Idaho GOP Chair Yates, who faces at least two challengers: ‘We’re on a good track’
Idaho Republican Party Chairman Steve Yates says he understands that at least two, and possibly three, candidates are campaigning to replace him, but he’s unfazed. “Kathy Sims is circulating literature, and Mike Duff is talking to people,” he said, adding, “If there’s an election, he’s running.” Yates said, “He’s saying a lot of nasty things” about the current chairman, mostly similar to things that have been circulating on social media. “I only know of those two – people have told me that Bryan Smith intends to run,” but he said he’s had no confirmation of that.
Yates said, “Everyone here knows that I’m running for re-election.” Rather than campaign, he said, he’s “just talking about what the party is doing.”
He said, “We just have a lot of people who have come, and they see that we’re taking care of business, we’ve got events that are meaningful to Republicans.” Those range from policy workshops, including one this afternoon on the 2nd Amendment, to guest speakers, to firearms practice and training, which is available for a fee to all convention attendees just off the main convention floor. That’s in line with the convention’s theme: “Faith, Family, Freedom … Firearms!”
He noted that both the platform committee and the nominations committee – which selects the delegates to the national GOP convention – already have completed their work today, ahead of schedule. The nominations committee was in charge of naming Idaho’s 32 delegates, but the process is governed by “incredibly arcane” rules and a formula that “is almost like college calculus.” As a result, the Ted Cruz campaign, which gets 20 of Idaho’s 32 delegates, and the Donald Trump campaign, which gets the other 12, largely determined who the delegates would be. “The party’s only choice is do you approve or not,” Yates said. The nominating committee finished its work in half an hour today; it had been allotted two and a half hours. Its report will get three final votes, one for the 1st Congressional District, one for the 2nd Congressional District, and one for at-large delegates, during the convention’s general session on Friday afternoon.
Asked how he expects this year’s GOP state convention to compare to 2014’s chaotic and ultimately failed confab in Moscow, Yates said, “Already, things are fundamentally different. Look at the size and organization of events. We’ve already had committees conduct business. We had to negotiate a painstaking process of allocation of national delegates, and people worked in good faith and worked it out.”
“People are enjoying themselves, coming to events,” he said, which have “fun Republican themes – we’re on a good track.”
