Cherie Vollmer named the stakes plainly on this week’s Political Potatoes podcast: “We’ve been able to go how many decades now with bragging about being the least regulated state. How close are we to not being able to brag about that? We’re simple bills away.“
Vollmer has been refining that diagnosis for three years on Twin Falls City Council. The Idaho self-professed “conservatives” keep bragging about and the Idaho their legislators are actually governing have diverged, and the people running the legislature do not understand the Valley they represent.
Vollmer is a Realtor and appraiser, born and raised in Twin Falls. She sits on Twin Falls City Council, serves on the Chamber of Commerce executive board, and is running in the May 19 Republican primary for House District 25B against freshman incumbent Rep. David Leavitt.
Per the Idaho Capital Sun, she is outraising him.
Vollmer’s opponent doesn’t understand water
Vollmer’s first priority is Magic Valley water. Twin Falls and District 25 sit on a high desert plain, and the only reason the valley grows anything at all is the legacy of Ira Burton Perrine, the rancher who chose the Milner Dam site, acted as his own engineer, and brought water across roughly 262,000 acres of desert by 1905. Vollmer thanked him by name on the podcast. Twin Falls did not get its water from a Heritage Foundation bill. It got it from I.B. Perrine, and Cherie remembers it.
Her opponent voted against House Bill 445, the 2025 water-stewardship bill that would have codified Magic Valley water agreements and funded aquifer recharge. Leavitt represents a district whose economy runs on irrigated agriculture, and yet he voted against the long-term interest of the district he was elected to represent.
What constituents actually care about at the door
Vollmer’s platform and her door-knocking experience line up. Public education is her stated dealbreaker. “You can’t cut public education. It’s constitutional and it’s also our community.” Then, more pointedly: “Why are we burning down the public education system?” Teachers, parents, and even homeschool families across the district are asking some version of the same question.
Rural healthcare is the next priority she says constituents bring up unprompted. In District 24, next door to hers, healthcare in the rural pockets comes down to a single clinic in Fairfield, and if that clinic closes, the next one is a two-hour drive. Idaho’s rural hospitals are not in good shape: 67 percent had a negative operating margin in the last quarter of 2025, per the Idaho Hospital Association, and the Medicaid cuts under discussion will only deepen the problem. Vollmer’s position on the program is direct: it may need reform, but completely pulling it “is not the answer at all.”
Local control is the third issue constituents raise, and the one Vollmer has the deepest experience inside. She illustrated it with the 2025 flag bill, which restricted what state and local government entities can fly. Vollmer pointed to an unintended consequence another legislator raised on the floor: a town’s tradition of putting out flags for festival weekends would be wiped out. “Leave it to the cities,” Vollmer said. As a sitting city council member herself, she has spent three years figuring out what a city actually does, and what gets lost when the state takes over.
None of these are national culture-war issues. All of these are issues the right District 25 legislator could have an impact on if elected.
Empathy is not a sin
Our conversation pivoted on a phrase the captured faction has been pushing in churches and on podcasts across Idaho: that empathy is a sin. A weakness. A “tool from Satan,” as some have framed it. Vollmer pushed back directly. “Empathy and grace come into play at the same time, and I’ve noticed this even on campaigning. There’s no grace, there’s no empathy. It’s almost a weakness if you have that, and that’s just not Christian.”
She illustrated what Idaho empathy actually looks like with a story about two Magic Valley farmers:
“Farmer Joe and Farmer Dan can’t stand each other, and they’ll shoot at each other’s houses. But Farmer Dan all of a sudden gets really sick and can’t harvest his crops, and Farmer Joe’s over there cussing him out while he’s harvesting his crops for him.”
That is neighborly. That is the Idaho the Magic Valley already runs on, and it is exactly what gets lost when an imported faction reframes empathy itself as the enemy and weaponizes contention to take out anyone in the way.
Who Leavitt runs with
Rep. Leavitt is the House half of what IdahoExtremism.org documents as the Magic Valley Miracle Four: the four 2024 freshmen the Citizens Alliance / Young Americans for Liberty / Idaho Freedom Foundation pipeline placed in the Magic Valley delegation. Per prior Political Potatoes reporting, he attended the opening of Mark Fitzpatrick’s Old State Saloon in Eagle alongside Sens. Keyser, Nichols, Lenney, and Rep. Tanner.
Fitzpatrick curates the Old State Saloon’s speaker roster as a white-nationalist and Christian-nationalist program, not as novelty booking. His 2025 Hetero Awesome Fest featured Dave Reilly, identified by InvestigateWest as a 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally planning-communications participant, saying live on stage that Boise is “clean. There aren’t any black people here.”
His co-host Rebecca Hargraves said Idaho’s 0.3 percent Jewish population is “far too high, IMO,” and separately, on record at the same event, “I’m racist.” Per the IE.org Fitzpatrick dossier, Fitzpatrick was seated next to Reilly when he said it, and did not object. The same dossier documents additional speakers including antisemitic-conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll and a Christian Nationalism advocacy event explicitly titled “The Inevitability of Christian Nationalism.” The Idaho Republican Party eventually pulled event hosting at the venue after Jewish Republican members raised complaints Fitzpatrick refused to back off.
That is the program Leavitt aligned with at the venue’s opening.
Leavitt’s caucus also produced Sen. Brian Lenney, who told a February press event announcing a slate of Heritage-Foundation-crafted immigration bills that Idaho’s farmworkers represent “cheap slave labor.” Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, immediately called the comment “a place of ignorance”. The Magic Valley delegation now traffics in rhetoric that Magic Valley farmers find offensive, and Cherie Vollmer noticed.
Simple bills away
Idaho is one of the few states without constitutional Home Rule, which means every preemption bill is a one-way ratchet. The flag bill closed one civic option, the next bill closes the next, and the bragging right slips out one bill at a time.
Vollmer wants back the Magic Valley people moved here for. After watching two Californians involved in a recent Twin Falls County Assessor race shrug at how nasty it had become - because, they told her, it was worse where they came from - her reaction was direct: “Our community is not a game.” To the newcomers who keep treating it like one, her message was also direct: “If the boring and the calmness bothers you, it may not be the right place for you.”
The primary question
On May 19th, District 25 will pick between Cherie Vollmer, who can name the engineer who built the valley's water system, and a freshman incumbent who voted against the bill to keep that water system funded.
Listen
The full conversation with Cherie Vollmer is here on Substack and on YouTube.
A note on equal time
Rep. David Leavitt is welcome to come on the Political Potatoes podcast and share his perspective. He can reach me by direct message through Substack.
About the Author
Gregory Graf is the creator of Political Potatoes and a lifelong conservative Republican who lives in Star, Idaho. Follow him on X: https://x.com/gsgraf
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