Young Kwak Photo
People are flocking to the Inland Northwest in greater numbers, especially in Idaho, and all those new people contribute to traffic.
If you've read our cover story for this week, you'd know that the Idaho Secretary of State has released data that unpacks the demographics of its voters. You'd also know that the one caveat to this fresh data was that it existed without a timeline — meaning we could tell you where folks moved from, but not when they moved.
Thanks to the work of Gabe Osterhout, the data visualization specialist responsible for releasing and helping make sense of this information, that's no longer true. A sliding scale — between 2004 and 2023 —has been added to the Secretary of State website that allows viewers to see when all these voters moved here.
And while this new information helps us contextualize the data, it opens up more questions about the trends that are pushing folks to the Gem State.
In 2008, 3,321 in-movers registered to vote. That's more than the three previous years combined.
We see similar statistics up until the 2016 presidential election, a trend that seems to repeat every year thereafter. Nearly 12,000 voters registered in 2016 and then another 11,000 voters registered in 2018.
The short answer seems to be that folks move to Idaho and register to vote during presidential elections — especially if they're happening at the same time as a global pandemic.
In 2020, 31,302 voters who moved to Idaho registered to vote, with more than a third of them coming from California. Of those voters, 60% registered as Republicans while only 14% registered as Democrats.
Kootenai County saw the second largest influx of voters (behind Boise's Ada County) at 4,392 new voters in 2022. Almost 70% of those voters registered as Republicans while only 10% registered as Democrats.
The data on which states people are moving from stay relatively the same — more voters move from California, Washington and Oregon than from any other state, regardless of which year we're talking about.
