Can a former Republican win the mayor’s race in a liberal city like Boise? | Opinion

Pulling up to the campaign event, visitors were greeted by a bevy of pickup trucks lined up outside the Boise firefighters union hall on Orchard Street. Inside, the crowd of dozens of mostly white men in matching red T-shirts milled about.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think you had stumbled onto a campaign rally for another candidate whose name starts with “T” and ends with “rump.”

But it was a campaign event last week for Boise mayoral candidate Mike Masterson, whose official campaign signs and T-shirts are decidedly blue.

The event was to announce the endorsement of Masterson for mayor from the Boise firefighter and police unions, a group where men are overrepresented. Masterson was Boise police chief from 2005 to 2015.

City races in Idaho are nonpartisan, as they should be. It works well. As the old adage goes in city politics, “There is no Republican or Democratic way of taking out the garbage.”

But you can’t help wondering about the political leanings of a candidate in an election.

Masterson is challenging incumbent Mayor Lauren McLean, who probably would not be offended if you called her a liberal. She’s unabashedly partisan, anyway, having served as Idaho’s representative announcing the Democratic delegates for presidential candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 election.

Masterson, who has been a registered Republican but is unaffiliated now, has received support from some prominent Republican figures, including former Idaho Attorney General David Leroy (who supported the campaign of Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador) and former Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney.

I asked Masterson about the perception, especially surrounded by the guys in the red T-shirts, of being a conservative in a liberal city.

“Well, I suppose that the perception can be a reality, so I do recognize that,” he said.

That’s not to say Masterson is some sort of right-wing extremist. After all, his campaign treasurer is Maryanne Jordan, a former Democratic state legislator who, as a former Boise City Council member, has worked with both McLean and Masterson.

“He is a person of progressive thought, pragmatic approach and care for the community,” said Jordan, who was a member of the Idaho Statesman editorial board in 2022. “I’m sure that all efforts will be made to paint him as a raging conservative to avoid trying to defend a record of failed management and accountability. It will be the job of the campaign to deal with that.”

Former Mayor Dave Bieter, himself a former Democratic state legislator, threw his support behind Masterson. Bieter lost his bid for a fifth mayoral term to McLean in 2019.

Moderate candidate

Masterson said he’s a moderate who has supported candidates on both sides of the aisle. He said he’s spoken out in favor of human rights and against discrimination. He pointed out his opposition to legislation allowing carrying concealed weapons on college campuses.

Masterson was unaffiliated from when he first registered to vote in Idaho until 2015, when he registered as a Republican, according to his campaign. He returned to being unaffiliated in 2022.

Masterson’s campaign said he has endorsed and supported moderate candidates from both parties, such as Democrats Rick Just and Dotti Owens and Republicans Marv Hagedorn and Gary Raney.

“The candidate that comes to the mayor’s office should be considering what is in the best interest of the city, instead of perhaps pushing a particular political agenda or platform,” Masterson told me after the union endorsement event. “And that is the beauty of our system.”

Masterson would rather talk about specific issues: city employee turnover, the zoning code rewrite, approval of Interfaith Sanctuary, issues with the police chief and the Office of Police Accountability, and a contract with a law firm to investigate racism in the police department. These are not necessarily partisan issues.

As the election moves forward, the Idaho Statesman editorial board will dig deeper into those issues, and we will base our endorsement on which candidate is best able to address them.

In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether a perception of being conservative, or at the very least more conservative than McLean, would hurt Masterson.

Liberal city voters

Boise is still a relatively liberal city, and if he’s going to win, Masterson is going to have to tiptoe on that line of perception that this race is about a Republican vs. a Democrat, red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal. Even if they agreed with his positions, it might be hard for liberal or Democratic voters to vote for someone they perceive as playing for “the other team.”

Although registered Republicans still outnumber registered Democrats in Boise’s legislative districts 15-19 by a margin of 60,866 to 37,005, the 54,000 unaffiliated voters in those districts tend to vote to the left.

Boiseans voted for Joe Biden for president over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. In the precincts that include Boise voters, Biden received more than 80,000 votes, while Trump received about 56,000.

When you take out the precincts that have less than a majority of Boise voters, Biden won 64 out of 81 precincts, and the vote gap widened to nearly 30,000.

Four years ago, when six candidates, including McLean, ran against Bieter, the political divisions were pretty clear: Republicans Rebecca Arnold, a former Ada County Highway District commissioner and now Ada County assessor, and Brent Coles, former Boise mayor, were on the right, and Bieter and McLean on the left.

McLean ran to the left of Bieter and took home the most votes, 23,669, to Bieter’s 15,711, while Arnold and Coles combined for 10,667.

In the runoff election a month later, McLean’s vote total only increased, to 30,306, while Bieter’s barely budged, coming in at 15,998.

Votes switching from Coles and Arnold to McLean suggest that the election had less to do with political persuasion and more to do with an anti-Bieter sentiment at the time, likely over such issues as a massive library proposal and a proposed baseball stadium.

Perhaps Boise voters are less concerned with political party and more concerned about practical matters, such as getting the garbage picked up.

In which case, this election could feature a healthy debate about the issues that are important to the voters.

Given today’s political climate, wouldn’t that be a refreshing change?