Scott Herndon
Scott Herndon: Idaho Republican Challenger for Senate District 1
Scott Herndon is a Republican challenger running for Idaho State Senate District 1 in the May 19, 2026, Republican primary. Herndon is a custom home builder from Sagle and a former one-term state senator whose single term was defined by some of the most extreme positions taken by any Idaho legislator in recent memory, including an attempt to force rape and incest victims to carry pregnancies to term. He held the top Idaho Freedom Foundation Freedom Index score among all Idaho senators during his term, is currently employed as Idaho Freedom Caucus state director, and chairs the Bonner County Republican Central Committee. He lost his 2024 primary rematch to incumbent Jim Woodward by 613 votes. The 2026 race is the fourth time Herndon and Woodward have faced each other.
Background
Herndon graduated from the Missouri Military Academy and earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from Arizona State University. He worked in finance and computer programming before relocating to Idaho, where he built his own home and launched a custom home building business in Bonner County. He served five years as the Bonner County jail chaplain.
Before entering politics, Herndon was a leader of the North Idaho chapter of Abolish Human Abortion (AHA), a fringe anti-abortion organization whose members identify themselves as “abolitionists” and which maintains that abortion is murder and, in many chapters, that those who seek abortions should be imprisoned or executed. Herndon’s chapter showed up at Sandpoint-area farmers’ markets, Walmart stores, and local schools carrying large signs with graphic images of aborted fetuses and approached passersby, including children.
Abortion Abolitionism: The Position He Runs On
Herndon’s defining political identity is abortion abolitionism, the position that abortion must be illegal in all cases without exception, including to save the life of the pregnant woman. In July 2022, he argued at the Idaho Republican Party platform convention against including a life-of-mother exception, saying: “We will never win this human rights issue, the greatest of our time, if we make allowances for the intentional killing of another human being.” That position is documented by the Idaho Capital Sun. Polling consistently shows Idaho Republican voters support a life-of-mother exception by substantial margins, placing Herndon outside even his own party’s voter base.
In January 2023, during his first legislative session, Herndon introduced legislation in the Idaho Senate State Affairs Committee to strip the rape and incest affirmative defenses from Idaho’s Criminal Abortion Law and Fetal Heartbeat Law, eliminating the two exceptions those laws contained. When Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow posed a hypothetical about a 13-year-old girl raped by a family member, Herndon replied: “Some people could describe the situation that you’re talking about as the opportunity to have a child in those terrible circumstances if the rape actually occurred.” The bill failed in committee. Coverage is documented by KMVT, the Idaho Capital Sun, and KTVB.
The same session, Herndon argued that Idaho’s “abortion trafficking” bill, which criminalized non-parents who help a minor obtain an abortion, should go further to also criminalize parents and guardians who help their own minor children access the procedure. The committee did not advance that position. A detailed profile of his abortion abolitionism was published by Rewire News Group in December 2023.
The Greg Pruett / ISAA Lawsuit
In 2019, Herndon and a companion attempted to enter the Festival at Sandpoint, held on publicly owned War Memorial Field, while carrying firearms and were turned away. Herndon subsequently acted as a named plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by Greg Pruett’s Idaho Second Amendment Alliance (ISAA) and the Second Amendment Foundation against the City of Sandpoint and the Festival at Sandpoint, with the case filed in 2020. The lawsuit was widely described as a deliberate test case engineered by Herndon and Pruett to create legal precedent.
On June 22, 2023, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled unanimously, 5 to 0, that private organizations leasing public parks may ban firearms during their lease period. ISAA lost. According to the Sandpoint Reader, the combined cost of multiple lawsuits arising from the Festival firearms dispute, including the Herndon case and a separate suit filed by Bonner County, exceeded $320,000 in legal fees for the city and county. Additional coverage from Spokane Public Radio and Idaho Dispatch.
