Been a while since I last posted...
Larry Echohawk, a fairly new General Authority for the LDS church, ran a major campaign for governor of Idaho in the 1994 elections. The other major contender was not LDS. Had Echohawk won, he would've been the first American Indian governor of any state.
Echohawk had played football for BYU, and he'd worked as an attorney at Fort Hall (in Bingham and Bannock counties in Idaho) and as a politician in Bannock county. He served as Attorney General of Idaho from 1990 to 1994.
So how did the very heavily-Mormon counties in Eastern Idaho vote? For convenience, I'm just including the larger counties.
Bannock County (Pocatello): 9,871 to 16,709 (61% of total vote)
Bingham County (Blackfoot and Shelley): 6,096 to 6,991 (51% of total vote)
Bonneville County (Idaho Falls): 15,839 to 12,146 (42% of total vote)
Jefferson County (Rigby): 3,872 to 2,444 (37% of total vote)
Madison County (Rexburg): 3,359 to 3,113 (47% of total vote)
I haven't included numbers for fringe candidates.
Statewide, Echohawk received 44% of the vote.
So Bingham and Bannock Counties--the communities where Echohawk had
lived and worked--voted for him, although the Bingham County vote was
fairly close. The rest voted against him.
Not only did Echohawk lose in Bonneville County, Jefferson County, and
Madison County, all heavily Mormon, but two of those counties actually gave
him less percentage of their vote than the state as a whole did.
I can't find details on how many LDS church members lived in these counties in
1994. City Data has current information on how large the LDS communities are
in these counties.
Bannock County has a smaller percentage of church members than the other
counties on my list. Outside of Bannock County, my guess is that well over half
of the people here were LDS.
Keep in mind, these counties are all part of the Mormon corridor. And yet
most of them refused to vote for a future General Authority.
Why? Not sure, but the fact that he's a Democrat probably didn't help.
