This Boise Democrat aims to defy party labels. Her grandfathers paved the way

BOISE – Rep. Monica Church grew up fishing, backpacking and bird-hunting with her grandfather, four-term Democratic Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus. He was the one who taught her, his oldest grandchild, how to drive a car and operate a boat.

“We were beyond close,” she told the Idaho Statesman. “We were just best friends. In the most stereotypical way you could think about a grandfather and a granddaughter, that was us.”

Now a Boise Democrat, Church, 42, is serving in the Idaho Legislature after she was elected in 2024 to the Idaho House seat representing District 19, which covers Boise’s North End.

Church, serving her first term, carries the weight of two families’ legacies in the Idaho Democratic Party at a time when Democrats are struggling to gain traction with voters. Andrus, her maternal grandfather, and former Democratic U.S. Sen. Frank Church, her paternal grandfather, advocated for public education and played a formative role in protecting the state’s wilderness areas.

She gravitated toward politics after growing frustrated with the slow pace of change when she tried to improve Idaho public education from the inside, both as a teacher and as a school administrator.

She was asked to run for office several times before she took the plunge, having decided that her daughter, now 15, was finally old enough to understand and weather the consequences of that decision, she said.

In office, Church is guided by lessons Andrus taught her and his other grandchildren about the importance of being trustworthy and transparent – and that when they were in a hole, they should stop digging.

“ ‘Just admit it – that the system is broken, or that the policy didn’t work, or that something has changed,’ ” she recalled him saying. “ ‘Work to better it, rather than doubling down.’ ”

She learned similar lessons from family lore about Frank Church, who died when she was only 1 year old, and from his wife, Bethine Church. The two prominent Idaho families joined when Andrus’ youngest daughter, Kelly, married Church’s son Chase in 1989. The two had run in the same political circles over the years.

Between them, Andrus and Frank Church held office from the 1950s to 1990s, achieving improbable popularity in a Republican-dominated state. Both were known for their efforts to preserve the state’s wilderness areas. Andrus worked to block federal efforts to store nuclear waste in Idaho, while Church helped to establish recreation areas in Hells Canyon, the Sawtooth Wilderness and others, seeking compromise between private and public groups who wanted to use the space.

But in the years since, Democrats’ fortunes have soured in Idaho. There have been no more Democratic governors or U.S. senators, and Democrats’ numbers in the state Legislature have dwindled. In the early 1990s, the Idaho Senate was split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. In 2025, the body had only six Democrats.

Church, a public high school teacher who has taught a range of social studies and history classes, told the Statesman she doesn’t believe the Democratic Party’s platform has changed much since her grandfathers’ time, or that the party’s message is the reason for its sliding popularity. Instead, she sees a reluctance – among both Democratic and Republican politicians – to demonstrate individual leadership by differentiating themselves from their parties, speaking frankly to voters about their stances and voting based on their values, rather than along party lines.

Those were skills that both Andrus and Frank Church demonstrated, Church said, which helped them to bridge party lines and earn trust across the aisle.

Andrus and Frank Church “were kind of separate and apart” from the party, she said. “I think that’s one of the things we often forget – that they were individuals. They were not party men.” Both held some traditionally Democratic positions, focusing on the importance of public education and environmental conservation – but they also defied Democratic Party leadership during their careers.

At times, Andrus campaigned for Republican candidates in other states. And Frank Church’s approach to protecting the Sawtooth wilderness area clashed with other Democratic conservationists who wanted to oust any private businesses from the area. Her grandfather believed that was untenable, Monica Church said, and instead sought compromise with mining groups, ranchers and others.

“That area looks the way it does today because both public and private groups value that area,” in large part because of her grandfather’s efforts, she said.

Six months after the 2024 presidential election, Democrats nationwide are grappling with their resounding defeat. Idaho Democrats also took a hit: Republicans picked off a Democratic state senator in West Boise and Democratic state representatives in central Idaho and Pocatello, the Statesman reported at the time. All told, Democrats’ proportion of legislative seats dropped below 15%.

Now that Church is a lawmaker, she aims to follow her grandfathers’ example in finding middle ground to settle disagreements – an approach she said will be critical as her party tries to find a way forward from its losses.

“I have just not ever been a very partisan individual,” Church said. She even weighed running for office unaffiliated with either party. “I think I came to politics with a kind of preconceived notion about parties from my family – that aligning with a party doesn’t necessarily garner you any specific advantage.