Greg Pruett is the president of ISAA, which has since rebranded as Honor Idaho. Pruett is a registered member of the Constitution Party and has publicly stated he has never supported Donald Trump. NPR’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series “No Compromise” documented Pruett’s ties to the Dorr Brothers network, examining his fundraising practices and astroturf social media operation. Herndon has maintained a close political relationship with Pruett throughout his career and received a 100% ISAA rating in the 2024 primary survey.
West Bonner School District: Using His Senate Seat for an IFF Power Play
While simultaneously serving as a state senator and as BCRCC chair, Herndon personally escorted Branden Durst, a then-senior policy analyst for the Idaho Freedom Foundation with no experience as a school administrator or teacher, to Priest River, where the West Bonner County School District board’s far-right majority voted to install Durst as superintendent in June 2023. Hundreds of community members turned out to oppose the hire at a contentious meeting. The board approved it anyway.
Herndon then allocated $2,000 in BCRCC funds, party committee money, to oppose the recall of two board members who had approved the Durst hire. On August 29, 2023, the community voted to recall both trustees by decisive margins: approximately 66% voted to recall Vice Chair Susan Brown and 63% to recall Chair Keith Rutledge. Durst resigned shortly afterward. Former Idaho Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Jones wrote publicly that the West Bonner episode illustrated the IFF’s documented plan “to discredit and dismantle Idaho’s public schools” and called on Idaho voters statewide to “West Bonner” extremist candidates at the ballot box. Coverage from the Spokesman-Review, Spokane Public Radio, and the Idaho Press.
Using Party Machinery to Punish Republicans Who Vote Independently
As BCRCC chairman, Herndon twice used the central committee apparatus against elected Republicans who exercised independent judgment. In April 2023, he led the BCRCC to issue a formal vote of no-confidence against District 1 state Rep. Mark Sauter because Sauter voted contrary to IFF priorities on several bills, including a library obscenity bill, a vaccine mandate bill, and others. Sauter responded that he had “done his best to be a responsible representative for District 1.” Critics and Bonner County residents wrote publicly that the BCRCC should be censured for using party processes as an ideological enforcement tool. Coverage by the Bonner County Daily Bee and the Sandpoint Reader.
In 2026, Herndon went further. As the BCRCC chairman who is also a candidate on the ballot, he produced a tabloid-format “Official Republican Voter Guide” that was distributed at BCRCC expense to every household in Bonner and Boundary counties. The committee voted 26-6 to endorse Herndon for his own seat. Neither Jim Woodward nor Rep. Mark Sauter received a candidate questionnaire before the guide was published. Herndon used the Republican Party’s institutional resources and credibility to campaign for himself while excluding his opponents. A letter published in the Bonner County Daily Bee on April 7, 2026, titled “I voted against the fox in the henhouse,” describes the episode from the perspective of a committee member who voted no.
What He Does With Federal Money He Tells Others to Refuse
Herndon built his political identity on opposition to federal spending and urges constituents and supporters to refuse federal money. He then accepted $10,000 in federal CARES Act pandemic relief funds for his homebuilding business, Scott Herndon Homes, during COVID-19. This inconsistency was documented through public records and reported by the Sandpoint Reader, which catalogued multiple such contradictions in an April 2026 piece reprinted by 9b.news.
The Sandpoint Reader also notes that Herndon voted to restrict Idaho’s ballot initiative process after voters approved Medicaid expansion by 60% or more, and that he opposes Medicaid expansion that covers approximately 85,000 low-income Idaho workers.
Campaign Finance and the Consulting Firm With Proud Boys Ties
Herndon’s 2022 campaign raised funds heavily from out-of-state donors, including contributors from California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, Georgia, Washington, and Michigan, and paid nearly $67,000 to McShane LLC, a Nevada-based political consulting firm, for campaign management, advertising, and attack materials targeting then-incumbent Woodward. McShane LLC’s vice president, Woodrow Johnston, had been reported in May 2021 by the Nevada Current to have worked to recruit members of the Proud Boys, which the FBI classifies as an extremist organization with white nationalist ties, to participate in a Las Vegas post-election protest challenging the 2020 results. The firm’s principal stated Johnston acted independently. The reliance on an out-of-state firm with documented extremist associations to run attack ads against a North Idaho incumbent is documented by the Sandpoint Reader and Take Back Idaho.
