Really Little for Idaho
A look at the state's self-molding Play-Doh politician
Of all the politicians I have endured in my time in and around politics, no one is more annoying than the person who really has no conviction and says/does whatever is necessary to win elections and maintain office. I’d much rather deal with the politician show stands on shallow and untenable convictions than the one whose positions shift based on political conveniences.
So now let’s talk about Brad Little, the governor of Idaho since 2019. I’ve known Brad since before he was a state senator, and in fact, I did some writing work for Brad when he was Senate Majority Caucus chairman nearly 20 years ago.
Little has been on every side of many major issues. He’s the ultimate shapeshifter, the self-molding Play-Doh politician. And because Idaho’s news media is notoriously awful at accurately conveying much of anything what’s happening in the world of Idaho policymaking, most people in the state have no idea who their governor is or what he actually stands for. Examples:
In 2003, Sen. Little voted to raise sales and cigarette taxes, and Little, as lieutenant governor spearheaded, Gov. Butch Otter’s effort to raise fuel taxes in 2015. Today, he’s a big champion of tax cuts, seemingly undoing some of the damage he helped enact over time. But tax cuts can only go so far because of the massive spending increases Little has presided over in his tenure.
In 2004, Little cast the deciding vote to keep a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage off the ballot. During his gubernatorial run in 2018, Little’s first radio ads for governor started with “Brad Little believes marriage is between a man and a woman.” Why? Because Brad needed the support of north Idaho conservatives and didn’t want Sen. Little’s voting record to get in the way of Candidate Little’s political ambitions. So he told the story that votes needed to hear for him to win.
In early 2019, the state Legislature decided not to renew the state’s voluminous body of regulations. Little was openly hostile to this until he wasn’t. He said, “I did not ask for this and did not want this.” Several weeks later, when Little realized there was political upside in promoting regulatory reform, he couldn’t stop talking about it and made it his initiative.
Little was head of state during the Covid insanity of 2020, in which he ordered people to stay home and businesses to close. The Little administration threatened businesses with loss of licenses if they defied his orders. He ended Idaho’s Covid state of emergency two years after he implemented it, but only in response to threats that the Legislature was going to force his hand on the matter. Yet a lot of people remember Little’s executive order to supposedly prohibit vaccine passports, even though the measure gave state agencies the leeway necessary to enforce vaccine passports.
Little’s education agenda has been in service of the status quo. He gave the left-leaning Reclaim Idaho group virtually everything it wanted (in terms of money) a couple of years ago. He lifted not a single finger in support of school choice until it became painfully obvious that he was out of step with other Republican governors, and then he signed off on a very unmanageable school choice law once it hit his desk because he needed to check the “I-supported-school-choice” box on his campaign literature.
Little allowed the state’s colleges and universities to maintain divisive ideology programs, ignoring the problem entirely, up until late 2024 when the State Board of Education finally began dismantling them. He signed legislation on this issue in 2025, so now he gets to claim that "accomplishment” as well.
Now, Little is BFFs with President Trump, because politically, that’s what works. If Mitt Romney or John McCain were president, Little would be equally delighted to pose for that picture too. It’s all the same to him.
The Republican party has shifted to the right — or really toward Trumpism — so Little is virtue signaling to align himself with that shift, to the degree he needs to, so that he doesn’t have to endure a challenge from his right in the 2026 GOP primary. This is what is happening now. His movement is not about any deeply held beliefs, just a desire to hold onto power.
On campaign literature, his sloganeering is “Brad Little for Idaho,” which I jokingly say is about as accurate a political tagline as one could imagine. Give him a break for honesty. He might as well have said “I just wanna stay as governor. Vote for me.”