Idaho 2026 Primary Election Results: Every Race Called, Every Incumbent Holds — November Is Set

The Verdict Is In From the Gem State

Idaho held its 2026 primary elections on Tuesday May 19, and by the time North Idaho's polls closed at 8 p.m. Mountain Time, the results were rolling in with the decisive clarity that political observers had anticipated. In the state's most watched races — the gubernatorial primary, the U.S. Senate primary, and both contested congressional primaries — every Republican incumbent held on, every intra-party challenge was repelled, and Idaho's political map heading into November looks almost exactly as it did when the filing deadline closed in February.

Turnout was estimated at approximately 22 per cent of registered voters by mid-evening — more than 229,000 ballots cast — with Secretary of State Phil McGrane noting at a pre-results press conference that participation was particularly strong in southeastern Idaho and the Magic Valley. Only registered Republicans could vote in the Republican primary contests under Idaho's closed primary rules, concentrating the action in the party that effectively controls every lever of state government.

The most significant results of the night, called by the Associated Press within minutes of North Idaho's polls closing, confirmed what analysts, prediction markets, and fundraising data had suggested for months. Jim Risch is headed to a November general election he is overwhelmingly favoured to win. Brad Little is seeking a third term with his party's formal backing. Russ Fulcher and Mike Simpson are returning to the congressional ballot. And for the first time since the filing deadline, every major November matchup in Idaho is officially set.

U.S. Senate: Jim Risch Wins Republican Primary With 65 Per Cent

The night's most nationally significant result belonged to U.S. Senator Jim Risch, the 83-year-old Foreign Relations Committee chairman who has represented Idaho in the Senate since 2009 and is now seeking a fourth term.

Risch was challenged by three Republicans: Joe Evans, a 57-year-old Army combat veteran and data analytics professional from Boise; Denny LaVé, a 49-year-old ironworker and construction company owner from Worley; and Josh Roy, a 44-year-old engineer from Lewiston who works in the pulp and paper industry. None of the three mounted a serious fundraising challenge to Risch's incumbency, and none generated the kind of earned media or grass-roots mobilisation that would have been necessary to disrupt an incumbent of his stature in Idaho's deeply Republican primary electorate.

The Associated Press called the race at 9:46 p.m. Mountain Time. With 34 of 44 counties reporting, Risch had captured 65.18 per cent of the Republican primary vote — a commanding margin that reflected both his structural advantages and the fragmentation of the opposition vote across three challengers. No single challenger was able to consolidate the anti-incumbent sentiment that existed in some corners of the Idaho Republican base, and the arithmetic of three-way opposition produced the outcome that prediction markets had priced at near-certainty for months.

Risch's path to a fourth term now runs through the November general election, where he will face Democratic nominee David Roth — a Boise realtor who was the Democratic nominee in the 2022 Idaho Senate race as well, losing to incumbent Mike Crapo by a margin of 61 to 29 per cent. Idaho has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1974. No credible analyst rates the general election as competitive. Risch will also face Libertarian candidate Matt Loesby and independents Todd Achilles and Natalie Fleming on the November ballot.

The senator, who turned 83 earlier this month, made one issue central to his primary campaign above all others: the protection of Idaho's federal public lands from sale. In a statement that captured both his legislative focus and the specific Idaho politics of the issue, Risch said the opposition to selling public lands was a 98 per cent issue in Idaho. In all his decades of service, he said, he had never received such passionate, unified messages from constituents as he had on that particular topic. His opposition to any federal land sale put him in alignment with the overwhelming majority of Idaho voters across party lines, and it neutralised one of the few substantive policy lines his challengers might otherwise have used against him.

For the Senate's broader partisan landscape, Risch's comfortable renomination confirms that Idaho's Class II Senate seat remains in the deep red column that it has occupied since the state last elected a Democrat to a Senate race more than half a century ago.

Governor: Brad Little Defeats Seven Republican Challengers

If the Senate primary was a comfortable incumbency defence, the gubernatorial primary was a more numerically crowded but ultimately equally decisive Republican story.