In the 2024 cycle, Herndon and Woodward together raised more than $230,000 in what Spokane Public Radio described as Idaho’s costliest and possibly most bitter legislative primary. Individual 2026 contribution data was not yet filed with the Idaho Secretary of State at the time this profile was written.
Idaho Freedom Foundation and the Freedom Caucus Schism
Herndon held the top Idaho Freedom Foundation Freedom Index score among all Idaho senators during his term, a ranking system critics describe as a publicly applied lobbying pressure tool that rewards ideological conformity over independent judgment. After losing the 2024 primary, he was hired in July 2024 as the Idaho Freedom Caucus’s newly created state director, deepening his institutional role within the far-right activist network.
The hire was made in the context of a significant internal split. In mid-2024, the state-level Idaho Freedom Caucus clashed with the D.C.-based State Freedom Caucus Network (SFCN). The national network was dissatisfied with the Idaho caucus’s relationship with House Speaker Mike Moyle and, by September 2024, publicly declared that caucus co-chairs Rep. Heather Scott and Sen. Tammy Nichols “did not meet our standards to associate with the national brand.” Several Idaho legislators, including senators from the Gang of Eight coalition, resigned from the state Freedom Caucus and aligned with the national network. Herndon remained with the state faction. His Idaho Freedom Caucus is now a separate organization from the national network that the Gang of Eight joined. This is documented by the Idaho Capital Sun and InvestigateWest.
Electoral History
Herndon has contested the District 1 Senate seat four times against Jim Woodward. He finished third in the 2018 Republican primary. He won the 2022 primary with 56% of the vote, ousting then-incumbent Woodward. He lost the 2024 rematch 51.9% to 48.1%, a margin of 613 votes, with Woodward receiving 8,219 votes to Herndon’s 7,606. Full results are covered by the Spokesman-Review and Sandpoint Reader. The 2026 primary is Herndon’s fourth race for the seat.
Policy Positions
Herndon’s top 2026 campaign priority is abolishing Idaho property taxes over a ten-year transition period. He also supports highway expansion in North Idaho and has called for stronger school accountability tied to performance. His campaign website outlines these positions. His most extreme position remains his absolutist abortion abolitionism, with no exceptions of any kind, including for the pregnant woman’s life.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Scott Herndon? Scott Herndon is a Republican home builder from Sagle who served one term in the Idaho Senate from 2022 to 2024, where he held the top Idaho Freedom Foundation Freedom Index score among all Idaho senators. He is currently the Idaho Freedom Caucus state director and BCRCC chairman, and is challenging incumbent Jim Woodward for the fourth time in the May 2026 Republican primary.
What district is Scott Herndon running in? Idaho Senate District 1, covering most of Bonner and Boundary counties in the Idaho Panhandle.
What is Abolish Human Abortion (AHA) and what was Herndon’s role? AHA is a fringe anti-abortion group whose members call themselves “abolitionists” and maintain that abortion is murder. Many in the movement support imprisonment or execution for those who seek abortions. Herndon led the North Idaho chapter before running for office. His chapter showed up at farmers’ markets, Walmart, and local schools carrying graphic signs and approaching members of the public, including children.
What did Herndon say about a 13-year-old rape victim? When asked in January 2023 whether a 13-year-old rape victim should be permitted to end a pregnancy, Herndon responded: “Some people could describe the situation that you’re talking about as the opportunity to have a child in those terrible circumstances if the rape actually occurred.” His bill to strip the rape and incest exceptions from Idaho’s abortion laws failed in committee.
Was Herndon involved in the Greg Pruett / ISAA gun lawsuit? Yes. Herndon was a named plaintiff in the ISAA and Second Amendment Foundation lawsuit against Sandpoint over gun carry rights at the Festival at Sandpoint. The Idaho Supreme Court ruled 5-0 against the lawsuit in June 2023. According to the Sandpoint Reader, multiple lawsuits arising from the dispute cost the city and county more than $320,000 in combined legal fees. Pruett, who organized the suit, is a registered Constitution Party member who has never supported Donald Trump.
