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Q&A: This Organizing Group Is Reclaiming Idaho’s Politics for the People [1]
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Date: 2025-02-14
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Luke Mayville is co-founder of Reclaim Idaho, a political organization seeking to bring Idaho politics more in line with the values of the state’s working people. The group was active in Idaho’s successful 2018 Medicaid-expansion ballot measure, which passed with 61% of the vote, but is now under threat by state lawmakers. In January, state lawmakers introduced a flurry of bills meant to restrict the power of ballot measures like that one, or make their passage more difficult.
Enjoy our conversation about defending that democratic tool, non-partisan organizing, and protecting rural public schools, below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Can you start by just telling me who you are, what you do, and maybe a little bit about where you’re from?
Luke Mayville is co-founder of Reclaim Idaho. The group aims to build long-lasting political mobilization in communities across the state. (Photo courtesy of Luke Mayville) Luke Mayville: I’m the co-founder of Reclaim Idaho. I grew up in North Idaho in the Panhandle, outside of the town of Sandpoint. I went off after high school and went to college, got a PhD, became an academic studying and teaching political philosophy, but then came back to Idaho in 2017. Originally, that move was temporary. I was working with some old friends to pass a local school levy. So, we were going door to door and mobilizing volunteers to get out the vote to fund the local school district in the face of a local opposition campaign that was attacking the integrity of the public schools and characterizing them as indoctrination centers.
We took that on and we won, and that was really motivating for several of us involved. We decided to try that same type of organizing on a statewide basis, and that led to the founding of Reclaim Idaho and the decision to launch a Medicaid expansion campaign. That campaign eventually got Medicaid expansion on the ballot. We were then able to put together an entire coalition and win with 61% of the vote, and ever since then, Reclaim Idaho has continued to work on a number of issues and grow as an organization. Now, we’re working really hard both to defend Medicaid expansion from the constant threat of repeal and to defend the public education system from the constant threat of privatization and school vouchers. And we’re trying to defend the ballot initiative process. Ever since our successful Medicaid expansion campaign, the legislature, year after year, has tried to basically eliminate the ability of citizens to put things on the ballot.
DY: Has that been a widely publicized battle? Sixty-one percent is a pretty outstanding vote in favor of Medicaid expansion. Do you think people know that the mechanism for that kind of change is under threat?
LM: What we found is that there’s broad support for the ballot initiative process, but that most people don’t know that it’s under threat. That makes organizing and mobilizing around the issue extremely important. It makes it critical to go out and host events and get people organized and make sure that local communities are aware that their own legislators are trying to take away their initiative rights.
DY: You talked about this statewide organization being inspired in part by a very local organizing effort about a local public school system. Can you just talk a little bit about scaling that type of organizing up a level?
People attend a Reclaim Idaho event as part of the group’s “Say No To Vouchers” tour in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Luke Mayville)
LM: When we first decided to scale up the work we had done locally and attempt to do that work on a statewide level, an important principle was that we weren’t simply going to do a statewide version of what we had done locally. Instead, we were going to multiply what we had done locally 20 or 30 times to have small local campaigns in 20 or 30 or more different communities that are all coordinated and focused on a common cause. We believed and continue to believe in distributed organizing, models of organizing that have been for a long time in some of the most successful statewide or nationwide grassroots campaigns of recent decades. What that involves is organizers showing up locally in communities and not just recruiting volunteers, but actually trying to build local volunteer teams with some amount of local leadership.
When the organizer leaves the town, the campaign really lives on because there’s both a capacity and a commitment locally to lead and coordinate the local effort. That’s an area where we’ve had a great amount of success, and it’s distinguished us somewhat from a lot of organizations. We essentially consider ourselves as organizers. We can consider our role as one of providing local leaders and local volunteers with the training and resources and information and assistance that they need to effectively lead and maintain the effort in their communities. That’s what’s enabled us to really scale up to a statewide level.
DY: Can you tell me about an example of a place where local leadership feels robust and maybe about the local issues that those groups have taken on?
LM: One of the most remarkable stories of the past several years is what’s happened in the community where we originally launched our organization which is in the far northern part of Idaho. It’s a relatively rural, small-town area, but we have a very disproportionate number of people involved with Reclaim Idaho there, in part because we started there. It’s about eight hours away from Boise. In that town, they’ve consistently been able to carry the mantle of Reclaim Idaho whenever we launch a big statewide campaign, whether it was around statewide public school funding, or a recent election reform initiative that we attempted, or opposing school vouchers. But remarkably, what they’ve also been able to do is take that network of volunteers and supporters of Reclaim Idaho and engage in other issues locally. So, a number of years ago, many of the same people who really learned to organize with Reclaim Idaho succeeded in getting a school levy for the local community that is permanent and doesn’t require constant renewal. And then, many of the people who organized with Reclaim Idaho helped in an effort to prevent a local school district from being taken over by far-right special interests. And they’ve gotten heavily involved in some of the really critical primary elections, where there’s a great deal at stake between different types of Republican legislators, some of whom are sworn opponents of the idea of public education, and others who will, at the very least, vote for education budgets.
So, it’s been a real success story to see some of the local networks of volunteers around the state who’ve gotten involved with Reclaim Idaho not just be able to continually get reorganized for the various campaigns that we’ve waged on a statewide level, but also to then, what’s the word I’m looking for, branch off into other local efforts to actually promote important causes in their communities.
DY: Since returning to your home state to do this kind of organizing, what have you learned about Idaho? What’s been surprising or interesting to you? Have you come to see the place you grew up in a different light at all?
LM: I’ve become even more committed than I was in the beginning to a certain idea of nonpartisan organizing. I think in the first year or two, when we launched our organization, there were at least hopes in the back of our minds that the partisan balance of the state could shift a little bit, not to any dramatic degree, but we hoped for a bit more partisan balance to the state’s politics. In the years since, it’s become clear that at least in the short-to-medium term, the next decade or so, we are highly likely to be an overwhelmingly one-party state. And with that reality in mind, I’ve become a lot more invested in thinking about how organizing can make a really important difference even in the most challenging political environments, places that many people around the country would look at and see no hope for whatsoever. And what I’ve learned is that even in overwhelmingly one-party states and one-party communities, there are still deep political divides, especially on specific issues. And sometimes those issues are the most consequential issues for people’s lives, for the quality of life in communities.
The greatest example of that right now is school privatization and the fate of the public school system. It’s hard to think of an issue that’s more important in America than the future of public education, given that this is probably the most significant public good that is truly universal and extended to all American families, regardless of income or any other status. And that public good is under attack. And what we’re seeing across the country is that there are concrete ways that organizing efforts can fend off the attack on public education.
DY: I think a lot of people don’t quite know what political organizing looks like, if not as an extension of the election cycle, but what does defending public schools in Idaho look like on an organizing level going forward?
LM: For anyone who tends to think of politics and organizing only in terms of two-year or four-year cycles associated with elections, I would encourage them to start following the politics in their state. State-level politics has just as great, if not greater, impact on people’s daily life as federal politics do. And, you know, for example, we’re only two months out from the November election, and Idaho’s 2025 state legislative session has already begun, and bills are being introduced that would drain hundreds of millions of dollars from public education and eliminate citizen initiative rights. And in the absence of organizing, there’s a possibility that those bills will just quietly become law and restructure our society. So, there’s an urgency right now, only two months after the close of the last election cycle, to actually get out in communities and make sure people are, number one, aware of the threat, number two, aware of how they can make a difference in pushing back and then making sure that they actually have the resources and, you know, training necessary to get involved in the legislative process.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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