Governor Brad Little, seeking a third term in a state where the Republican presidential nominee carried every county in 2024 by approximately 40 percentage points, faced seven Republican challengers on the primary ballot. The field included names ranging from established Idaho political figures to relative newcomers, and the sheer number of challengers complicated the task of building a single unified opposition to a sitting governor.

The Associated Press projected Little as the winner at 9:55 p.m. Mountain Time, shortly after North Idaho's polls closed. The governor advanced to the November general election, where he will face Democratic nominee Terri Pickens — the winner of a competitive Democratic primary that the AP called early in the evening, with Pickens holding 64.89 per cent of the vote with the majority of precincts counted.

Pickens, an attorney from Boise, brings genuine professional credentials to the Democratic nomination, but the structural obstacles facing any Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Idaho are formidable in the extreme. The Democratic Party has not won an Idaho gubernatorial race since 1990 — a 36-year drought that has persisted through multiple national Democratic wave elections, multiple cycles of Idaho economic growth and challenge, and multiple generations of Idaho voters. The general election in November will proceed, but its outcome is not a subject of serious analytical dispute.

Congressional Results: Both Republican Incumbents Advance

Idaho's two Republican House incumbents each faced primary challenges and each survived them, though in differing degrees of comfort.

In the 1st Congressional District, Representative Russ Fulcher held his seat against two Republican challengers: Marine veteran Joseph P. Morrison and farmer Andy Briner. The AP called the race for Fulcher, who advances to face Democrat Kaylee Peterson in November — the same candidate he defeated in both 2022 and 2024. Peterson, a former Idaho Young Democrats president, will be making her third consecutive attempt to unseat Fulcher in what is one of the most reliably Republican congressional districts in the Northwest.

In the 2nd Congressional District, Representative Mike Simpson — who has served since 1999 and is seeking a 15th term, currently chairing the House Interior and Environment Subcommittee on Appropriations — won his Republican primary against challengers Brian Keene, a former educator, and Perry Shumway, a marketing professional. Simpson will face Democrat Ellie Gilbreath in November.

The AP called both congressional races at 11:13 p.m. Mountain Time. Idaho's two House seats, both Safe Republican in every major ratings system, will remain Republican after November barring outcomes that essentially no analyst considers plausible given the state's partisan configuration.

State Legislative Upsets: Where the Real Drama Was

The most genuinely competitive drama of Idaho's May 19 primary night came not from the federal races but from the state legislative contests, where a handful of intra-Republican battles produced results that surprised observers and could shift the ideological composition of the Idaho Legislature heading into the next session.

The Twin Falls County Republican primary for state Senate produced one of the night's most notable upsets. Incumbent state Senator Josh Kohl lost his seat to challenger Casey Swensen, who won 57.87 per cent of the vote to Kohl's 42.13 per cent with all precincts reporting. The race reflected the ongoing tension within Idaho's Republican legislative caucus between establishment conservatives and more hardline challengers who have increasingly mobilised the party's right flank in primary elections across the state.

The Idaho Falls area saw its own competitive legislative race, where Representative Barbara Ehardt narrowly survived a primary challenge from newcomer Connor Cook. With all 51 precincts fully reporting, Ehardt captured 51.59 per cent of the vote to Cook's 48.41 per cent — a margin of just 151 votes that will keep the incumbent in the race but demonstrates the genuine vulnerability that even long-serving state legislators face when intra-party challengers are well-organised and adequately funded. Ehardt, who has served in the Idaho House since her initial appointment by former Governor C.L. Otter in late 2017, advances to the November general election where she will face Democrat Chance Marshall.

Bannock County's state Senate race produced its own close result, with Senate State Affairs Committee Chairman Jim Guthrie defeating challenger David Worley by 53.28 per cent to 46.72 per cent — a margin of approximately 481 votes. Guthrie's chairmanship of one of the Idaho Senate's most powerful committees made his race one of the most watched at the legislative level, and his survival by a relatively thin margin signals that even the institutional power of a committee chairmanship does not provide complete insulation from the right-flank pressure that characterises Idaho's contemporary Republican primary environment.

