Latah County Republicans hoped for a county red wave Tuesday, but were met with a good showing of Democrat opposition.
The morning of Election Day, a man stood alone on the corner of Jackson and 3rd St. He held a towering sign, “Honk 4 Trump.” There wasn’t five seconds that went by without a car’s response.
This man, Steve Piper, is a Moscow citizen of several decades and a dedicated Trump supporter. He stood at the exact same spot as he did during the 2016 presidential election and, as he described, received a similar response from passersby.
“Overwhelmingly, this year right now, we’re killing it,” Piper said to a fellow Trump-supporter at the stoplight. “When I heard what was going on in this town with the horns and the people with the thumbs up…honestly, this time around, it is overwhelming.”
Piper, among what appears to be a slew of support from passing cars, felt confident in major Republican wins both locally and nationally. Caleb Bouma, the chairman of the Latah County Republicans, held similar expressions of hope and confidence in clinching the Senate seat with Dan Foreman, the House seats with Caroline Nilsson Troy and Brandon Mitchell and the Latah County Commissioner position with Gabriel Rench.
“I am pretty confident that we’re at least going to get a couple seats,” Bouma said. “We’ve worked really hard this year, done a lot of things we haven’t done in the past. I think that, overall, the numbers are looking really good. We’re likely to get (Troy) and (Mitchell) in, but (Foreman and Rench) are maybe a little more difficult. We’ll see.”
The race between incumbent Tom Lamar and Gabriel Rench was the most contentious of the lot. Rench received widespread criticism and contrasted presidential support for his arrest on Sept. 23 at Christ Church’s Psalm Sing.
“There’s no surveys (for our race),” Rench said. “There’s no indicators of how things are going. I can only look at past data and information to kind of inform me. But I know based on the last time Tom Lamar had someone running against him in 2014, that’s all the data I have…. He only won by 600 votes. A lot has obviously changed; he’s probably won some votes, gained some votes, lost some votes since 2014. I don’t know how my arrest polarizes things, if it gets people more fired up for voting for me or ‘we like to vote for nice people.’ Does that prohibit or make it difficult to vote for me? I don’t know.”
Preliminary results with only 22 out of the 35 total precincts reporting, which arrived at roughly 9:40 p.m. on election night, indicated all four Republican candidates were ahead of their competitors. The largest lead was 30%, but Rench was only 11% ahead of Lamar at that point in the evening.
Some precincts took later into the night to report ballots due to a predictable increase in mail-in and early voting. After these precincts, including Latah County, were counted, the results flipped dramatically.
Latah County’s unofficial results were reported at roughly 12:20 a.m. Latah County’s Voter Live Turnout website listed full results on its website. Benewah County’s Voter Live Turnout website did the same.
Once both Latah and Benewah counties were counted for the legislative races, Foreman lost the Senate seat by 1,111 votes. Mitchell lost Latah County, but won the election by 609 votes. Troy, who ran for Legislative District 5 House Seat B, won by 2,525 votes. These numbers were found by combining results from both live turnout websites.
Rench’s ran for a Latah County-specific position. He lost the District 2 Latah County Commissioner race by 5,121 votes.
Rench took the loss in stride but said the City of Moscow is not representative of Latah County, which he implied was the deciding factor of his election.
“I heard that I won in the polls, but (Lamar) won the absentee ballots….,” Rench said. “I think the City of Moscow controls Latah County. That’s just how the county structures go sometimes. But you know, that’s just how conservatives don’t get out and vote like they should, like they could; this is what happens.”
Other Republican candidates did not respond to comment.
This article has been edited to correct election results.
Carter Kolpitcke can be reached at [email protected].
Sage Francetich
What Rench said is idiotic. Moscow doesn't "control" the county. It just has the largest population of any city in Latah County, and it's barely over 50% of the county's population. Elections are a numbers game, and he lost. It's plain and simple.