Donut Diplomacy

Exposing the Winning by Losing Strategy Used to Pressure Idaho Legislators

Some political strategies only function if nothing ever gets done.

They depend on predictable failure. They reward confrontation over competence. They turn losing into proof of virtue and governing into evidence of corruption. Once you recognize the pattern, it becomes hard to miss, because the same moves repeat no matter the issue or the year.

Right now in Idaho, that strategy is being run openly by the Idaho Freedom Foundation and its media partners, including Stop Idaho RINOs. Their focus is not on passing legislation. It is about shaping the story around why legislation doesn’t pass and assigning blame in a way that serves future power struggles. They accuse legislators of taking donut bribes, which they say is why their loyalists can’t pass legislation.

That distinction matters. Instead of being honest about the rapidly diminishing influence IFF once had, they engineer failures to play the victims while shouting to email subscribers something like, “If only we had more 'true conservatives’ like their Gang of 8, then we could get stuff done!”

When a faction no longer has the votes to control outcomes, the incentives change. The work shifts away from coalition-building and toward grievance production. Bills are introduced without a path. Budget realities are ignored. Process is treated as optional. Then, when the effort predictably stalls, the loss itself becomes the product.

That’s Donut Diplomacy.

You can see this approach clearly in how certain outcomes are framed even before the session begins. In pre-session commentary on his Dustin vs Everyone Substack, Dustin Hurst doesn’t treat outcomes as open questions. He predicts that LAUNCH won’t be repealed. Grocery tax repeal won’t pass. Leadership won’t listen. The losses are presented as foregone conclusions.

While his enemic social media engagement may suggest otherwise, Hurst plays a prominent role in enforcing IFF directives. He’s their digital attack dog, relentless in his obsessive focus on whoever he’s been directed to attack.

Once failure is assumed, there’s little reason to do the work required to win. There’s no need to negotiate, to count votes honestly, or to adapt proposals when the math doesn’t work. What matters, then, is not the outcome but how the loss is explained.

LAUNCH is the clearest example.

By March of 2024, LAUNCH was no longer just Governor Little’s pet policy project. It had been funded. Applications were open. High school counselors were actively advising students. Families were making real decisions based on what the State of Idaho had already committed to.

Since its inception, well over 10,000 Idaho students have applied to use the LAUNCH program, and an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 students have already used it or are actively relying on it, based on the size of the appropriation and the program’s per-student cap.

Those students didn’t sign up for ideological reasons. Their parents didn’t plan around it because of partisan loyalty. They did it because the state told them the program was real, funded, and available.

At that point, the nature of the decision changes.

Once thousands of families are relying on a program, the question is no longer whether a political faction personally likes it. The question becomes whether it is responsible to pull the rug out from under those students without a replacement, a transition, or an acknowledgment of the consequences.

That was the choice being proposed when activists demanded LAUNCH be killed outright.

What didn’t follow were replacement proposals or scaled alternatives. There was no redesigned workforce pipeline. No transition plan. No serious attempt to solve the problem that LAUNCH was created to address. What followed instead were demands for elimination, paired with narratives about betrayal when leadership declined to comply.

The votes weren’t there. The risk was obvious. Leadership chose not to blow up an $80 million program that thousands of Idahoans were already using.

Rather than explain that chain of causation, the loss was reframed as an ideological failure. Context disappeared. Grievance took its place.

The grocery tax debate followed a similar path.

Idaho is constitutionally required to balance its budget. Eliminating a revenue stream requires either replacement revenue or corresponding cuts. Leadership chose to expand relief through credits and refunds rather than destabilize the budget. In 2025, House Bill 231 increased the grocery tax credit again, a fact acknowledged publicly by the governor’s office.

That approach is open to criticism. What it isn’t is inaction.

Still, absolutist repeal bills with no offsets were introduced and failed exactly as expected. Those failures were then used to claim leadership was indifferent to families, while the relief that did pass was quietly ignored. The manufactured outrage machine went into overdrive: Young Americans For Liberty, the group joined at the hip with IFF, was caught sending fake emails to legislators demanding they repeal the Grocery Tax. Another example of using a legislative push in bad faith to play the victim card and tell supporters what they should be angry about.

The pattern holds.

Legislative pay became another target, and here precision matters. In late 2024, Idaho’s Citizens’ Committee on Legislative Compensation approved a pay increase through a statutory process designed to prevent legislators from voting themselves raises in real time. That decision took effect during the 2025 legislative session. The process was public and widely reported. Some lawmakers objected. Others pointed out that inflation and long sessions have made service increasingly inaccessible to working-class Idahoans. That’s right: Legislators don’t get to set their own pay, and narratives suggesting they can vote on their own pay omit important facts and are dishonest.

