Scott Herndon for Idaho, Sagle, ID (2026)

09/14/2026

Picture this. You are pregnant, and something has gone wrong. You are frightened. And you have been told that in Idaho, a doctor will stand over you and do nothing, because the law will not let him save your life.

You have been lied to. And I can prove it, in Idaho's own words.

Idaho law does not stand between you and care for an ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage. It says plainly that treating those is not even an abortion. And if a pregnancy ever threatens your life, the law lets your doctor act on his own judgment to save you. Our own Supreme Court has said that judgment "does not require a particular level of immediacy." Read that again. Your doctor does not have to wait until you are dying. And in all the years this current law has been in force, not one doctor has been prosecuted under it. Not one.

So, ask yourself this: If the emergencies are already covered, what does Prop 1 actually change? Why do the people behind it need you afraid?

Here is why. Prop 1 erases all protection for every unborn child through all nine months. It removes the requirement that a doctor even be involved. It removes any duty to care for a baby born alive. It allows abortion on a minor. They took the hardest cases, the ones the law already handles, and are trying to use fear to sell us all the rest.

Do not vote from a fear someone built to move you. I stand on the Idaho Constitution: every one of us has an inalienable right to life, and the child in the womb is one of us. Vote no on Prop 1 on November 3rd.

If you live in Bonner or Boundary County at a visible location and want a "No on Prop 1" sign for your yard, message this page and I'll make sure you get one. And wherever you are, share this so your neighbors hear the truth before they vote.

09/13/2026

My daughters took this picture this week. All five of them are musicians. They play together, and out in our community, and here's the part that gets me: they largely taught themselves, using tools that didn't even exist when I was young. A video here, an app there, sheet music pulled up on a screen in seconds. Nobody made them do it. They wanted to.

Arlene and I homeschooled our kids. They're mostly grown now, and the thing I'm proudest of isn't a grade or a test score. It's that they love to learn, and they know how to learn just about anything on their own, without me.

That, to me, is the whole point of an education. The world never stops changing. Half the tools and jobs our kids will use in twenty years don't exist yet. What lasts isn't a fixed pile of facts. It's a love of learning and the drive to keep learning for the rest of your life.

Think about how much has changed. When I was a kid, learning something new meant a trip to the library, the card catalog, a set of encyclopedias, and hoping they weren't already out of date. My girls learned to make music from a screen in their hands. Our kids have more opportunity to learn than any generation in history.

Now here's the part that should stop you: Idaho's public school funding formula was built for the card-catalog world. It runs on rules from the 1960s and was last seriously rewritten in 1994, before that phone in your pocket existed.

This week in Coeur d'Alene, our State Superintendent and three North Idaho superintendents told a room full of business leaders that the formula is broken. They're right. But the real question isn't just making it newer. It's who it's built to serve.

Right now, Idaho is one of only six states that still funds staffing positions instead of students. About 63 cents of every state education dollar is handed out based on how many staff a district has, not how many kids it serves or how well they learn. It funds the institution. I want it to fund the child.

Because education is about each individual kid and the person they're becoming, not the system around them. So, the money should follow the student, weighted for real need so no child gets shortchanged, portable so a family can find the school that fits, transparent so you can see what your child generates and how it's spent, and flexible so schools are judged on results, not paperwork. Thirty-one states, red and blue, already fund kids this way.

And Idaho is better positioned than almost any state to do it, because we already did the hard part in 2006 when we pulled the property tax off school operations and funded them from the state. The natural next step is to let those dollars follow the student.

Fund education in full, set these principles in law, and then build a formula that actually meets them. Fund it fully so no one can say we're cutting schools, then get it right for the kids.

And here's something that happened just this week: one of those five, my daughter Hannah, was hired to teach rhetoric at Valor Christian Academy right here in Sandpoint. The girl who taught herself to love learning now gets to spark that in other people's kids. That is the whole point, raising up young people who go on to build, create, teach, and lead right here at home.

Because whether a child is in a public school, a charter, or learning at the kitchen table like mine did, the goal is the same: young people who love to learn and never stop.

What set your own kids up to keep learning? And should Idaho's education dollars follow the child?

09/11/2026

In 1931, Idaho passed something called the Property Tax Relief Act. It created the income tax. You got the new tax. You never got the relief.

