‘The party changed, and I didn’t’: Mainstay Republican leaves Idaho Senate
The day before Thanksgiving, Chuck Winder was clearing out his office at the Idaho Capitol. Papers were piled in boxes, and decorations were packed up. On his desk were an assortment of nametags, taken from his seat on the Senate floor and committee rooms. Soon, his name would be scraped off of the Senate President Pro Tempore’s office door. His term would end in three days.
“I’ve gotten it pretty emptied out,” he told the Idaho Statesman.
After decades in public service, 16 years in the Idaho Senate and four as the Senate president pro tem, Winder was going home.
The 79-year-old lost his Republican primary race by fewer than 300 votes in West Boise in May, ending a run of 14 years in Senate leadership, where he focused largely on transportation and education.
Winder’s ouster by a challenger to his right, Josh Keyser, was widely viewed as a culmination of the far-right takeover of the GOP and a potential harbinger of the further rightward tilt of the Legislature. Gov. Brad Little, an ally of Winder, called his loss the surprise of the 2024 primary.
“I never thought there’d be a day in Idaho that someone told me I wasn’t conservative enough, but that’s happened,” Winder said. “What it really came down to is the party changed, and I didn’t change as much as they wanted me to. I’ll take blame for that, but I also wear that with pride, too.”
How Chuck Winder lost his seat
Winder went to grade school in eastern Oregon, attended the private College of Idaho in Caldwell, and afterward served as an aviator for the Navy in Florida and Texas. When he left the military, he moved to Nampa in 1972 to work for a commercial developer as a pilot for company executives.
Two years later he moved to Boise, where he got his start in politics at City Hall. Appointed to the Planning and Zoning Commission in the late 1970s, he went on to run for a seat on the Ada County Highway District Commission, where he stayed for 13 years.
Winder said he was galvanized to enter partisan politics by the 1992 independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, who campaigned on bringing business principles into government. Two years later, Winder announced himself as a “moderate Republican” candidate for governor who sought to reduce partisanship, push for local control and limit government, according to Idaho Statesman news coverage at the time.
Four-term Democratic Gov. Cecil Andrus had said said he would not run again, and Winder was the first Republican to announce his campaign to break a quarter-century of Democratic control of the Governor’s Office. He declared his campaign at the Grove Plaza in downtown Boise while praising Andrus. He said he opposed further restrictions on abortion as well as an anti-gay initiative circulating in the Legislature.
He lost in a crowded primary field to Phil Batt; Winder only received 13% of Republican votes. Batt then appointed him to chair the Idaho Transportation Board, where he stayed for 11 years, until he ran for, and won, a Senate seat in 2008. Two years later he was elected to leadership.
He was more reserved than prior Senate leaders, Little said.
“Chuck didn’t talk much,” he said.
Winder became a staple of the Idaho Senate. But over time, his constituents changed.
While Winder’s West Boise district once spanned the city of Eagle, his district shrank as the area’s population boomed. His previous boundaries extended from the Canyon County line east to the Idaho 55 highway and north halfway to Emmett.
Redistricting in 2011 moved Winder to boundaries that instead covered a few miles of suburban neighborhoods south of the Boise River between Can-Ada Road and Eagle Road. In 2021, redistricting cut his district in half, from Chinden Boulevard down to Ustick Road instead of south to Interstate 84.
“Particularly when you’re a veteran legislator like Chuck, he may instinctively think everybody knows who he is,” Little told the Statesman. “But when you have a new legislative district, that’s not the case.”
The senator narrowly retained his seat in the Republican primary in 2022, despite the boundary reapportionment following the 2020 census. Knocking on doors in his district this year, Winder estimated that 30-50% of the people he encountered had moved to Idaho within the last three to five years.
As his district changed, Winder also increasingly became the target of an ascendant far-right movement. A longtime government official, he was viewed by some within his party not as an ally, but as an obstacle, said Phil Reberger, a longtime lobbyist and supporter of Winder.
