.
Here’s how the trick works.
That 5% is calculated against every vote of the session, including the unanimous ones. When you put 237 road names and technical fixes in the denominator, every legislator’s “against the party” percentage gets crushed toward zero by simple arithmetic. On the contested votes that actually measure ideology, the same legislator’s numbers can be ten or twenty times higher. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the entire reason they’re presenting the math this way.
The same legislators are also pointing at Democrats who voted against the Democratic majority and saying, “See, even Democrats break with their party, so it doesn’t mean anything when Republicans do it.” Of course, Idaho Democrats sometimes vote with Republicans. They live in Idaho. They represent Idaho districts. Their constituents pull them rightward. That’s gravity, not equivalence. The fact that Idaho Democrats occasionally cross over doesn’t validate Idaho Republicans crossing over. It just confirms that Idaho is a conservative state, which is the whole point of measuring whether Republican legislators vote like it.
Some are closing with a rhetorical question: “How much against the Republican majority is allowable before we question whether someone belongs in a different party?” That’s the wrong question. The right question is: how often can a Republican vote against conservative bills before voters question whether they should be representing a conservative state?
And every number in this scorecard is auditable. Every bill is public. Anyone with a spreadsheet and an afternoon can check it. The legislators publishing their own counter-numbers are asking voters to trust their math instead of ours. Voters don’t have to. They can run it themselves.
What they’re actually doing
Notice what these legislators are not doing.
Not one of them has said “I voted against this bill, and here’s why I think conservatives should agree with my reasoning.” They’re not defending the votes. They’re attacking the math.
When someone changes the subject from “what did I do” to “how are you measuring what I did,” that’s the tell. The bills on this scorecard aren’t a hand-picked list of greatest hits. They’re all the recorded votes of the session. If a legislator has a problem with what’s being measured, the problem isn’t with us. The problem is that they don’t want their entire voting record made public.
There’s another giveaway. Their own arguments are full of contested-vote math. They tell us “Democrats only influenced 17 outcomes.” They tell us “Republicans were split 198 times.” Both of those numbers are about contested votes. The same kind of votes we’re measuring. They’re using contested-vote analysis to defend themselves while telling us we shouldn’t use contested-vote analysis to score them. Pick one.
Who they’re really talking to
The conservative base voter does not need an essay on methodology to know that voting with Democrats on contested bills is a problem.
The legislators making these arguments aren’t trying to convince conservative primary voters. They’re trying to convince donors, moderates, and the comfortable middle that this scorecard is unfair. They’re hoping the people who already weren’t going to vote for them in a primary will side with them in a public spat.
It’s a tell about who they think their real constituency is. And it should tell voters something, too.
The bottom line
We published every vote. The bill list is the entire session. The methodology is one sentence long: take every vote, remove the ones where nobody disagreed, and show voters the rest.
The legislators pushing back the hardest are the ones at the top of the scorecard. The “good Republicans” they’re holding up as examples are the same names that have been flagged as crossover voters for years. They are the same names that score poorly on every conservative scorecard out there, every session. Two metrics, same answer. They’re trying to relabel “moderate” as “loyal” and hope nobody notices.
Idaho voters can read.
That’s what this is really about. Not methodology. Not percentages. Not unanimous votes. It’s about whether the people elected to represent a conservative state are willing to be measured against their entire voting record.
If the answer is yes, the scorecard is a tool they should welcome. If the answer is no, voters deserve to know that too.
The map is red. The votes are purple. We’ll keep publishing the difference.