“To be effective, you need to be authentic, and you need to have clear priorities, and you need to stick to them, and you need to be a doer and not a complainer,” she added. “If the Democratic Party wants to find new footing, it has to be authentic.”

Experts blame polarization for Democratic Party losses

Idaho political scientists and historians offered various theories as to why Democrats’ ability to win in Idaho has waned.

For one, the state has seen an influx of Republicans moving in, said Charles Hunt, a political science professor at Boise State University. From 2004 to 2023, nearly 120,000 people who had moved from other states registered to vote in Idaho, with Republican newcomers vastly outnumbering new Democratic voters, according to data from the Idaho Secretary of State’s Office.

Democratic politicians in recent decades also took some stances that alienated parts of their traditional base, including workers in North Idaho’s mining and timber industries, said Stephanie Witt, a professor of political science at Boise State. The party’s focus on wilderness conservation and efforts to curtail extractive industries were at odds with these workers’ livelihoods, she told the Statesman.

As a result, “that small group of Democrats up there has pretty much dried up,” she said.

Politics have become increasingly nationalized, with voters paying more attention to federal government issues than to local ones – and viewing local candidates primarily through the lens of their national party’s platforms, Witt said.

At the same time, voters have increasingly tied their own identities to their political party, viewing the parties as two separate teams rather than a set of beliefs along a spectrum, Hunt said.

This makes it less likely that voters would be willing to split their ballot between Democratic and Republican candidates, he told the Statesman.

“People are pretty calcified in their political beliefs,” he said. “You have more recognizable – I hate to put it in such dramatic terms – heroes and villains at the national level,” whether that’s President Donald Trump on the right or U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, on the left.

“What these figures do is, even without intending to, they become these bogeymen, I think, for local and state politicians to attach to the other party,” Hunt said. This paves the way for attack ads to tag a member of the other party as extreme – to “attach them to their most extreme caricature at the national level.”

Increasingly, voters know little about candidates other than their party affiliation, said Randy Stapilus, an author and former Statesman reporter who has covered Idaho politics since the 1970s.

“Now, if you’re a candidate of one party or the other, you’re apt to be so thoroughly demonized by one and so sanctified by the other that the idea that this is an ordinary human being with pluses and minuses that you need to evaluate – that seems to be left behind,” he told the Statesman.

Idaho Democrats try to navigate Legislature

With so few seats, the prospects for Democrats’ efficacy in the Idaho Legislature are bleak, Stapilus said.

Democrats have been the minority in the body since Stapilus began covering state politics in the 1970s, but back then, there were enough of them that they “could not be ignored,” he said.

Now, though, “any real attention that you’re getting from the majority is almost just qualified as goodwill on the part of the majority,” Stapilus told the Statesman. “They don’t really have to pay attention.”

Witt, in contrast, argued that divisions within the Republican Party have given Democrats back some power, as more moderate Republicans were forced to partner with Democrats to counter their far-right colleagues’ attempts to block budgets, for example.

Church said she has found the most success in getting to know her Republican colleagues on a personal level, connecting on shared interests or cultural references, such as TV shows, before trying to connect on political topics.

That approach helped her foster a close working relationship with Rep. Clint Hostetler, a Twin Falls Republican who pushed for tax credits parents can use for private school tuition – a cause that Church opposes. But the two “had a lot of good conversations, and we actually saw eye to eye on a lot of things, which was probably hard for a lot of people to believe,” Hostetler told the Statesman.

“You have to understand a person before you can change hearts and minds, right?” Church said. “You have to be in their heart before you can try and change it, and it goes both ways.”

Hostetler and Church connected on their time living in California and on a shared sense of humor, Hostetler said, and built up enough trust to meet together with teachers and administrators who wanted to speak with Hostetler about his voucher proposal.

Church also plans to work this summer with the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a far-right think tank, to help develop a curriculum for a required high school course on Western civilization.

Church said teaching has prepared her to bridge political divides. In the school system, she must balance the needs of students, parents and administrators in much the same way she must balance lawmakers’ and constituents’ varied interests, she said.

Voters “just want to feel place and similar and community, and you can’t do that if you just don’t understand the human that’s speaking to you – if you don’t understand their experiences, or they’re so far removed that they feel fake,” she said. “I guess I’ll just keep trying to be myself and anger everyone on all sides. But Cece was good at that, and so was Frank. So I guess that’s my family heritage.”