Today is Tuesday, September 13, 2022. It’s primary election day in several states, notably New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware. The outcomes in three of these states might shine a magnifying glass on what the actual midterm elections could portend.

The details of these races are reported on in an online CNN article by Shania Shelton, Melissa Holtzberg DePalo, and Ethan Cohen entitled “How to follow elections in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware.”

As primary season comes to an end today, most eyes will be on New Hampshire as voters will decide which Republican will take on Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan in November. In the state’s 1st Congressional District, there is a GOP primary where the nominee will challenge Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in a key House race this fall.

In New Hampshire, the highest-profile race will be the GOP primary for the U.S. Senate seat. Don Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general, is facing off with state Senate President Chuck Morse. Some in the repugnican party worry frontrunner Don Bolduc could jeopardize the GOP’s chance to win the seat. The reason why GOPers are somewhat worried about this candidate is that he has shown little ability to raise money – he had pulled in less than $600,000 by August 24, compared to Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan’s $31.4 million – and has a propensity to speak provocatively, with even repugnican operatives who know him well describing him as a “loose cannon.” Popular Republican Governor Chris Sununu told WGIR last month that Bolduc is “not a serious candidate. He’s really not.” He twists the knife into Bolduc’s back, saying, “If he were the nominee, I have no doubt we would have a much harder time trying to win that seat back. So, I don’t take him seriously as a candidate. I don’t think most people do.”

To help his opponent, Sununu endorsed Morse days before the primary and recently spoke with a much-disgraced ex-president, urging him to get into the race. Dumpf has yet to endorse anyone (he has his own myriad troubles right now!), but some repugnicans in the state were worried that he would back the worst candidate, Bolduc. It’s just like him to do this, isn’t it?

In the Republican primary in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, voters will decide on two candidates who parrot Dumpf’s policies – whatever they are – Matt Mowers and Caroline Leavitt, who are the frontrunners in the primary. Both are fully running on board with the former president’s agenda.

There are about eight weeks out until the November midterms and it’s anyone’s guess which party will dominate. Democrats, overall, appear to be in a better position right now because of the abortion issue. Women, especially, are fired up in registering their anger at the polls. Republicans are first heavily favored to take the Senate, but that is not a certainty anymore since the overturn of women’s reproductive rights by the rabidly conservative Supreme Court in June. So far, it seems that Republican candidates in general are pivoting away from discussing abortion rights with the electorate. It’s Republicans who voters can blame for this historic removal of privacy rights that were enjoyed for 50 years.

I would like to report on a positive story reported for The Intercept which should bring a smile to most people’s faces and the story is the reversal suffered by the odious far right in Idaho of all places in the election of an 18-year-old to the Boise school board who vocally opposed book bans and smears against LGBTQ+ youth as opposed to his far-right opponent who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries. To me, this is a very good sign in the wake of persistent attacks from the far right on some of our cherished liberties and on vulnerable groups like the LGBTQ+ community.

The online article was written by Robert Mackey and is entitled “Idaho’s Far Right Suffers Election Loss to 18-Year-Old Climate Activist.”

Thus the nationwide campaign to stifle discussions of race and gender in public schools through misinformation and bullying suffered a significant blow in this northwestern state, when Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week. The young winner of the race turned 18 days before the election and was already well known in the school district as a student organizer on climate, environmental, voting rights, and gun control issues. But in the closing days of the campaign, his opponent, Steve Schmidt, was endorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, which in response helped Rajbhandari win the endorsement of Boise’s leading newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.

The young activist, a third-generation Idahoan whose father is from Nepal, was elected to a two-year term, with 56 percent of the vote.

To illustrate how extreme this organization was, there are the attacks on Facebook against the new school board member, in which they accused Rajbhandari for being “Pro Masks/Vaccines” and leading protests “which created traffic jams and costed [sic] (these idiots can’t use the correct form of ‘cost’ here!) tax payers money,” and agitated to have books removed from public libraries in Nampa and Meridian, two cities in the Boise metro area.

The admirable young activist started leading climate protests in Boise when he was only 15 and noted that members of the Idaho Liberty Dogs brought rifles to school to intimidate “a bunch of kids protesting for a livable future.”

When the Idaho Liberty Dogs called on Boise voters to support Schmidt – and a slate of other candidates for the school board who, ultimately, all lost – Rajbhandari said he texted his rival to say, “You need to immediately disavow this.”

The climate activist says he told his opponent that “This is a hate group. They intimidate teachers, they are a stain on our schools, and their involvement in this election is a stain on your candidacy.” Pretty hard-hitting stuff coming from the mouth of an 18-year-old with a good head on his shoulders, wouldn’t you say?

His dimwitted opponent, Steve Schmidt, refused to clearly reject this hateful group, even after they lashed out at a local rabbi who criticized the endorsement by comparing the religious leader to Hitler and claiming that he harbored “an unrelenting hatred for white Christians.”

Such a hateful group was handily rejected by Idahoans and it might signal a turning away from such extremist organizations. Rajbhandari is singularly aware that the far right is particularly focused on eliminating public education and disbursing the money to charter schools instead. He notes that their program encompasses attacking teachers (why do you think so many teachers are leaving the profession right now?), promoting “baseless claims of indoctrination” in schools as well as “attacks on LGBTQ youth, with claims of ‘grooming.'”

This youthful firebrand even publicly confronted Idaho’s far-right lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, who was setting up a task force to investigate indoctrination in Idaho education; he told the far-right official that she was investigating an entirely imaginary threat. I give him credit for taking that step. He went on to inform McGeachin, who was running for governor at the time, and her running mate, state Rep. Priscilla Giddings, that Idaho teachers were not “indoctrinating students to hate America, as this committee purports.” He further accused the two repugnican officials of endorsing baseless conspiracy theories as a political stunt in support of their candidacies. What he told the two Trumpian candidates can be viewed as a wonderful example of using the right argument against these pernicious forces sweeping the country at the moment. He said, “You won’t succeed. You won’t succeed in silencing student voices. You won’t succeed at bringing Idaho back to the 1800s. You won’t succeed at abolishing public schools as the Freedom Foundation aspires. And you won’t succeed in being elected to the executive branch of government, which I feel is the true purpose of this.”

Rajbhandari continued his excoriation against the two extreme repugnican candidates: “And you won’t succeed despite all your efforts, we Idahoans are smart, we’re educated, and we can’t be fooled into believing that something exists when the opposite is true. All across the state, there are young people like me who will vote in the Republican primary for the first time in 2022.”

As this very intelligent young man predicted, McGeachin did not win the republican primary for governor; she was defeated.

So here we have a very commendable story coming out of Idaho. There is hope yet then in our young electorate, as illustrated by this victory of young Rajbhandari over a more mature – but stupid -candidate for a school board seat. Who knows where this young man might be in 20 years or so? Maybe pursuing a more highly visible political office in his state or wherever else he might call home at that time?

Stay safe and be well.