“Chuck was, I think, rightly identified as the establishment, mainstream Republican, and there are those in the party further right that think things need to be stirred up,” said Reberger, who has known Winder for more than 40 years.
Winder and Keyser raised well over $100,000 in their primary race, and a political action committee associated with the libertarian student group called Young Americans for Liberty spent nearly $206,000 against the incumbent. The average amount raised by candidates in Senate races this year, including those who also fundraised for the general election, was about $39,000.
Winder told the Statesman that top administrators of the state GOP — namely Dorothy Moon, who chairs the party, and other leaders of the central committee — also openly supported Keyser.
Lt. Gov. Scott Bedke, who has known Winder for more than two decades, said he thinks low turnout in the Republican primary was a factor. In Ada County, estimated participation was 28%.
“The far right was able to effectively target him and take him out,” Bedke said.
ITD sale debate damaged relationships, Winder says
In interviews with the Statesman, Idaho Republican leaders identified transportation as the central focus of Winder’s career. While Idaho had long stuck to using cash on hand to build out state highways, Winder was part of a push in the early 2000s to use federal bonds to raise nearly $2 billion for road expansion projects.
Little, who was in the Senate at the time, initially opposed the federal bonding but eventually came around, the governor said. Idaho Republican lawmakers for decades have pushed back on using federal dollars, preferring to have tightly controlled budgets that limit the size of government. That resistance remains today.
“He probably could see the growth ahead of the Treasure Valley in a way that those of us that were outside of the Treasure Valley could not see,” said Bedke, who was a House member back then. “He could see that our infrastructure was not prepared for that,” adding that the federal bonding “was a major departure from the way we’d done it.”
After his first term in office, Winder climbed into leadership and was elected assistant majority leader in the Senate. Bedke said that’s when he became a broadly influential “gatekeeper” of legislation.
“I always advised (other lawmakers), if you could get Chuck to sign off on your bill, be a cosponsor or a Senate floor sponsor, then that was a good thing, because he was well-respected in his caucus,” Bedke said.
But in the past few years, some of that influence waned.
During this year’s session, Winder prominently opposed an effort spearheaded by House Speaker Mike Moyle, R-Star, to undo an already-negotiated sale of the Idaho Transportation Department campus on State Street. Though the aging building was damaged in a flood, and the governor’s deputies already approved the sale and negotiated with developers, some lawmakers said the state wouldn’t be paid the property’s full value, or that it would cost too much to relocate the agency.
“This is a hill I want to die on if I have to,” Winder said on the floor. “I’m going to fight this tooth and nail because it is so far out of line.”
Over his protests, lawmakers rejected the sale anyway.
While he doubts his opposition contributed much to his primary loss, Winder said it damaged relationships within the Republican caucus. But he said he still thinks lawmakers made the wrong choice to keep the building and attempt to renovate it.
“When all is said and done, it’s going to cost them a heck of a lot more money,” he said.
Winder’s political career has also spanned a series of debates over how to fund public education.
Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, and Winder co-chaired a committee in the 2010s to examine ways to overhaul how to distribute money to the state’s public schools. Lawmakers have yet to change the funding formula the committee was formed to scrutinize.
Winder said he was proud of efforts to raise starting pay for teachers. In 2019, lawmakers boosted starting salaries up to $40,000, and since then also increased funding for professional development and special needs students.
“It’s made us more competitive with surrounding states,” he said of the higher pay.
On controversial topics, Winder sometimes served as a bridge between his party’s factions.
For months, lawmakers were at a stalemate over a proposal to limit library books to children. Skeptical of the need for a bill in years past, Winder said he changed his mind after seeing a book he found inappropriate at one of his grandchildren’s birthday parties. When a compromise version of the bill made it to the Senate floor, Winder warned colleagues voting against it that they “may end up with something a lot worse than what’s before you today.” The bill still failed by a single vote.
