The 80% Lie

It is a manufactured number. The PAC running the primary attack on Sen. Jim Guthrie is the same operator that built, paid for, and publishes the website where the attack number lives. The “crossover bills” the site counts as “voting with Democrats” are the bipartisan, near-unanimous votes nobody voted against — tax-code reference updates, anti-fraud, education funding. John Heida is named in the legally-required disclosure as the PAC’s treasurer. He runs the attack and the evidence the attack cites. The methodology is hidden, the source is undisclosed, and the percentage is the operation. This is what the IFF network’s omission playbook looks like in the wild.

How the lie is engineered

Open any legislator card on voteswithdems.com and click “View Crossover Bills.” The list is sorted by “Democrat unity on position (highest first).” That phrase is the entire methodology — buried in a UI sort label, never explained, never linked to a methodology page. There is no methodology page.

Here is the trick. When 100% of the Democratic caucus votes the same way as a Republican legislator, the site counts that bill as a “crossover vote.” Every routine bipartisan tax-code update, every anti-fraud bill, every education appropriation, every family-law clarification — anything where Republicans and Democrats agree — counts toward the percentage under the same rule that is supposed to flag disloyalty.

The numerator is engineered to inflate. The denominator quietly excludes the votes where Republicans and Democrats disagreed (because there’s no “Dem unity” to score against). The output is a percentage labeled “votes with Democrats” that actually measures “agrees with the legislature.” The number feels damning to a primary voter precisely because the formula is never shown.

That is how “voting with Democrats 80.8% of the time” gets manufactured out of a Republican who, on the actual partisan-deviation metric, votes with his own party’s majority over 90% of the time. The math is on the public record. The methodology is the lie.

Why the network needs the lie — and why Heida is the one signing it

The IFF network runs primary challenges against sitting Republican legislators it cannot whip. The problem is structural: on policy alone, conservative incumbents like Jim Guthrie outpoll IFF-handpicked challengers. So the network does not run primaries on policy. It runs them on identity. Your senator is not a real Republican. That argument needs evidence. The 80% number is the evidence the network manufactures for itself.

That is the function of voteswithdems.com. Not journalism. Not academic vote tracking. Not independent watchdog data. It is a permission slip — built and paid for by the same PAC running the attack — engineered to give the network’s primary voters a sourced-looking statistic for the conclusion the network has already chosen.

John Heida is the operative whose name sits on the legally-required disclosure. He runs Stop Idaho RINOs. He pays for the dashboard. He signs the disclaimers. The same X account he controls (@stopidahorinos) republishes the percentages as if they were independent data. The IFF-network amplifier accounts (@redrangetv, the Worley campaign) repeat the number from the same source without naming it. Heida is the one putting the number in front of voters, and Heida is the only person disclosed as accountable for how it is computed. The methodology is his to defend. He has never published it.

What the dashboard shows

The site is a single-page React dashboard. Photos of Idaho Republican legislators. A red “R” badge. A district number. And one big blue percentage: VOTES WITH DEMOCRATS [X]% OF THE TIME. Based on 2026 Voting Data. No methodology page. No source-data link. No About page. No formula.

Sen. Jim Guthrie sits at the top of the published list at 80.8%. Behind him, in the order the dashboard displays: Jack Nelsen 80.1%, Josh Wheeler 75.9%, Jon Weber 75.5%, Treg Bernt 75.1%, Dustin Manwaring 75.0%, James Woodward 74.5%, Mark Sauter 74.3%, Dave Lent 74.3%, Lori McCann 74.1%. The order matches the IFF-network primary-target list.

DOCUMENTED · 2026-04-26 · VOTESWITHDEMS.COM

The voteswithdems.com homepage displays nine Idaho Republican legislators with 'VOTES WITH DEMOCRATS [X]% OF THE TIME' percentages of 74.3%–80.8%. Footer disclaimer: 'Paid for by Stop Idaho RINOs · John Heida Treasurer.' No methodology page exists on the site.

What the methodology actually counts

Click through to any legislator’s “View Crossover Bills” detail. The site shows a per-bill list, sorted “by Democrat unity on position (highest first).” That phrase is the entire methodology, hidden in the sort label.

Sen. Guthrie’s 2026 detail: 172 of 213 “crossover votes”, 80.8%. The first seven bills shown, sorted at 100% Dem unity:

Bill	Subject	Guthrie’s vote	Dem unity
H0559	Updates references to the current Internal Revenue Code	NAY	100% (NAY)
H0504	Prohibits bulk lottery-ticket purchases	YEA	100% (YEA)
S1258	Authorizes liquor licensure for distilleries in certain instances	YEA	100% (YEA)
S1288	Establishes the Idaho High-Needs Student Fund	YEA	100% (YEA)
S1257	Provisions regarding visitation and termination of parental rights	YEA	100% (YEA)
S1300	Director appointments to certain executive agencies	NAY	100% (NAY)
S1301	Provisions regarding sales by certain licensed brewers	YEA	100% (YEA)

Every bill above shows 100% Dem unity. That number is what triggers the “crossover” label.

DOCUMENTED · GUTHRIE DETAIL VIEW · VOTESWITHDEMS.COM

Per voteswithdems.com's own per-legislator detail view, Sen. Guthrie's 80.8% '2026 Crossover' figure derives from 172 of 213 votes counted under the methodology. The bills the site lists as 'crossover' are routine bipartisan legislation: tax-code reference updates, anti-fraud bulk-lottery prohibition, distillery liquor licensing, the Idaho High-Needs Student Fund, parental-rights provisions, executive-appointment rules, brewer-sales licensing, each shown at '100% Dem unity,' meaning every Democrat in the chamber voted the same way as Guthrie.

