The chair of the Idaho Democratic Party credits Tuesday’s sweep of three swing districts in the Legislature to listening to voters over the past year and focusing on solutions to challenges they are facing.
Democrats picked up one seat in the Senate and five in the House. The party will now hold 21 seats in the Idaho Legislature in January, but Republicans still carry a supermajority with 84 seats. Chair Lauren Necochea said the six flipped seats will put Democrats in a better position to make good policy and stop bad bills that harm Idahoans.
“What we heard from people is that affordability, healthcare — those regular kitchen table economic concerns — are what are on the top of people’s minds,” Necochea told EdNews in a Wednesday afternoon phone call.
She said Democrats have solutions in that regard, while Republicans just shrug and hope the free market will take care of it.
Over the next two months before the 2027 session begins, she said the Democratic caucus will work to formalize an agenda based on what the candidates ran on.
Democrats want to remove the state’s grocery tax, bring back the child tax credit, which expired in January, and restore cuts to Medicaid. Necochea said the party also wants to end “sweetheart deals” with data centers and to stop giving tax breaks to wealthy individuals and profitable corporations.
The six new seats could also help Democrats block increases to Idaho’s $50 million Parental Choice Tax Credit for students enrolled in non-public schools. House Bill 93, which created the tax credit in 2025, passed 42-28 in the House and 20-15 in the Senate.
“We’re spending $50 million a year on vouchers while we’re cutting Medicaid so deeply that moms are getting letters that their child with a disability is going to have their therapies limited,” Necochea said.
Democrats currently hold three of 20 seats on the powerful Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee. Necochea said Tuesday’s gains mean Democrats should get one more.
“If there is justice in the world, we should have another seat,” she said. “We’ll be holding 20% of the House, and we should have seats on JFAC accordingly.”
Nationally, Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, but all federal seats in Idaho remain in Republican control.
Necochea said the national landscape motivated swing district voters because they saw just how far Republicans would go to rubber-stamp the Trump administration, which she said has devastated farmers and made everything more expensive.
“We don’t have a single Republican leader in Idaho who has spoken out against any of these really harmful actions,” she said.
When asked if there is a particular seat Necochea is most proud that Democrats won on Tuesday, she said she is “proud of all of our candidates.”
