The Republic of Shoshone has long been one of the American Federation's most colorful and divided member states politically. Originally founded after the Republic of Oregon split into three in 1863, Shoshone started out as a mix of Native American reservations (hence the name) and mining areas, with the capital at Lewiston soon being eclipsed in terms of population by the boom towns of Boise, Missoula and Silver City.
From its early days, Shoshone developed a reputation for a diverse population, with white settlers, Chinese immigrants, Mormons from neighboring Deseret and of course Native Americans all making up significant chunks of the population. Unfortunately, this also led to racial conflict, with a particularly infamous conflict seeing race riots in Boise exacerbated by the police. The positive of this was that, due to pressure from neighbouring states, particularly from Oregon's Prime Minister George Henry Williams, the Shoshone government was forced to provide voting rights and (albeit limited) civil rights protections to all Shoshonians, regardless of race or religion.
Until the Great Depression, political conflict was heavily racial, with the Idahoan Party (a popular name the white settlers favored for the region), the Chinese Party, the Mormon Party and the Indigenous Party all being significant forces; the former two died out thanks to the Depression, while the latter two have generally been minor parties since then. Practically the only parties to draw multi-ethnic support were the Social Liberal Party, a centrist to center-left party which proved fairly progressive during the 1920s due to the leadership of William Borah, who served as Prime Minister for most of the decade, and the Agrarian Party, a centrist to center-right party which drew its votes from rural voters.
However, the 1935 election, held at the height of the Great Depression, changed everything. Borah stood down as PM due to faltering health and his failure to combat the depression, and a new party, Glen Taylor's Farmer-Labor Party, formed a government with the Social Liberals' begrudging support. Under Taylor, the monopolies of the faltering mining companies of Shoshone were broken up, the minimum wage was tripled, welfare state provisions were established and a Civil Rights Act, one of the most progressive of its time, was passed which banned discrimination in social spaces and the workplace.
As one might expect, this faced a significant backlash from white and conservative Shoshonians, but Taylor managed to hold onto power with the support of various parties by catering to their legislators (Agrarians with grants to farmers, Indigenous with civil rights, Social Liberals with monopoly-busting to potentially offer a freer market, etc.). It was not until 1950, when business interests pumped money into a new right-wing party, the Party of the Democratic Right (PDR), which swept Taylor's government away in a landslide.
The Farmer-Labor party would never recover, its voters drifting back to the Agrarians and to a new party founded by its supporters, the Socialist Alliance. Despite the name, the SA was generally more right-wing than the Farmer-Labor party, though still very much a left-wing party. It managed, in the 1960 election, to beat the ardent right-winger Herman Wellker under its popular and charismatic leader Frank Church. Like Taylor before him, Church faced aggressive efforts by his opponents and businesses to torpedo his government, but was able to paint himself as an enemy of big business through this, and won re-election in 1965 and 1970. In 1975, the faltering economy saw him lose out to the Social Liberals of John Evans, but Evans would last only one term before the ardently right-wing Steve Symms took power in 1980.
Symms' government undertook significant deregulation of Shoshone's economy and a zero-tolerance policy on crime, the consequences of which allowed Evans' successor Cecil Andrus to beat him in 1985. After two terms, Andrus resigned in 1993 and in an unexpected move invited Indigenous leader Larry Echo Hawk, whose party had steadfastly supported his government's conservation projects, to be the first Native American Prime Minister of Shoshone.
However, this was effectively a last hurrah for the Shoshone left; the Agrarians of Phil Batt took power in part due to the anger of conservatives at Echo Hawk getting a 'coronation', and though Batt proved fairly moderate during his single term, continuing conservation projects forwarded by Andrus, when the Agrarians lost significant ground to the PDR in 2000, Mike Crapo became PM, and oversaw a sharp veer to the right for Shoshone.
Unsurprisingly, when Crapo oversaw massive public spending and tax cuts, considerable reversals of conservation efforts, further loosened the country’s already fairly libertarian gun laws and restricted abortion access, he made himself a divisive figure; his opponents took to calling his policies ‘a load of Crapo’, and humorous images of a bull next to a picture of the PM started to circulate the internet.
Crapo had become so negatively perceived outside of the state that by the 2005 election he was seen as a liability by those within it, to the point that every major party besides his own PDR pledged not to support him. When the other parties made the popular SA leader Larry Grant the new PM, however, he faced considerable obstacles to his agenda, and for the 2010 election a new party known as the Conservative Reform Force (CRF) had sprung up to reintroduce many of Crapo’s policies and reverse Grant’s conservation efforts and healthcare funding.
Despite that party’s surge, it did not do well enough in 2010 to get into power, and the Social Liberals, now led by the moderate Walt Minnick, took the lead in government from the SA. Minnick established austerity measures that made him unpopular with the left, but since he also opposed bringing back restrictions on abortion and was pressured by a coalition of groups (including former PM Batt, unexpectedly) to establish protections against LGBTQ individuals in the Shoshone constitution, he was generally seen as the lesser of two evils.
Effectively the only thing that kept him in power in the 2015 election was the continued conflict between the PDR, now led by Mike Simpson, and the CRF, now led by Butch Otter. The two parties had acquired a reputation in the Shoshone press for being compared to Tweedledum and Tweedledee (or occasionally Fine Gael and Fianna Fail by those who wanted to sound more professional) due to frequently squabbling over the few issues they disagreed on, like conservation (where the PDR is more moderate than the CRF) and healthcare (on which the CRF is more moderate than the PDR), rather than presenting a united conservative front.
It was in no small part due to this infighting that Minnick’s party just edged out the CRF in terms of votes (though not seats) in 2015, although it helped that the minor right-wing parties- the pro-life Child’s Rights Party, the evangelical Mormon Party, and the pro-death penalty Retribution Party- shaved off more votes and seats from and were less hostile to the right-wing parties than the Greens and the pro-LGBTQ Rainbow Party did from the left-wing ones. Minnick’s second government was thus formed by an alliance of the Social Liberals, SA, Agrarians, Indigenous and Green parties with tacit support from the Pirate and Rainbow parties, mostly on a platform of not being the other guys.
This arrangement finally collapsed in January of 2017 when the Agrarian leader, Edgar Malepeai, resigned and was replaced by the much more conservative Brad Little, one of whom’s main positions was that if he won the leadership he would withdraw the Agrarians from the coalition and ally with the conservatives. This he did, and he made Butch Otter the new PM on the basis of the CRF getting more votes and seats 2 years prior (and consequently meaning in the last 25 years, Shoshone has had PMs from 6 different parties).
Otter’s government has been just as contentious as Crapo’s before him. Its unelected status and hard-right policy agenda has been controversial, but the efforts from supporters of the CRF, PDR, right-wing Agrarians (though that party is on the verge of splitting- commentators have remarked that at this point the only thing its members really have in common these days is all being white people from rural Shoshone) and the smaller right-wing parties to establish tactical voting plans made it look like he would have no trouble being re-elected come 2020.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic. The cuts to healthcare the Otter government has overseen started to take damaging effect, and combined with the lack of furloughing for workers and effort being spent on measures like restricting the legal rights of transgender people instead of tackling the pandemic, Shoshonians are losing patience with Otter failing to tackle the issue. Not helping is the fact the election has been pushed back from the traditional May of every fifth year to May 2021, meaning the right-wing parties’ war chests have wasted large amounts of money preparing for an election that was abandoned. Whatever happens, next year’s election in Shoshone, the first held more than five years after the last in its history, will be interesting to say the least.