EMMETT, IDAHO – Ammon Bundy, the Independent candidate for governor in the 2022 November election, garnered 101,835 votes, which was nearly 17.2 percent of all ballots cast. Bundy ran to the right of the Republican candidate.
This was an unpreceded feat in Idaho politics where most alternative candidates for governor fail to capture more than a couple percent of the vote. Since 1990, when Idaho voters elected their last Democratic governor, the previous highest vote-shaving came from an Independent candidate in 2010, and even then the Independent candidate only managed to eke out 5.9 percent of the vote.
The astounding 17.2 percent results by Bundy surprised many and sounded warning bells across Idaho’s two party political establishment. It gets more interesting when the percentage split between the Republican and the Democratic candidates from the November 2022 General Election clearly shows a large chunk of Democratic voters cast their ballots for the Republican candidate. Democratic governor candidates received over 38 percent of the vote in both 2014 and 2018, but only 20.3 percent in 2022. In previous years, Democratic governor candidates have received up to 44.1 percent of the votes since 1994.
If the estimated 18 percent of crossover Democratic voters had been loyal to their party’s candidate in the 2022 governor race, the Republican candidate would have still succeeded in winning the election, but with only 42.5 percent, to the Democratic candidate’s 38.3 percent, and Bundy’s 17.2 percent.
A little over a year after the conclusion of the November 2022 race for governor, Idaho’s top Independent challenger finds himself without a home, or a livelihood, after a civil defamation case brought against him awarded the plaintiff over $50 million.
Bundy believes he was targeted by the powerful political elites in Idaho, releasing a statement on December 4, 2023, in which he states, “I’ve lost everything … all because I said some things they did not like.” He also claims it has become dangerous for him to remain in Idaho, so he relocated his family. Near the end of his address Bundy stated, “I believe that justice will still prevail here … but what these people have done is very wicked.”
