Democrat Mary Shea hopes the third time’s the charm in her race against Republican Rep. Dustin Manwaring in the Pocatello swing district.

Manwaring won re-election in 2022 with a 4.4 percentage-point margin over Shea, then widened his lead to 10.4 percentage points two years ago in District 29. But Shea said this year feels different.

“I think people are really starting to see that supermajority politics in Idaho is sometimes leading us in the wrong direction,” she said.

Manwaring wants to continue his work on the Legislature’s budget-setting committee and to strengthen Idaho’s medical education pipeline.

“I want to use my experience and my focus on several issues to make sure that we’re continuing to make good policy choices in Idaho, but mostly to make sure that Idaho remains a place where people want to be to raise a family,” Manwaring said.

The two share one thing in common — they are both lawyers.

Manwaring has 17 years of experience in Pocatello, mostly in business and real estate law. Shea has 27 years under her belt, with experience ranging from small claims court to the U.S. Supreme Court. She has focused on civil rights and, most recently, child welfare cases.

Idaho’s campaign finance portal shows a big difference in the candidates’ funding sources.

Of Manwaring’s $47,273 in contributions, 3% comes from people. Most of his campaign cash comes from companies and political action committees — something he defends.

“I think it’s an unfair criticism to say you’re raising most of your money from companies and PACs or associations,” he said. “All those PACs and associations represent thousands of Idahoans. Those are real people.”

Of Shea’s $44,344 in campaign funds, 65% comes from people.

“I represent people,” Shea said. “I work with people. I’m in the community with people. He represents companies, and he’s talking to and working with companies and legislating for companies. And I do think that that’s a big difference between the two of us.”

Ten years ago, Manwaring was motivated to run for office to make sure there was a younger voice in the Legislature.

Now he is motivated to take on more responsibility.

He’s served on the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee for the past two years, getting into the weeds on state agency budgets. He’s been busy this summer on the Rural Health Transformation Committee tasked with spending $186 million in federal money to improve rural healthcare.

“I think as you gain more experience in the Legislature, obviously you have more knowledge base, but I think you carry more weight on the bills and the substance of what you’re doing,” Manwaring said.

He’s used that weight to focus on improving undergraduate medical education. Idaho has a severe physician shortage and Manwaring last year co-sponsored a bill that calls on the state to subsidize more medical school seats.

Idaho needs a medical school and a teaching hospital, he said, but in the meantime the state could add more seats or create a savings account for medical education. 

“For a growing state, if we don’t start laying the foundation work, we’ll never get there,” he said.

When asked about the Rural Health Transformation Committee’s recent decision to cut a $1.2 million program for behavioral health hubs, which school districts had already applied for, Manwaring said there were some feelings on the committee that the Department of Health and Welfare was going around the Legislature by funding the hubs. (The department’s director, Juliet Charron, is now stepping down at the end of the year.)

“I look at this as more of a pause than we’re not going to do it,” he said. “And I think we all need to take a serious look at whether it’s something (for which) we should prioritize funding.”

On K-12 education, he said funding special education is a priority. On school choice, Manwaring voted in favor of the $50 million Parental Choice Tax Credit.

“I support that legislation because I support having choice for all families, particularly lower-income families,” he said.

When asked if he would favor expanding the program, Manwaring said he would need to see data on how many lower-income families the program is serving. The State Tax Commission has not released that data.

As more families are choosing private schools, charter schools and homeschooling, Manwaring said he sees an opportunity for public school districts to innovate and “reinvent public education.”

“I think we’re all going to be better off in the future by making sure parents have those opportunities, but at the same time, that doesn’t mean we cannot have a robust, fully-funded working public education system,” he said. “We are required to do that by the Constitution. We will do that, and I fully support fully funding public education.”

If re-elected, Manwaring said he wants to use his experience on JFAC to make responsible budgeting decisions and be a wise steward of taxpayer money.

This past session was dominated by budget holdbacks. Manwaring said there were a lot of difficult decisions. Going forward he would like to see the state pre-fund its fire suppression account. He said Idaho is now seeing a budget surplus, and the Legislature will decide how it will be used.

He said he expects District 29 will have some really close races this year, but he doesn’t expect a big shift in representation within the Legislature as a whole.

“Even if there’s a House of Congress that loses and flips to the Democrats, I’m not sure that’s going to be reflective in Idaho,” he said. “We are very different. We are more conservative here.”

Shea wanted to make a difference when she first ran against Manwaring in 2022, but she wasn’t ready.

Two years later it was a tough national environment for Democrats, she said, which made it challenging to run in Idaho.

But 2026 feels different for the child welfare law specialist who has been very involved in advocating for Proposition 1. She said the voter initiative that would rescind Idaho’s near-total abortion ban “changes the calculus a little bit.”

And regular Idahoans, she said, are starting to see that the Republican supermajority is leading the state in the wrong direction.

“This felt like a different environment,” Shea said. “It felt like this was a better timing for me, and I felt way more ready.”

Shea’s life experience led her toward a long legal career focused on civil rights and a drive to understand why some systems don’t work fairly for everyone.

She grew up in segregated South Side Chicago, where some of the biggest race riots happened blocks from her home. She then moved to Richmond, Virginia, which was once the capital of the Confederacy. She grew up attending school with open discussions about racial tension as Virginia fought desegregation.

“It definitely shaped my worldview,” she said.

Shea has practiced law in Pocatello for nearly 27 years but wasn’t involved in politics until 2021, when Sen. James Ruchti, D-Pocatello, and the late Sen. Mark Nye asked her to run.

“I shared their concerns about the direction that Idaho was headed in, and it sort of aligned with where I was in my life about wanting to feel like I was contributing and doing something meaningful with my time,” she said.

If elected, Shea said she wants Idaho to fully fund public education and close gaps in special education and building maintenance funding. She wants to stop pushing costs onto folks through property taxes in the form of bonds and levies.

She also is concerned about the Legislature’s targeting of the LGBTQ community in recent years. She said she knows families that have moved out of the state because of the new laws, including this year’s transgender bathroom bill.

“They don’t feel safe being who they are or loving who they love in this state,” Shea said. “And that’s not the Idaho that I know and love.”

If she had a magic wand, Shea said she would restore all of the funding that she could after a year of state budget holdbacks. She is especially concerned about cuts to the Department of Health and Welfare.

“As the director told the Legislature, ‘We’ve cut past the bone,'” Shea said, referring to Charron.

With her experience in child welfare cases, Shea said she knows what it means when the department doesn’t have the resources it needs.

“It means that cases don’t get investigated, removals don’t happen,” she said. “Children are less safe, and that should not be the situation in Idaho. So I worry a lot about that.”

Now in her third run, Shea said she feels very supported by the Idaho Democrats. She also understands some of the criticism against the national Democratic Party over the past few election cycles — that the party hasn’t been fighting for working families.

“Democrats are at our best when we are standing up for the people,” she said. “When we’re standing up for civil rights. When we’re standing up for working class people.”