Did Herndon accept federal money he told others to refuse? Yes. Herndon urges supporters to refuse federal money as a matter of principle. He accepted $10,000 in federal CARES Act pandemic relief for his homebuilding business during COVID-19. The inconsistency is documented through public records by the Sandpoint Reader.
What happened with the West Bonner School District? Herndon personally escorted a senior Idaho Freedom Foundation analyst with no education administration experience to Priest River, where a far-right school board majority installed him as superintendent. Herndon then used BCRCC party funds to fight the recall of those board members. The community recalled both trustees by wide margins (63-66%), and the superintendent resigned. Former Idaho Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Jones cited the episode as evidence of the IFF’s plan to dismantle Idaho’s public schools.
Who is Scott Herndon running against? Incumbent Jim Woodward, a Navy veteran and North Idaho business owner who defeated Herndon in the 2024 primary by 613 votes.
What is the BCRCC voter guide controversy? As BCRCC chairman and a candidate on the ballot, Herndon produced an “Official Republican Voter Guide” distributed at party expense to every household in Bonner and Boundary counties. The committee voted 26-6 to endorse him. Neither his opponent Jim Woodward nor Rep. Mark Sauter received a candidate questionnaire before the guide was published. He used the Republican Party’s institutional resources to campaign for himself while excluding other Republicans.
What is Scott Herndon’s connection to the Idaho Freedom Foundation? Herndon earned the top IFF Freedom Index score among Idaho senators during his term. He is currently employed as the Idaho Freedom Caucus state director. His record as senator and his current organizational role place him at the center of the IFF’s political network in North Idaho.
Profile published by IdahoVoters.com. Last updated April 2026. This profile will be updated as additional information becomes available.
Affiliations
News Stories
Herndon casually invoking the possibility of armed, violent struggle against the government is the latest in a disturbing pattern of rhetoric and action on Idaho’s far right. From Ammon Bundy threatening to meet court officers with “friends and a shotgun” to a man at a Turning Points USA rally asking, “when do we get to use the guns?” to a vanload of white supremacists showing up at the Coeur d’Alene pride festival with evident bad intentions. Not that Herndon probably means what he said. There’s no evidence that Herndon actually wants to “have the real fight” — he just wants to be seen saying he’s ready for violence for the sake of securing votes in the closed primary, where he used extreme positions to oust the eminently reasonable veteran Sen. Jim Woodward. I’m aware of exactly one instance of Herndon “having the real fight.” But it wasn’t in the name of liberty. It was in 2012, when he shot his neighbor’s dog. In the back. While it was running away from him.
According to contemporary police reports from the Bonner County Sheriff’s Office, Herndon shot the pup because he was worried it would go after his chickens. The deputy noted the dog was about 80 feet from those chickens when Herndon pulled the trigger, and it hadn’t touched any of them. It turned and ran away when he yelled at it. And he shot the little black lab in the back as it fled. Is this the action of a bold revolutionary? A lover of freedom ready to pledge his life, fortune and sacred honor? Or just a kind of belligerent, cowardly person? The kind of person who invokes the idea of armed revolution when a committee chairman won’t hear a bill. The kind of guy who shoots a dog because it looked at his chicken coop. “I was hired by the voters in my district and so I work for my voters,” Herndon declared. Not if dogs could vote.
