Robert Scott on a US state moving out of the shadows
America’s political maps tell comforting lies. California deep blue, Idaho bright red, one supposedly the future and the other a stubborn past. It is a story that has crept across the Atlantic too, the shorthand British commentators reach for whenever they want a quick read on the US. Spend time in Boise and it unravels fast.
Idaho remains a deeply conservative state. Trump won here comfortably, and school vouchers, book bans and abortion are the state’s defining battlegrounds. But politics is never static, because people never are. Things are changing.
Boise, Idaho’s capital and largest city, is driven by those who keep arriving in their droves: Californians priced out of their own state, remote workers from across the country no longer tied to an office, students and artists chasing rent still cheaper than the coasts. That growth has a cost. Rents in the city have risen by roughly 40% in recent years and home prices by around 50%, in a state where the typical household earns nowhere near what the typical home now costs. Sounds like home.
Last year, Idaho’s state legislature banned cities from flying any flag other than the Stars and Stripes and Idaho’s own. It was aimed squarely at the Pride flag outside Boise City Hall. Mayor Lauren McLean took it down under protest, then had the building wrapped in rainbow colours instead, daring the Attorney General to fine her. You see that same defiance all over Boise. Pride flags and rainbow murals are hard to miss, not because they are unusual in an US city, but because of what it represents. Here, they feel like small acts of resistance in a state that has spent so much time trying to legislate people out of public life.
That same appetite for defiance has a soundtrack. Treefort Music Fest is officially a music festival. In reality, it feels like a celebration of the city Boise is becoming: drag performers sharing stages with folk singers, families, students and ageing punks. That organising energy shows up on the street too. A teacher stopped me to collect signatures for a petition to legalise cannabis. She told me about crossing the state line to buy it for her father, who has a chronic condition. It is a drug run many Idahoans make out of necessity, with cannabis still illegal here but legal in the surrounding states. Not long after, a retiree asked me to sign a different petition, this one for abortion rights after the state’s near-total ban. I couldn’t sign either. Not my country, not my vote. But I liked being asked. Organising is everywhere.
And the more people I spoke to, the more those bigger political fights gave way to the everyday business of getting by. A server in a burger bar had moved to Boise because the rent, obscenely, still counts as a bargain. Then there’s my friend David, who drives for Uber and DoorDash, part of a gig economy that shifts the risks of making a living onto the worker. That insecurity doesn’t exist in a political vacuum. Idaho is a right-to-work state, and barely 4% of its workers belonged to a union in 2025, less than half the national average. The politics here have long favoured employers over organised labour, leaving workers with less power when wages fall behind or the cost of living rises. Boise may be growing, but the people doing the work don’t share in the security that growth is supposed to bring. Sounds like home.
It is tempting for the British left to look to the usual places for signs of life in American progressive politics. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York was the most energising moment the US left has had in years, and Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in Michigan is now drawing plenty of attention. These are the races that travel across the Atlantic, fought by candidates who speak a political language the British left immediately recognises.
But for me, Idaho might be the more interesting story, precisely because it has none of those advantages: no left flank in the legislature, no progressive infrastructure, a legal environment built to keep unions weak. And still people organise: a teacher and a retiree out with petitions, a mayor who won’t back down. That is what makes them worth noticing: not novelty, but people organising anyway.
British politics tends to imagine America split cleanly between enlightened blue states and reactionary red ones. Idaho suggests something more interesting: political identities are not fixed and organising can show up in places nobody is watching for it. Boise is not becoming California. It is becoming its own kind of city, shaped by newcomers, artists, Black communities, LGBTQ people claiming space without apology, and young workers demanding more than permanent insecurity.
Political maps are slow to change. Culture moves first. Elections catch up later. Increasingly, Boise feels like home. I can’t wait to go back.