Ninety-five years later, they still tax the home you already paid for, your paycheck before it ever reaches your hand, and nearly everything you buy. They even tax the boards and the nails you build with. You are being taxed blind, at every turn, on money you already earned and already paid tax on once.

I am not running for the senate to trim it. I want to end the property tax in Idaho for good, and we already started. I helped pass two of the biggest property tax relief bills in recent state history, and this year my own party wrote ending the property tax into its platform. We do it without gutting a single school or fire station.

You should be able to truly own the home you worked for.

If you are with me, comment END IT below, and follow this page.

09/10/2026

Twenty-one years ago, Arlene and I built our own place on Otts Basin Road in Sagle, Idaho. We were younger, with a lot more energy than money, and we did all of it with our own hands. Because we built it ourselves, we never took out a mortgage on it. We have owned our home outright from the very first day.

In twenty-one years of owning our home free and clear, never once owing a bank a dime, we have still gotten a property tax bill every single year from the government. If we don't pay, they will take what we built and worked hard for. You can build your own house with your own hands, owe no one, and the government will still charge you every year for the rest of your life just to keep it. After you die, they will charge your children and then your grandchildren for the privilege of keeping the family home.

Miss enough of those bills and the government can take it. A home you built and have always owned outright.

That is why I will not stop until we end the property tax in Idaho. You should be able to truly own the home you worked for.

09/09/2026

Your vote is the one piece of power in America that every person holds in equal size. The richest man in Idaho gets one. You get one. That is the whole idea. And it only works if your one vote is safe and counted honestly.

So, ask yourself a simple question. Who should guard your vote? Idaho, or Washington, D.C.?

This week, that stopped being a hypothetical.

The federal government built a national database to check whether non-citizens were signing up to vote. This past Friday, a court in D.C. ordered it shut off. And that same database was so sloppy it had already flagged thousands of real American citizens, maybe your neighbor, maybe you, as fake.

Idaho already leans on that Washington database to help check our rolls. So when a D.C. court switched it off, it reached right into your elections. Two judges you never voted for, 2,000 miles away, just changed how Idaho protects your vote.

That is the trap. If the security of your vote depends on a computer in Washington, then Washington can pull the plug any time it wants. And it just did.

You did not choose Idaho to have it run from D.C. And Idaho does not have to work this way. We already check our own voters against our own records right here, our driver's license files and our State Police records. That is your data, held by your state. We should lean on that, not on a database a judge in Washington can turn off.

And we should keep it here. This year the federal government sued our Secretary of State to force him to hand over the private voter information of every Idahoan, yours included. He said no. Good. That roll belongs to you, not to Washington.

I do not wait on Washington to protect your vote. I already went to work at home. I wrote the Idaho law that took student IDs off the list of accepted voter ID. Three activist groups sued to kill it and dragged it all the way to the Idaho Supreme Court. They lost, 5 to 0. And I am not done. I intend to close the loophole that still lets a person vote here with no ID at all.

In 2024, almost 65 percent of us put it in our own Idaho constitution that only US citizens vote.

So here is where I stand. I don't want Idaho renting the security of your vote from Washington any more than I want you renting your paid-off home from the government. Your vote, your state, your records, kept right here, where the people who run them answer to you.

Should Idaho guard your vote, or should Washington? Tell me below. I do read every comment.

09/08/2026

His name is Homero Garibay-Alvarez. He was in Idaho illegally, and an Idaho court convicted him of vehicular manslaughter. In plain words, he took someone's life. He served his sentence in an Idaho jail, and when it ended, the ordinary outcome would have been simple. The door opens and he walks back out onto the same Idaho roads.

Instead, Idaho State Police put him on a transport out of the state, headed for deportation. He is not coming back. And he is not alone.

That is Operation No Return. It is a program run by our own Idaho State Police, working with federal immigration authorities, and here is exactly what it does. When a criminal who is in this country illegally finishes his sentence in an Idaho jail, instead of opening the door and letting him walk back onto your street, the state takes him into custody and starts the process of removing him from the country for good.

Look at who is on the state's own published list, because it reads like a nightmare. Lewd conduct with children. Injury to a child. R**e. Sexual assault. Human trafficking. Kidnapping. Vehicular manslaughter. Drug trafficking. Aggravated assault. Strangulation. And a long line of repeat drunk drivers, some with three, four, even six DUI convictions, the kind of driver who is one bad night from killing a family on Highway 95.

