STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

It quickly became apparent why children squirm so much as some 20 adults settled into the hard cafeteria table seats at Bellevue Elementary School.

They shifted uncomfortably through 90 minutes of speeches and a question and answer period as campaigners made their case at the Blaine County Republican Party's Pie and Politics event.

Making it more palatable was some genuinely impressive pies brought by the candidates and the Republican faithful. The pies included Peach Praline, Cherry with a Cheesecake Bottom and Dutch Apple.

Mike Pohanka has served one term in the Idaho legislature.

Trudi Schneider's Strawberry Rhubarb was still warm. And the German native accompanied it with a bowl of homemade whipped cream, demonstrating exactly how Germans use it on everything as she topped her Starbucks coffee with a generous dollop.

As the audience spooned bites of pie into their mouths, candidates for office in District 26 and Blaine County fed them soundbites.

With several races on the May 19 primary ballot, the evening's sharpest focus fell on the contested District 26 House seat—specifically, the contest between incumbent Mike Pohanka, R-Jerome and challenger Jeff Emerick of Ketchum.

Pohanka opened with the confidence of a man who has walked the Capitol of Idaho.

Jeff Emerick is challenging Mike Pohanka for his House seat.

"What I love the most is when I'm back here with boots on the ground helping the constituents," said Pohanka, a first-generation American whose father escaped Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s.

Pohanka, who earned a master’s degree at Penn State, spent 30 years at Idaho Power and nearly 19 years teaching economics at the College of Southern Idaho. He has served as chaplain for the Idaho State Police and two sheriff's offices and as president of both the Jerome and Twin Falls Chambers of Commerce.

Water storage, including raising the Minidoka and American Falls dams and possibly rebuilding the Teton Dam, tops his list of priorities. He championed a construction zone safety bill that received the governor's signature, creating reckless-driving citations for motorists exceeding posted speed limits by 20 mph in active work zones.

He acknowledged the Highway 75 construction headaches that bedeviled traffic going into Ketchum last summer, saying he has been working to get the Idaho Transportation Department, utility companies, city and county talking to each other weekly.

Lyle Johnson, of Eden, railed against Muslim immigrants that he said are not coming here to work.

"Those are things I like doing," he said. "Taking care of the people, removing barriers, and getting the job done."

He closed with an appeal for affordable housing, pointing to a Coeur d'Alene model called PAHA--Panhandle Housing Authority--that places teachers, nurses, and first responders into 1,500 to 1,800 square-foot homes for households earning under $100,000 annually.

Jeff Emerick, the challenger, introduced himself as a man born and raised in the valley who has spent a decade on what he called the frontlines as an elections worker, a volunteer in the jail delivering recovery messages and a current officer with the Hailey Rotary.

"Whether or not I win or lose this election, I'm going to continue my work," he said.

Bryan Hyde said he has softened his “us versus them” rhetoric.

Emerick's pitch centered on accountability and community safety. He said he has reported elections irregularities and nonprofit embezzlement over the past decade, although he didn’t provide evidence of the actual cases. He said he wants to bring that same instinct for oversight to the legislature.

"I believe a big part of what makes me a good candidate is that I will hold people accountable--and I've proven that," he said.

His most pointed remarks addressed what he called a deteriorating safety environment in Blaine County. He cited unlicensed drivers, cartel activity, and what he described as multiple open Sheriff's Department investigations into sex trafficking. Again, he didn’t cite actual cases.

"I know maybe to some of you I might sound crazy," Emerick acknowledged, "But this is happening."

He also highlighted his commitment to protecting public lands and preserving Blaine County’s Hillside Ordinance, which restricts home building on hills.

"I consider myself a public servant already, first and foremost," he said.

Darcy Creech is running for Blaine County Clerk against the winner of the Democratic primary between incumbent Stephen Graham and Dawn Cieslik.

Creech sold a hat company called Conception Hats within five years of founding it, then spent 25 years running a vertically integrated hat shop on Nantucket, designing, sourcing, importing, and selling, while training what she estimated as four dozen young women in their first jobs.

Off the island, she founded Hydrex Philanthropics, a nonprofit that partners with Compassion International to drill water wells in African villages, transforming communities of 1,500 to 2,500 people at a time.

"When you're an entrepreneur, you have to train people, manage people, and make more money than you spend," she said. "In government, when you spend more than you have, every voter suffers."

She said she came to her candidacy the hard way as a poll worker who says she witnessed systematic inefficiency and then paid for trying to fix it. When she observed voters leaving without casting ballots, deterred by a long line for electronic vote machines while paper ballot booths sat empty, she said she began directing people to request oval paper ballots.

She said she left after her fellow poll workers objected.

Bryan Hyde, who is running for the District 26 Senate seat held by Ron Taylor, D-Hailey, spent years as a talk radio host in southern Utah before his conscience, as he put it, told him to stop throwing red meat.

"I was good at getting people riled up," he said. "But was I really accomplishing something?"

He eventually stepped back from what he called "enemy-driven thinking"--the framing of every political question as us versus them.

"What makes you a good person is living as a good person," he said. "Knowing that you are a source of beneficial good in the world."

Hyde argued that government has a legitimate but limited role—protecting God-given rights, as both the Declaration of Independence and the French economist Frédéric Bastiat articulated. He cautioned against the expansion of programs that grow because "if they're not growing, they're dying."

He expressed skepticism about license plate reader cameras and concern about outside PAC money flooding local legislative races with falsehoods. He closed with a call to principle over partisanship.

"Doing the business of the people requires us to be less enemy-driven and more principle-driven in what is right, what is good, what is just and what is proper for government."

Lyle Johnson, of Eden is seeking the District 26 House Seat B being vacated by Rep. Jack Nielsen.

He was unsparing in his assessment of Idaho's dairy industry's reliance on what he called undocumented workers.

"I think it may come to one of these days not far down the road that Idaho people just say: That's it, we want every one of them rounded up and we want every one of them out of the state of Idaho," he said.

He also called for audits of every state agency and stricter open meeting law enforcement with personal penalties for violators rather than institutional ones. And he pushed back on what he described as a culture of government corruption in Idaho that has cost taxpayers into the hundreds of millions, although he did not provide examples.