Over the weekend, the Idaho Republican Party voted against adopting an amendment that would have added an exception to its official policy on abortion for cases to save the life of the mother. Scott Herndon, a Republican running unopposed for a state Senate seat, argued to delegates that “for the last 49 years we have essentially lost the argument in the culture because we have focused on abortion as the termination of a pregnancy and not the termination of a living human being.” He added: “We will never win this human rights issue, the greatest of our time, if we make allowances for the intentional killing of another human being.” Obviously, he did not note that withholding life-saving care from a pregnant person, knowing they could die, is also an intentional killing, because that would apparently require too much reflection on his part. The decision not to add an abortion exception to save the life of the mother was decided 412-164; as The Independent notes, the party platform “is used to direct policy within the state’s GOP-controlled legislature.”
urrently, Idaho’s “trigger” law, passed in 2020, outlaws abortions with exceptions for rape and incest, though only if the crimes are reported to law enforcement. (The Idaho GOP platform has no exceptions for rape or incest; a regional Planned Parenthood organization and an Idaho abortion provider have sued to block the law and a hearing is scheduled for August 3.) According to Newsweek, in a Facebook video after the Supreme Court struck down Roe, Herndon declared, “you don’t put to death the innocent child for the crime of its father, but that’s what this [trigger] law would allow.” He also claimed that such exceptions give women “a free pass,” and said that “if a mother really wants to kill her child, she could lie, say she was raped, file a police report, and go get her child killed in the state of Idaho and nobody would be prosecuted.” Because Herndon apparently wanted to make it abundantly clear that not only is he anti-abortion, he’s also a colossal asshole too. (On his website, Herndon says he “believes in preserving and protecting human life” and “has followed this in word and deed as an active Abortion Abolitionist and Pro-Gun advocate.” We’re going to guess that no, he doesn’t see the irony.)
There was never an abortion clinic in Sandpoint, Idaho. But about a decade ago, locals in Sandpoint and surrounding towns started to notice the presence of one of the country’s most hardline anti-abortion groups. They showed up at the farmers’ market, Walmart, and local schools, carrying large signs with gruesome photos and approaching passersby—including children—to “preach the gospel.” One of the group’s leaders often brought his own kids.
That man assumed office as an Idaho state senator in December 2022. His name is Scott Herndon.
“All of us were surprised that he actually got elected,” one local resident told me. “It should never have happened.”
Herndon is far from the only extremist who has infiltrated Idaho politics. North Idaho, in particular, is a hotbed for the rise of Christian nationalism and overtly fascist ideology...
Herndon, the anti-abortion activist-turned-state senator who also has IFF ties, made waves several times during his first legislative session in 2023. In the course of debate surrounding Idaho’s first-of-its-kind “abortion trafficking” bill, for example—which made it a crime for a non-parent or guardian to help a minor get an abortion in Idaho—Herndon argued the bill should go further, criminalizing parents and guardians as well. (Enforcement of the law is currently blocked as a legal challenge proceeds.)
Herndon also unsuccessfully attempted to remove the rape and incest exceptions from Idaho’s criminal abortion ban. (These exceptions are already so narrow that the Department of Justice has argued they violate federal law.) Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow pushed back, asking Herndon if hypothetically his bill would force a 13-year-old girl who had been raped by a family member to continue her pregnancy.
In response, Herndon referred to such a situation as an “opportunity.”
“I got shell shock, and that’s the only way I can describe it,” Wintrow said when I met her in Boise in late October. “Because it was so violent for a senator to say there should be no exceptions for rape or incest for an abortion.”
Most mainstream anti-abortion groups are careful to say they don’t support criminalizing pregnant people for seeking abortions. The model legislation they draft focuses on the actions of doctors instead. But Herndon was a leader of the North Idaho chapter of Abolish Human Abortion (AHA), one of a handful of groups on the anti-abortion movement’s fringe in which members identify as “abolitionists.”
Minority Leader Sen. Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, asked about situations in which teenage girls were raped by an uncle or father and if that girl would be forced to carry her pregnancy to term under Herndon’s proposed legislation.
Herndon replied, “some people could describe the situation that you’re talking about as the opportunity to have the child under those terrible circumstances, if the rape actually occurred.”
Currently, the abortion ban includes an affirmative defense for abortions performed in cases of rape and incest if a police report is filed, but Herndon said that is merely an allegation that a rape or incest took place....