Every single one of them was in Idaho illegally. Every single one was convicted in an Idaho court. And you do not have to take my word for any of it. The Idaho Capital Sun, which is not a conservative outfit, went through the list and independently confirmed the convictions.

This is what enforcement looks like when it actually works, and it is happening right here, at the state level, by Idaho officers. Not a slogan. Not a press release. A man who abused a child does not get handed back to the community that convicted him. That is the whole point.

I have said this before, and I will keep saying it. When Washington fails on the border, the bill lands on Idaho. In our courts. In our jails. In our schools. And sometimes in the worst way of all, on a victim who never should have crossed paths with someone who was not supposed to be here in the first place.

Programs like this are how Idaho protects its own people. I will fight to keep them funded, I will back the Idaho State Police and the officers doing this hard work, and I will oppose with everything I have any push to turn Idaho into a sanctuary that would release these people back among us. We enforce the law. We do not shield those who break it. And we do not turn loose the ones who prey on our children.

Most Idahoans have never even heard of Operation No Return. Now you have. Share this so your neighbors know what is being done to keep them safe, and what we can never afford to undo.

09/07/2026

A woman named Tracy Mack stood up at the Coeur d'Alene City Council on August 18 and asked the question a lot of us have been thinking. Why are we being watched? She had found cameras around town reading license plates, and she wanted to know who is collecting that data and where it goes. Good for her for asking.

Let me say the thing out loud that plenty of people are already feeling. We lived just fine without any of this. For most of American history there was no machine photographing every car on the road and filing it away. Police still caught criminals. Missing kids still got found. The republic ran. The idea that we suddenly cannot function without a camera logging where every law-abiding person drives is something we were sold, not something we ever needed. A lot of folks in this district would be glad to see these come down entirely, and I understand exactly why.

At the meeting the police chief gave a list of reassurances. The city does not use Flock. It is only used passively. It photographs the plate, not the person. Access is logged. There are audits. Trust us.

Every one of those is a policy, not a law. Not one of them is guaranteed to you, and they can change the day a new chief walks in or the day a different agency decides to run its cameras another way. Your rights should not hang on the good manners of whoever happens to be in charge this year.

And here is what I would say to the good officers, because plenty of them already know it. The problems with this technology are real and they are not secret. Officers in other places have used these systems to track exes and people they had no business following. Innocent drivers have been pulled over at gunpoint over a misread or out-of-date plate. The data gets breached. And the vendors quietly share it across a national network, sometimes with agencies the local department never authorized. You do not have to be against the police to see that a tool with those problems needs hard limits written down. Many officers want those limits too.

The city has run these since 2007, and to check your plate against a list, the camera has to photograph every plate that passes. Yours. Mine. Thousands of people who did nothing. Idaho law sets no hard cap on how long that record is kept or who it is shared with, and the ALPR law already on the books has no teeth.

So here is the floor I will fight for in the Idaho Senate. If police have a warrant, or a live hit on a stolen car or a missing person, use the camera and catch the criminal. Otherwise they cannot keep a record of where you drove. A hard retention limit in days, not years. No selling it, no pooling it, no feeding it into a national tracking network. Real penalties in state law, not an honor system.

I call it the floor on purpose. If the people of Idaho decide they want these gone altogether, I am the last person who will tell them they have to keep them. We got along without them before and we could again. But at the very least, the law, and not a promise, should stand between you and a government that wants to know everywhere you go.

Where do you land: hard limits written into law, or gone entirely? I'm reading the comments.

09/05/2026

Your November property tax bill is coming. Coeur d'Alene just voted to make theirs bigger, and every Idaho city and county can do the exact same thing to yours.

Every year, Idaho law lets a city raise the property taxes it collects by up to 3%. Coeur d'Alene just decided to take the full 3% this year.

But they also did something most people have never heard of. They reached into a pot of "foregone" taxes.

Here is what "foregone" means. In past years, when the city chose not to raise your taxes the full 3%, it did not just let that money go. It saved the right to collect it later. Year after year, that saved-up taxing power piled up. The city's own finance director explained it plainly at the meeting:

"In prior years when the city did not take that 3% allowable increase, it was preserved as foregone taxing authority. At this point, the city's foregone balance is just under $6.5 million."

