‘New West’ Continues To Wear Conservative Face

Lynne Hay, a 55-year-old homemaker who moved to Boise last year, is one of those people who some analysts have long predicted would change the face of politics in the West.

She and her husband came to Idaho from the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most culturally and politically progressive places in the nation.

Yet Hay, like many immigrants who have flooded to the Rocky Mountain West in the 1990s, brought with her a set of beliefs that serve to reinforce the rock-ribbed conservatism of Idaho rather than change it.

Although she misses some “amenities and art” of the San Francisco Bay Area, she finds the “wholesome-type living style” of Idaho an appealing contrast to life in California.

“In my younger days I was a liberal, but the older you get, you realize a lot of these (government) policies don’t work,” Hay said. “I feel there should be less government intrusion in a person’s life and that there is a tremendous amount of waste of the taxpayers’ money.”

To be sure, plenty else is changing in southern Idaho. In Nampa, the computer chip is powering an economic transformation.

New housing developments are gobbling up farmland as developers race to accommodate a 28 percent increase in population since 1990.

This is the face of what is often called the “New West,” where telecommunications and electronics have diversified and strengthened economies once heavily dependent on natural resources.

Tens of thousands of immigrants from both coasts are drawn to the region every year by rapidly expanding job opportunities, unbeatable natural amenities and fewer social problems.

Contrary to popular imagination, the West is not only the fastest-growing region in America but also the one with the highest percentage of residents living in urban areas.

Yet in the midst of such change, the region’s dominant political culture - largely conservative and Republican - has remained essentially the same.

If anything, the GOP’s grip has tightened since the beginning of the decade, despite predictions the massive influx of migrants would weaken its control and dilute the political influence of long-powerful economic interests in the agriculture, energy, mining and timber industries.

“We’ve speculated about that for years, thinking that (growth) would moderate our politics,” said Jim Wetherby, a Boise State professor who conducts an annual political survey of Idaho voters. “It hasn’t. I think it has made our state more conservative.”

Politicians such as Walt Minnick, Democratic candidate in the U.S. Senate race this year, note that high-tech people moving to the area often are distrustful of government and tend to be conservative politically.

In Idaho, 1994 was a virtual GOP rout. Republicans won the governorship after a drought of 24 years, and captured all but one of the seven state constitutional offices. They defeated the lone Democratic member of the four-person congressional delegation. And they won 80 percent of the state legislative seats.

Idaho’s legislature is now so dominated by Republicans, laments former Democratic Gov. Cecil Andrus, that “there’s not even enough Democrats to have a good potluck.”

Democrats may reclaim some ground next month, but not enough to seriously threaten the GOP’s regional hegemony, political analysts say.

Republican gains in 1994 came on the heels of stunning growth and change throughout most of the region. Although growth rates have slowed somewhat, the early 1990s were a time of dramatic change:

Between 1990 and 1993, the population growth rate in the Mountain West was more than double the national average, and the region included six of the 10 fastest-growing states: Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

Western states led the nation in non-farm employment payroll growth. The top five states in overall job growth from mid-1994 to mid-1995 were all in the West.

Three of the states with the largest increases in median household income from 1992 to 1994 were Nevada, Colorado and Idaho.

David Evers, a 29-year-old training coordinator for chip maker Micron, is typical of those coming to Idaho. When he lived in Santa Clara, Calif., it was not unusual to hear the sound of gunfire, he says, and in comparison he finds Boise nearly crime-free.

Although Evers says he would prefer a more diverse racial and ethnic environment than he finds in Idaho, on the whole “I would much rather raise a kid here than in California.”

In 1970, Idaho had no electronics manufacturing. Today, huge employers like Micron and Hewlett Packard, drawn by a productive work force and able to attract skilled workers because of the quality of life, dominate the regional economy around Boise.

The electronics manufacturing sector employs more people than the timber and food processing industries, longtime powerhouses of Idaho’s economy along with agriculture. Micron this year might account for almost half of all corporate income taxes in the state.

On the vast Colorado plateau, stretching across parts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, resource-based employment declined from 15 percent to 8 percent in the two decades ending in 1992, according to a recent study by Colorado College economics professor Walt E. Hecox.

Yet, to the dismay of environmental organizations, economic and demographic shifts have had little impact on the political power structure’s continued support for natural resource extraction industries that depend on ready access to public lands.

The politics have lagged behind, suggested Rep. Pat Williams, D-Mont., because the West’s traditional resource industries are pouring huge amounts of money into the political system to preserve their power.

“There is a pointed, orchestrated effort throughout the West by the extractive industries to pervert the normal marketplace of political ideas,” Williams said.

But other observers say the lack of a political shift in the West reflects a more simple reality: People moving here are fundamentally conservative; many are escaping from what they consider ill-conceived liberal government; and they either adopt or bring with them the kind of independent streak that has always dominated Western political thinking.

“These people tend to be Republicans, they tend to be upwardly mobile, they tend to think of themselves as self-sufficient, and they are often fleeing the machine politics of urban areas,” said Thomas M. Power, chairman of the economics department at the University of Montana.

Four years ago, the campaign manager for Democratic House candidate Larry LaRocco intensively studied new voters in Boise and nearby Ada County.

“They really were a bunch of Perot supporters,” said Martin L. Peterson, now a lobbyist for the state university. “They were not strong partisans and they were fairly conservative.”

Next month, Idaho’s U.S. Senate race offers a key test. Republican Sen. Larry Craig, one of the Senate’s most conservative members and strongest defenders of the West’s timber, mining and grazing interests, faces Democrat Minnick, a former business executive and board member of the Wilderness Society who is attacking Craig’s environmental record.

But Minnick is not counting much on Idaho’s new voters. “The growth has disproportionately come from California,” he said. “It has been fueled by growth in high tech. Technical people tend to be politically conservative and distrustful of government and not very politically involved, so they tend to be Republican.”

One large unknown is how the West’s newcomers will react politically if migration brings the same kinds of problems they fled, such as overcrowded schools, traffic jams and suburban sprawl.

Three years ago, rapid growth began showing up as a frequently mentioned “most important problem facing Idaho” in Boise State’s annual survey, and now is cited by almost 14 percent of respondents.

Joyce Brewer, a 48-year-old family counselor who grew up in Idaho and returned in the early 1980s after living in upstate New York, sees nothing but an upside to the kind of growth that means enjoying better art, ballet and theater in Boise. “It’s clean growth,” she said. “The industries that come in are very clean industries. … I love all the new things it brings about.”

But in Nampa, longtime mayor and civic booster Winston K. Goering sometimes frets. “Spacewise, I think we could almost double, our infrastructure could take it,” Goering said. “But I don’t think I would want to be here then.”