But Winder remained broadly in line with his party on traditionally conservative values. A longtime opponent of abortion, he has at times drawn the ire of abortion rights supporters, like in 2012, when he introduced a bill to require ultrasounds before abortions, even in cases of rape. He said at the time that he hopes physicians press women on whether “this pregnancy (was) caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by a rape.” His comments were picked up by the Huffington Post; the bill failed.
Early this year, during a discussion about the state’s strict prohibitions on abortion, Winder said the ban could be a remedy for the labor shortage.
He told the Statesman that his aversion to abortion restrictions in the ’90s reflected his opposition to a push by some in the party to remove all exceptions — including rape, incest and a mother’s life. But he said he’s always believed that “life began at conception.”
Still, Winder’s conservative positions have not satisfied his party’s right flank, and he has angered far-right lawmakers he attempted to discipline.
After he stripped two committee vice chairs of their positions and disciplined a third senator – all three of whom were members of the Idaho Freedom Caucus – for what he saw as coarse online rhetoric about their colleagues, the Ada County Republican Central Committee censured him. The Idaho Freedom Foundation, a prominent think tank and longtime foe of Winder, said his actions were “authoritarian.” Winder once called the IFF a “huge threat” to democracy in Idaho.
“I don’t think we want to quash debate and quash differing opinions,” former Sen. Scott Herndon, R-Sagle, who was one of the three senators Winder disciplined, previously told the Statesman. “I don’t think a senator from District 20 should be telling the senators from District 1 and District 24 what they should be saying.”
But Winder still feels he was right to call out those lawmakers.
“We ought to be able to debate anything — (even) tough issues — but it shouldn’t be personal,” he said.
School vouchers back on agenda for Idaho lawmakers
Winder wasn’t the only incumbent to lose his seat in the May GOP primary. Two moderate conservative senators — Geoff Schroeder, R-Mountain Home, and Linda Hartgen, R-Twin Falls — also lost to challengers to their right, and so did several House Republicans. Senate Assistant Majority Leader Abby Lee, R-Fruitland, was another moderate Republican who won’t return to the Capitol after she chose not to run for reelection.
The shift could put the House and Senate more in lockstep and could be enough to upend a pattern that has developed in recent years: The House easily passes controversial bills that the Senate then rejects or replaces with a compromise version.
Lawmakers and public school advocates have told the Statesman the shift could make the push for school vouchers more likely to succeed this year. Voucher schemes, which give state funds to students who attend private or home schools, have passed in several other conservative states but so far failed to gain enough traction in Idaho. Winder this year opposed a voucher bill that did not make it out of a House committee, though he said he would have considered a voucher pilot program with limited funding and income limits.
Horman, one of the strongest proponents of school vouchers in the House, said she thinks “the Legislature in general, based on changes from the election, will be more supportive of school choice this session.”
The Idaho Falls lawmaker cosponsored the failed voucher bill and said she plans to bring another version next year. While the previous bill was open to any family, she said this next iteration will have income thresholds, with a greater focus on lower-income families.
Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, who opposes vouchers, said the incumbent senators’ losses are worrisome.
“I think the threat of vouchers is greater now that those very grounded, reasonable Republicans were unelected,” Wintrow said.
She said she hopes that “no matter who’s in leadership,” senators will preserve the “fairness of government process.” Republicans on Thursday selected Senate Majority Leader Kelly Anthon, R-Burley, to replace Winder, Sen. Linda Hartgen, R-Twin Falls, to be majority leader, and Senate Majority Caucus Chair Mark Harris, R-Soda Springs, to replace Lee.
“We all have a responsibility to the institution and to ensure the government process is fair, open and transparent for the people,” Wintrow told the Statesman.
In policymaking, Winder said the Legislature’s turn further to the right could spell issues.
Out of his Senate job, Winder said he is in talks to be a transportation and education consultant, and could end up registering as a lobbyist at the Capitol. Asked if running for office in the future was off the table, he laughed.
“I’d say it’s 99% off the table,” he said.
Winder has seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He said he plans to ski and enjoy free time in the winter that he “hasn’t had for 16 years.”