Important: this is not money sitting in a bank. It is saved-up permission to raise your taxes. The city gave itself the right to take that $6.5 million from taxpayers whenever it chooses. And on September 1st, the council voted to start using it. This year alone they took about $923,000 of it, on top of the automatic 3%. Together that raised the city's property taxes about 6% in a single year.

Here is the part that got me. The city is not short on money. It is sitting on a healthy savings account, about 25% of its budget. Even one council member was not sold, saying it was hard to say yes when they had not made "a strong argument for that full amount of foregone." But the majority voted to take it anyway. Only one member voted no.

For a typical Coeur d'Alene homeowner, the city's share of the property tax bill is already around $1,185 a year. And that is before the county, the schools, and every other district add their property taxes to your bill.

None of this broke the law. That is exactly the problem. Idaho law lets a city take the full 3% every year, save up the years it doesn't, and cash it in whenever it wants. And it is not just cities. Your county can do the very same thing, and so can your other taxing districts. When even that is not enough, they raise fees, on water, on permits, on services, because fees skip the limits property taxes have. It is a shell game, and you pay every version of it.

This is why I do not think capping the property tax is enough. A cap just slows the taking. As long as the tax exists, government will find a legal way to grow it. The only way to truly protect your home is to end the property tax and replace it with the growth Idaho's economy already produces every year. No new tax. No hidden pot. No shell game.

You already bought your home. You should not have to keep paying the government every year just to keep it.

Most of us can't sit through a three-hour city budget meeting on a Monday night. I can, and I do. Follow along, and I will keep bringing you what is really happening with your money.

09/04/2026

I filled up in Sagle this week. Travel America Conoco: regular unleaded $4.89, premium $5.35, and diesel number 2 at $6.19 a gallon.

I pay with a Conoco card, so I pulled my own receipts at that same pump. Last September regular was $3.12. By February it had actually drifted down to $2.82. Then it took off. This week, $4.89. The whole jump, up 73 percent, hit in the last six months.

And out here, driving is not a choice. We live rural. There is no bus, no train, no walking to work. Town is dozens of miles away. Most of us put 40, 60, 80 miles on a vehicle every single day just living our lives, getting to the job, hauling kids to school and practice, running to the feed store, making the drive to the doctor. When the price at the pump nearly doubles, we cannot just drive less. We drive what we have to drive. So, it comes straight out of everything else.

Now look past the sign for a second and think about the kitchen table.

When gas climbs two dollars a gallon, something else in the budget has to give. Maybe it is eating out that stops. Maybe it is the kids' activities that get trimmed. Maybe it is the trip to see family that does not happen this year. Maybe it is just the quiet stress of checking the account every week and wondering how long you can hold the line. A mom doing math in her head at the pump. A retiree on a fixed income choosing between a full tank and something else on the list. A guy putting $185 of diesel in his truck before he has earned a dime that day.

Here is what gets me. When your family's costs go up, you tighten your belt. You cut something. You make it work. Government almost never does. Prices go up on everybody, and instead of finding savings, government keeps spending more and reaching deeper into your pocket to pay for it. City, county, state, all of it. More budget, more programs, more taxes and fees, year after year, good times and bad.

That is backwards. When money is tight for families, it ought to be tight for government too. The answer to a squeeze on working people is not one more dollar out of their pockets. It is government finally learning to live within its means, spend less, and give people their money back.

That is why I fight to control spending and cut the tax burden wherever I can. Eliminating the property tax is my plan and I will keep driving it, because it is the tax that can take a paid-off home. But it is bigger than any one tax. Every level of government should have to justify every dollar it takes from you, especially now, when you are the one going without so their budget balances.

So, I want to hear from you. Are you feeling this? What has it changed in your house? What did you used to do that you have cut back on just to keep up? Tell me in the comments. I read them, and the people in charge should have to read them too.

You work too hard to be the only one who has to cut back.

09/03/2026

You don't actually own your home. As long as the property tax exists, you're renting it from the government, and the rent comes due every year whether the mortgage is paid off or not.

Miss enough of it and they take the home you already bought and paid for. Eliminate the property tax, and for the first time in America, you would truly own your property.

That's the whole fight. When you send me back to the Senate, I'll lead it.

Scott Herndon for Idaho

09/14/2026

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