As Idaho Grows Ever Redder, Boise Worries About Its Isolation

Amid the hoopla over gains that Democrats made across the country, voters in Boise, Idaho, registered their own modest form of defiance this week.

They re-elected two City Council members who had helped raise a rainbow pride flag outside City Hall — a small sign, for now, that the state’s biggest blue dot can remain independent as the deep red expanse grows around it.

A year into the second Trump administration, Boise has become a front line of sorts, an island surrounded by a state that is growing ever more Trump-tinged crimson. The two councilors — Colin Nash, the council president, and Jimmy Hallyburton — faced opponents on Tuesday who had accused them of needlessly antagonizing the conservative state legislators working just two blocks down North Capitol Boulevard.

The challengers lost badly. But that doesn’t mean Boise’s moderates and liberals feel secure.



https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/politics/boise-idaho-trump-conservatism.html