Once the session began, that nuance vanished. The raise was framed as self-dealing. Those affiliated with IFF virtue-signalled online that they would donate their raise to charity, or that they could not afford to attend Young Americans for Liberty conferences on their own dime because they had given it away. The distinction between committee approval and legislative action was erased. Context gave way to outrage. This same selective storytelling shows up when the process itself is misrepresented.

In a recent Substack post, Glenneda Zuiderveld compared her bill to the “Add the Words” legislation and questioned why leadership was willing to hear one but not the other. The implication was that Senate leadership, including Senate Pro Tempore Kelly Anthon, failed in their duties.

What was left out is a procedural fact that changes the entire analysis.

“Add the Words” was introduced as a personal bill. Personal bills are guaranteed a hearing by design. Legislators use that tool precisely when they believe an issue should be aired, regardless of leadership preference or committee congestion.

Zuiderveld’s bill was not submitted as a personal bill.

If the goal was simply to ensure the bill was heard, that option was available. It was not used. Omitting that fact leads readers to believe leadership blocked something they were obligated to advance. That didn’t happen. The process functioned exactly as intended.

Nothing improper occurred. What failed was the storytelling.

The scorecards produced by IFF and Stop Idaho RINOs take this misrepresentation a step further by weaponizing fuzzy math. Claims that a Republican “voted with Democrats 77 percent of the time” sound alarming until you understand how Idaho’s Legislature actually works.

Democrats are a small minority. Republicans control the chambers, the committees, the agenda, and the budgets. Most bills that reach the floor are written by Republicans. When Democrats vote yes on a Republican budget bill and a Republican also votes yes, that gets counted as “voting with Democrats.”

Most legislators fulfill their constitutional duty to pass budgets. Democrats do too. IFF loyalists are instructed to vote no on nearly all spending bills as a matter of ideology, not legality. That produces a scoring advantage for obstruction and allows governance itself to be reframed as betrayal. If anyone else deployed this dishonest tactic, you would see social media posts suggesting that the Gang of 8 voted with Democrats 100% of the time because they were also present when voting. See how easy it is to distort a record with out-of-context facts? The reality is, most Democrats are voting with Republicans the majority of the time, not the other way around.

This is where LAUNCH and other programs defended by the Governor and leadership become more than a policy disagreement. It becomes a political target.

LAUNCH is one of Governor Brad Little’s signature programs. He championed it. He defended it. He got it passed. That made it valuable to Idaho families and politically inconvenient to his critics.

President Donald Trump endorsed Brad Little and praised his leadership and economic agenda. Trump’s policies align with support for workforce- and career-focused education initiatives of the kind LAUNCH was designed to deliver. That context matters because it exposes the selective outrage at work.

Across the country, Republicans have embraced trade schools, apprenticeships, and career pipelines that keep young people in their home states and connect them to good-paying jobs. LAUNCH fits squarely within that tradition.

Labeling it “not conservative” is an attempt to draw a us-versus-them line that serves a narrow political goal.

This is why good faith matters.

Legislators decide who they can trust. That trust is built by people who lead with facts, understand constraints, and tell the truth about outcomes. It is not built by threats, scorecards, or narratives designed to keep voters angry.

Good ideas move forward because someone did the work. Bad ideas go into the round file. That’s how governing is supposed to function.

Communicating that reality takes effort. It requires explaining why something didn’t move, not just celebrating what did. It requires respecting voters enough to tell them the truth.

Donut Diplomacy avoids that work. It relies on grievance, omission, and manufactured outrage. It only succeeds if voters never stop to ask how a loss actually happened or provide real context on nuanced issues.

Idaho deserves leaders who govern in good faith, and voters who are told the whole story.

So go ahead and enjoy that donut, with all the hard work our legislators do, they probably deserve one.

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About the Author

Gregory Graf is the creator of Political Potatoes and a lifelong conservative Republican living in Star, Idaho.

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Disclaimer
The following is intended to convey an opinion on newsworthy events of public concern regarding public figures and/or public officials in exercising their official duties. No implications or inferences—beyond those explicitly stated in the preceding— are intended to be conveyed or endorsed by the Author. Wherever available, hyperlinks have been provided to allow readers to directly access any underlying assertions of fact upon which this opinion is based.

The author of this article enjoys an occasional donut, but as of the date of this article's publication, he not received a donut from Speaker Mike Moyle.