The legislation Herndon did successfully introduce relating to abortion would add definitions of abortion and embryo or fetus. The proposal would amend the state’s trigger ban to say that embryo or fetus would, “mean any human in utero”—which Herndon said would clarify that the criminal penalties for performing an abortion do not apply to treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, which is when the fetus develops outside of the uterus. The bill would add the definition, “‘Abortion’ means the use or prescription of any instrument, medicine, drug, or other substance or device to intentionally kill a living embryo or fetus. ‘Abortion’ shall not include the unintentional death of any human embryo or fetus.”
He said adding that the embryo or fetus is “living” and clarified that there would be no prosecution if an abortion was done when the fetus had miscarried.
The proposed bill adds that any person who provides care to a pregnant woman to save her life that results in the accidental death or injury to the fetus will not be prosecuted under the ban. Previously this only applied to healthcare professionals, but Herndon said he wanted to expand it to include all first responders.
In the months leading to the infamous 2017 Unite the Right tiki-torch rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, then-talk radio host Dave Reilly had some messaging-strategy tips for the attendees from the alt-right, the internet-savvy collection of racist and antisemitic groups that arose during the Trump era... He chided members for posting a Nazi meme publicly on Facebook where the left could use it against them. He advised alt-right gays to “stay in the f—ing closet.” He livestreamed a Charlottesville KKK rally a month before the event, and the top organizer of the upcoming alt-right rally shared it as motivation for his followers to recruit more attendees....Six years later, Reilly, now a political operative in Idaho, has landed a new messaging gig: helping to shape the communications strategy for the conservative Idaho Freedom Foundation, arguably the most powerful political activist group in the state.
But while few on the hard right in Idaho have been willing to publicly defend Reilly, few have been willing to explicitly condemn him either. InvestigateWest reached out to the 10 Idaho legislators most supported by the Freedom Foundation, and only one, Sen. Scott Herndon,responded — though he declined to comment on Reilly directly....
Sen. Herndon, the very highest-ranked senator on the Idaho Freedom Index, was the only one who responded. In his reply, Herndon was onlywilling to explicitly speak out against Fuentes, the alt-right figure who Reilly once said was “serving the will of God” and that “his enemies are now my enemies.” Herndon suggested that the same kinds of conservative, limited-government principles that resulted in his scoring so high in the Freedom Index compelled him to oppose Fuentes, whom he sees as holding something closer to radical leftist ideology.
“The rhetoric and movement he represents appear to promote government expansion, collectivist ideological principles, identity politics and even a socialist-style dictatorship,” Herndon said. “Those principles are flat-out anti-American.”
Sen. Scott Herndon, R-Sagle, also received a letter after he posted online criticisms of federal and state spending, saying that he thinks legislators do not sufficiently scrutinize the billions of dollars spent by the state every year. All three senators are members of the Idaho Freedom Caucus, a hard-line group of conservative lawmakers loosely tied to the House Freedom Caucus in Washington, D.C....
In late October, Herndon published a blog post on his website criticizing legislators who do not vote against any budget bills. Herndon — who is a member of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, the budget-setting legislative panel — wrote that none of the more than 200 budget bills voted on in the past two years were halted on the Senate floor and returned to a committee, noting that the senator he replaced, Jim Woodward, voted “yes” on the 110 budget bills last year, as did a large majority of his colleagues. In his letter, Winder asked Herndon to apologize to the other members of JFAC. “Although your fellow colleagues on JFAC have taken their duties seriously, you have not,” Winder wrote in his letter to Herndon. “When you start saying that you’re the only really good Republican on there that’s really looking at budgets and working hard, ... you’re attacking your colleagues,” Winder told the Statesman. “If you disparage them, then how are you going to get them to support you when you want to get anything else done?”
Related Images
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Scott Herndon describes his transition from California to Idaho.
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Sen. Herndon with Idaho GOP Chairwoman Dorothy Moon
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Sen. Herndon discussing his bill to decriminalize the sale of unpasteurized milk
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Sen. Herndon discussing his vote to block summer lunches for children living below the poverty line
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Sen. Herndon discussing his bill to force Child Protective Services to read Miranda warning to parents when interacting with them
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