Idaho is one of the most Republican states in the country, and in 2024 it moved further that way. Donald Trump carried it by 36.5 points — 605,246 votes to 274,972 — wider than his 30.8-point margin in 2020, against a national shift of about six points. The state has voted Republican for president every cycle since 1964, and only two of its forty-four counties went the other way in 2024. The deepest Republican ground sits in the rural east along the Utah line, the most heavily Latter-day Saint corner of the state: Franklin County by 77.6 points, Bear Lake by 77.1, Oneida by 75.9.
That east is the religious story. Idaho holds the second-largest Latter-day Saint share of any state, 22.1 percent, behind only Utah, and the church concentrates in the upper Snake River Plain — Madison County, around the Brigham Young University campus at Rexburg, voted Republican by 64.3 points; Jefferson by 73.3; Fremont by 69.0. The two counties the Democrats carried both run on recreation rather than agriculture: Blaine County, which holds the Sun Valley resort, by 31.7 points, and Teton County, on the Wyoming line below the range, by 6.8 — the whole of the Democratic map in a state of 1.9 million.
The closest large county is Ada, which holds Boise and about a third of the statewide vote: Republican by 10.3 points in 2024, the least-red of the big counties, though it did not flip. Latah County, home to the University of Idaho at Moscow, ran nearest of all at 8.0 points. The profile underneath is middle of the pack — 24th in median household income at $77,800 — with just over half the state claiming no religious affiliation, a counterweight to the Latter-day Saint east. In 2026 Governor Brad Little (R) seeks a third term against Terri Pickens (D), and Senator Jim Risch (R) a fourth against David Roth (D), both Republicans renominated on May 19.