The Kootenai County Republican Central Committee voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to elect Ron Jacobson as its new chairman, after the retired banker and former mayor of Post Falls called for unity between the party’s moderate and hardline factions.
Jacobson’s election, by a vote of 63-9, officially ended the reign of longtime county GOP leader Brent Regan, who narrowly lost his precinct committee race in Idaho’s May 19 Republican primary. Regan was eligible to be re-elected as chairman despite having lost his seat, but he wasn’t nominated in Thursday night’s meeting, leaving Jacobson to face only state Sen. Ben Toews (R-Coeur d'Alene).
“I’m tired of infighting, I’m tired of name calling, I’m tired of separation,” Jacobson said before the vote, adding that everyone on the committee agrees on “probably 90 to 95% of the topics.”
“I think that division causes harm to the party, harm to our local areas,” he said. “When you’re playing team sports, you accomplish much more, you’re much more successful, when you play as a team, as opposed to fighting with each other.”
Candidates endorsed by the Kootenai Freedom Caucus, Regan’s faction, won 37 precinct committee seats in the May 19 election – exactly half of the total – while candidates backed by the North Idaho Republicans won 33. Four independent candidates won and became crucial players in the week of behind-the-scenes politicking that preceded Thursday night’s vote.
“There’s been a lot of horse trading, there’s been a lot of phone calls,” Coeur d’Alene Mayor Dan Gookin, who ran unsuccessfully for a precinct committee seat, said in an interview Tuesday. Gookin, who was backed by the North Idaho Republicans, said he ran solely to help oust Regan and would have resigned from the committee immediately afterward.
In a sign of the broad support for Jacobson, who now serves as interim city administrator of Coeur d’Alene, he was nominated by Randy Westlund, the current mayor of Post Falls who defeated Jacobson in 2025 and was endorsed by the Kootenai Freedom Caucus as a committeeman.
Regan lost his race to dental anesthesiologist Rick Montandon, who was affiliated with neither group, by a vote of 286 to 272. Another unaffiliated committeeman, Nina Beesley, nominated Toews, who offered a similar message of unity before the vote.
“The scriptures tell us to love our neighbor,” Toews said. “That’s my vision, for us to look at each other as neighbors instead of as groups.”
The North Idaho Republicans were founded in 2022 to oppose Regan’s leadership, helping their preferred candidates win 30 of the 74 precinct committee seats in 2024. Jack Riggs, a Coeur d’Alene physician and former lieutenant governor of Idaho who co-founded the group, said in an interview Wednesday that he hoped the previous week’s election results would help the committee “elect good leadership.”
“My hope is not for a policy change as much as it’s for people who disagree with each other being able to have a conversation, not to distrust or hate each other,” Riggs said. “I would hope, locally and across the country, that Republicans can come together because Republicans have a much better agenda than the Democrats. The party is stronger when it’s working together.”
Riggs and other members of the North Idaho Republicans have criticized Regan and his allies for associating with white supremacists and antisemites, including podcaster Dave Reilly, who was hired by the hardline Idaho Freedom Foundation while Regan chaired the group’s board.
“Pointing out the existence of racism doesn’t make you ‘woke,’” Riggs wrote in a 2024 column, after motorists shouted racial slurs at Black members of the University of Utah women’s basketball team while they walked in downtown Coeur d’Alene. “It makes you a good Republican, and a good citizen.”
Any hard feelings toward Regan from members of the committee were kept in check Thursday evening, and they all stood to applaud the longtime chairman after Jacobson’s election when a committeeman suggested they should thank Regan for his service.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Regan declined to comment on the election results or Thursday’s committee meeting, saying only that “it’s up to the committee to decide the direction they want to go.”
In its final meeting of the previous term, the a majority of the KCRCC voted on Saturday, May 23, to transfer half of its cash—about $64,000—to the Republican Party of Idaho, according to a Facebook post by the committee’s official account. The outgoing committee also voted to close all of its social media accounts except for those on Facebook, YouTube and X.
A few hours before the committee met to choose its new leader, Beesley said her five years on the committee had taught her “it is important to truly care about the people and defend God-given rights and constitutional principles,” and also to “speak the truth with compassion, be fair, and just.”
“The past five years have been a joy, but there are also things that transpired and decisions that were made that were a source of great sorrow,” Beesley wrote in an email. “That chapter of life is coming to a close. At the KCRCC reorganization meeting, we are moving into a new chapter in our community.”
Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact The Spokesman-Review's managing editor.