Read the bills, not the percentages. Updating Idaho’s tax-code references to current federal law is the dictionary definition of a routine bipartisan vote. Prohibiting bulk lottery-ticket purchases is a consumer-protection / anti-fraud bill. The Idaho High-Needs Student Fund is education funding. Parental-rights provisions are family law. Distillery and brewer licensing is local-economy regulatory housekeeping. Director-appointment rules are statutory plumbing.

When 100% of Democrats vote the same way Sen. Guthrie does, the legislature is agreeing, not crossing over. The voteswithdems.com methodology converts every instance of Idaho Republicans and Democrats agreeing on routine policy into a “vote with Democrats”, and then publishes the cumulative count as a betrayal score.

The honest math, on the record

Rep. Marco Erickson, who is on voteswithdems.com’s published target list and has every reason to refute the methodology in detail, published a worked breakdown of the actual 2026 House voting record on his Facebook page on April 17, 2026. The numbers can be reproduced from the public Idaho legislative record. The math:

“The house voted on 486 pieces of legislation this year. 237 of those we all agreed on both Democrats and Republicans or 49%. 51/486 were party line Dems against Republicans. 10%. 198 Republicans were split, 41%, this is where Dems joined us even more times. There is a baseline of 249 votes where Republicans had the opportunity to vote with Democrats if you take out the 237 where we all agreed.”

“When the Freedom group says any of us vote with Dems 70 or 80 or 90%, their data needs reviewed because the Democrat vote influenced the outcome of legislation a total of 17 times and 6 were appropriations out of 486. … The real data you want is how many times were we against our own party and with Dems. My number was 23 times against the party with 18 with Dems. That is 5%. Or 95% with my party majority.”

— Rep. Marco Erickson (R), Idaho House, April 17, 2026

Erickson’s “honest” metric: votes against own party majority, divided by total votes, produces a partisan-deviation rate that, for him personally, is 5%. The Idaho House Republican baseline is 4–10% by his table. Even the highest-IFF-score Republicans land at 21–24% against own party majority, not 75–80%.

The honest math, side-by-side with the published number for the same legislators:

Legislator	voteswithdems.com published	Erickson’s honest metric (against R-majority)
Erickson	(on the homepage list)	5%
Bingham	(R-aligned)	8% (92% with R-majority)
Mickelsen	(target)	9% (91% with R-majority)
Manwaring	75.0%	9% (91% with R-majority)
Cayler	(high-IFF score)	24% (76% with R-majority)
Leavitt	(high-IFF score)	21% (79% with R-majority)
Thompson	(high-IFF score)	22% (78% with R-majority)

The legislators voteswithdems.com publishes 75–80% “with Dems” percentages on are the same legislators who, by the honest metric, vote with their own party’s majority 88–95% of the time.

What gets omitted to make the number work

Three pieces of context, each provably available from the Idaho legislative record, each missing from voteswithdems.com:

1. The bipartisan-unanimity baseline. 49% of 2026 Idaho House votes were ones where Republicans and Democrats agreed. The dashboard removes those from the denominator (correctly), then folds them into the numerator (incorrectly) as soon as a different bill in the 41% intra-Republican-split category lands a given legislator on the Dem-aligned side. The 100%-Dem-unity bills shown in the Guthrie modal are the visible artifact of this counting rule.

2. The intra-Republican-split context. 198 of 486 House votes were Republicans voting against each other. Some Republicans were on the side that aligned with the Democratic caucus; others were on the opposite side. Whichever Republican subset aligns with Democrats on each bill gets a “crossover” tick. This is normal legislative business. The dashboard treats it as RINO behavior.

3. The against-own-party-majority metric. The honest measure of partisan deviation, the one Erickson worked out and posted publicly, is the metric voteswithdems.com would have to publish if it wanted to inform voters rather than recruit them against specific incumbents. The site does not publish it. There is no “About” page, no formula, no methodology link, and no acknowledgment that the metric being computed is one a math-literate reader would call misleading.

The circular self-citation

The full attack chain runs from the same office to the reader and back:

1. Stop Idaho RINOs PAC (Heida) builds voteswithdems.com, designs the methodology, publishes the percentages.
2. @stopidahorinos (Heida’s PAC X account) repeats the percentages as authoritative-looking statistics.
3. @redrangetv (Pruett-operated astroturf-video account) cuts a clip stating “Sen. Guthrie votes with Democrats over 80% of the time”, citing the dashboard number without naming the source.
4. Worley campaign content (the Pruett-network primary challenger to Guthrie) restates the same line in the candidate’s own voice on his own X account.
5. The voter sees the same percentage from four sources and reasonably concludes the underlying claim is corroborated.

It is one source, four masks. The same office that owns the methodology owns the channels that cite it. The reader is given no reason to think the claim is anything other than independent data. The omission is the operation.

Read with

This investigation is the methodological complement to Manufacturing a Martyr, which documents the broader Pruett-network operation that uses voteswithdems.com numbers in its seventy-five-day pre-launch chorus on Sen. Guthrie. The Worley-campaign primary against Guthrie is the operational application; voteswithdems.com is one of the manufactured-evidence inputs.

A separate investigation will, in due course, walk through every named target on the voteswithdems.com homepage with side-by-side voteswithdems-methodology percentages and honest-metric percentages, sourced from the LegiScan API roll-call record. The case for the methodology being misleading does not depend on that comparison, it is established by reading the bills the dashboard itself selects as evidence, but the comparison will make the gap unmissable.

The IFF network operates on omission. The data exists. The context is what’s missing. We publish both.