Centrist state Rep. Jack Nelsen takes political flak for resisting hard right
Robbie Gramer, a national security reporter at The Wall Street Journal, traveled to his native Idaho and found a state where the internal divisions of the Republican Party are playing out in ways that could shape the party’s national direction. The article is part of the Journal’s “Rooted In” series, in which reporters return to their hometowns to capture the voice of the nation ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
In a first-person account, Gramer described himself as a fourth-generation Idahoan who now lives in Washington, D.C., and who tries to keep close tabs on his home state “given that my day job keeps me in Washington, D.C., or much farther afield covering U.S. foreign policy.” He reported traveling to Island Park, a community in eastern Idaho near the Wyoming border, where he met state Rep. Jack Nelsen, a retired dairy farmer and “old guard” Republican, while fishing for rainbow trout. Gramer wrote that, “Despite my questionable fishing skills, two trout took pity on me and let me hook them.”
Nelsen, the Journal reported, is among the Idaho Republicans who have “defied” the party’s “hard right lurch” and battled to keep the party on a more centrist tack. Gramer wrote that Nelsen has taken “political flak” for his stance.
The resistance Nelsen represents puts him at odds with newer hardline-right politicians in the state. The Journal profiled state Rep. Clint Hostetler, whom Gramer described as a deeply religious legislator who recently moved to southern Idaho from California. Hostetler told the Journal he considers himself a “political refugee” who wants to save Idaho from the leftist policies he believed destroyed California.
Hostetler and Nelsen are emblematic of the question Gramer’s piece poses: whether the newer hardline-right upstarts have permanently altered Idaho politics, or whether the old guard still have a fighting chance to preserve what they see as Idaho values. The Journal did not predict an answer.
Gramer wrote that Idaho, while deeply Republican and mostly rural, is “about the furthest you could get from a battleground state” and is “often overlooked in the national media during election cycles.” But, he added, this Mountain West state has become a “key bellwether” for the broader fight over what a post-Trump Republican Party could become at the national level and a “test lab for some of the nation’s most controversial conservative legislation.”
The article does not name a specific upcoming race where the divisions it describes are likely to play out, and it does not identify any particular bill or policy that exemplifies Idaho’s role as a “test lab.” The piece closes by directing readers to a companion video, “Watch our full episode to hear what Nelsen, Hostetler and others say about the battle raging within the right.”
Gramer, according to the article, is a national security reporter at the Journal in Washington. He previously worked at Politico, where he was a reporter and the lead author of the newsletter NatSec Daily. He has reported from over two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East, and has reported from the halls of Congress, remote research stations in the Amazon rainforest and aboard Norwegian coast guard cutters high in the Arctic Circle. He was also the host of Foreign Policy magazine’s award-winning podcast “After Hotel Rwanda,” about the kidnapping of a Rwandan human-rights activist and U.S.-led efforts to free him. Before his career in journalism, Gramer was associate director of transatlantic security at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. He graduated from American University with a degree in international relations.