The Bonneville County School Levy: Democracy at Its Most Local

Among Tuesday night's results was a measure that had nothing to do with partisan politics but a great deal to do with the daily lives of families across eastern Idaho. Bonneville County voters approved a $9.6 million-per-year supplemental levy for Joint School District 93 by a margin of 58.77 per cent in favour. The levy, which will run for two fiscal years from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2028, was designed to close a mounting budget gap that the district had identified as threatening its operational stability. The result, announced with all 20 precincts reporting in Bonneville County, represented a community's decision to fund its own schools at a level the state's baseline funding had not provided — the kind of hyper-local fiscal democracy that operates largely out of national political sight but matters enormously to the teachers, students, and families affected by the outcome.

Idaho's November Map: What Tuesday's Results Mean for the Midterms

The full picture of Idaho's general election ballot, as it emerges from Tuesday's primary results, is a political scientist's map of a deeply and durably one-party state operating in a national midterm environment where Democrats are attempting to contest the Republican Senate majority.

Republicans hold every statewide elected office in Idaho. Their state legislative majorities are commanding — 29-6 in the Senate and 61-9 in the House before Tuesday's primaries, with the precise post-primary composition still being calculated from the legislative results. Neither U.S. House seat, the Senate seat, nor the governorship is rated as competitive by any major election forecaster. The Democratic Party's ballot presence in Idaho in November will consist of nominees who will contest every available race — a commitment to democratic participation that matters for the long-term health of a functioning two-party system — while facing structural obstacles that make competitive outcomes in statewide races essentially unprecedented in the current political era.

The national significance of Idaho's results lies primarily in the Senate race. Jim Risch's fourth term, if won as expected in November, will keep the Idaho Class II seat in the Republican column as part of a broader Senate map in which Republicans currently hold a 53-45 majority and are playing defence on 22 of the 33 seats up for election this cycle while Democrats defend 13. Idaho was never going to be the race that determined Senate control. But its predictability is itself a data point — confirmation that the reddest of red states are holding their partisan alignment firmly even as other races in other states present genuinely competitive contests.

The Candidates Who Now Wait for November

The six major-party nominees now set for Idaho's November 3 general election know exactly what they are running for and against. Jim Risch and David Roth will contest the Senate seat. Brad Little and Terri Pickens will contest the governorship. Russ Fulcher and Kaylee Peterson will contest the 1st Congressional District. Mike Simpson and Ellie Gilbreath will contest the 2nd.

The November contests will be conducted in a different political climate than tonight's primaries — with more time for campaigning, more attention from national organisations, and the specific dynamics of the 2026 national midterm environment that are still being shaped by legislative battles in Washington, economic conditions across the country, and the overall posture of an electorate that will be assessing two years of the Trump administration's second term. In Idaho, those national factors are unlikely to be decisive in any race. But they will shape the conversation, the turnout, and the margins.

For now, primary night is over. The incumbents held. The challengers fell short. The November matchups are set. Idaho is ready for the next chapter of an election cycle that, in the Gem State, has almost always ended the same way — and shows no signs this year of being any different.

Sources

1. Idaho Capital Sun — "Live updates: Here's the latest on Idaho's 2026 primary election results" (May 19, 2026) https://idahocapitalsun.com/2026/05/19/live-updates-heres-the-latest-on-idahos-2026-primary-election-results/
2. LocalNews8.com (KIFI) — "Live Updates: Idaho May 2026 primary election results" (May 19, 2026) https://localnews8.com/news/2026/05/19/live-updates-idaho-may-2026-primary-election-results/
3. ABC News — "Idaho 2026 live primary election results" (May 19, 2026) https://abcnews.com/Politics/idaho-2026-live-primary-election-results/story?id=132581129
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