This story was produced by RE:PUBLIC Lands Media and is co-published here by permission.
A recent primary election race in Idaho between Republican candidates Stephanie Mickelsen and Kelly Golden wasn’t the sort of contest that shows up on CNN’s Magic Wall, but it yielded a vivid example of how conservation can be used as a political weapon these days. At a forum featuring both women in advance of the May 19 vote, Golden made a comment that drew fire from a new Idaho-based group called the PAC for Public Lands. The political action committee’s creators focus entirely on what state-level politicians say and do about the multi-faceted issue that’s built into their name.
Golden and Mickelsen were vying to represent a rural legislative district called 32A, which wraps around the city of Idaho Falls in Bonneville County. For the second cycle in a row, Mickelsen, an incumbent known for her expertise in agricultural and groundwater issues, beat Golden, who has worked in radio and the nonprofit sector, and who positions herself to the right of Mickelsen. The PAC for Public Lands targeted Golden for defeat, knowing that whoever won this primary will win in November: 32A is a Republican stronghold in a red state, and there’s no Democratic challenger in the general election.
“I’m definitely the more conservative, more platform-aligned candidate,” Golden told RE:PUBLIC in a recent interview. She supports the policies backed by the Idaho Republican Party, which takes a firm states’ rights stance on public lands. The federal government owns and manages nearly 62 percent of Idaho’s total area, around 32.8 million acres in all. The platform calls for reducing this amount and says Idaho should “manage and administer” any land currently owned by the feds.
At the forum, in response to a question about housing affordability, Golden floated an idea that turned heads: Give some of this land to young people and let them build houses on it. What she described was an either-or choice between free land and benefits from an existing state-funded jobs-training program called Idaho LAUNCH.
“If Idaho was able to control our lands again,” she said, “what if we were to open it up to a modern-day Homestead Act, where we could give kids the opportunity to either choose LAUNCH or land? When you graduate high school, do you want to go to LAUNCH? Or would you like five acres that you could do whatever you want to as long as you lived on that land?”
The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged western expansion by giving 160 acres to U.S. citizens 21 and older if they were the head of a household and agreed to live on and improve the land for five years. Idaho LAUNCH gives students up to $8,000 to pursue vocational training in what the state calls “in-demand career fields.”
Golden didn’t say these homes should be built in the middle of Idaho’s most beautiful outdoor spaces. What she had in mind was less-desirable terrain that’s often overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. “The phrase, and I hate it, but some people call it ‘junk land,’” Golden said during our interview. She mentioned an unincorporated town called Howe, which sits about an hour northwest of Idaho Falls.
“Howe is a farming community with a stoplight,” she said. “There are hundreds of thousands of desert-and-sagebrush acres all around it that are just desolate right now. That would be a place I would explore and say that at least it’s viable.”
Howe, she added, is within commuting distance of the Idaho National Laboratory — a major employer in Idaho Falls — and it’s possible a data center will be built in that part of the state someday. Growth could be in the town’s future.
The idea of building affordable housing on repurposed federal land has been a policy goal of the Trump administration, and it’s a politically controversial concept. The PAC’s founders know this, and they weaponized Golden’s remarks with digital ads and bulk text messaging.
“Kelly Golden wants to GIVE AWAY YOUR PUBLIC LANDS TO 18 YEAR OLDS!”, the text said. “At a recent candidate forum … [she] said she wants to give away our public lands—the places where we hunt, fish, graze, and camp. What other crazy ideas could she have in store for Idaho?”
Politics is rough, but was it fair to turn Golden’s remarks into a scare quote? Alexis Pickering, a co-founder of the PAC, thinks so. When Golden mentioned homesteading, Pickering told RE:PUBLIC, “We were like, OK, let’s talk about that! … This was a perfect example of how dangerous it would have been for her to get in there.”
Idaho isn’t turning purple anytime soon, but Pickering and other activists have noticed that protection of public lands is an issue that can draw support from both sides of the aisle. In March, the state legislature adopted Joint Memorial 111, a symbolic measure that calls on Idaho’s congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., to always bear in mind that “selling or transferring [public] lands would not only jeopardize access and tradition, but also place unsustainable and unpredictable financial burdens on states, local governments, and Idaho taxpayers.”
In Wyoming, a similar joint resolution passed easily during the 2026 session, asking Congress to place a priority on public lands protection and saying that “disposal of lands should not occur without meaningful input from state and local governments and affected communities.”
This strong show of support was prompted in part by a failed resolution from the 2025 session that called for Congress to “extinguish the federal title” to public lands and subsurface resources in the state. That’s a long way of saying: Let Wyoming, not the federal government, control the land and what lies beneath it. The resolution allowed for only one exception: the feds could keep Yellowstone National Park.
Gestures like these move both states a little closer in the direction of Montana, where vocal support of public lands has come from all four members of the state’s congressional delegation. In the summer of 2025, in the wake of Utah Senator Mike Lee’s proposal to sell off up to 3.3 million acres of BLM and Forest Service lands, U.S. Senators Tim Sheehy and Steve Daines blocked the provision from being included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Representatives Ryan Zinke and Troy Downing are both members of the chamber’s bipartisan Public Lands Caucus.
In Idaho, the concept driving the PAC for Public Lands is straightforward: Go all in on a single issue, spending money to support candidates who work to protect public lands and to oppose those who don’t. One state to the east, a new group called Protect Wyoming is pursuing a similar strategy, and both PACs appear to have arrived at their approaches independently. They aren’t linked in any way.
The creators of the PACs moved in this direction because PACs can do things that traditional nonprofits can’t. A tax-exempt 501(c)(3) like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers — which is based in Missoula, Montana — is prohibited from directly or indirectly taking part in political campaigns on behalf of candidates. The group can certainly express itself about issues, though—a website resource called Take Action tells supporters about legislation that it thinks should be either supported or opposed.
The PAC for Public Lands was launched earlier this year by four Idaho residents with extensive experience in politics: Pickering, executive director of Conservation Voters for Idaho, a nonprofit affiliated with the D.C.-based League of Conservation Voters; Chuck Coiner, a former Republican state senator; Brian Brooks, a veteran of wildlife nonprofits, including the American Bird Conservancy and the Idaho Wildlife Federation; and Ross Copperman, a former outdoor industry executive who chairs a group called the Idaho Hunger Coalition.
Protect Wyoming was created by two outdoorsmen whose day jobs had never involved political campaigns. Zach Lentsch, the PAC’s chairman, is a Cody-based climber who runs Wyoming Mountain Guides, which offers rock, ice and alpine adventures all over the state. Chris Allen, the treasurer, lives three hours east of Cody in the town of Clearmont, where he and his wife train and sell horses. Both Lentsch and Allen are hunters, and the PAC devotes most of its resources to outreach efforts aimed at this demographic.
“We’re trying to turn hunters into voters in Wyoming,” Lentsch said. “We’re really focused on sportsmen, because that’s a large group in our state.”
It’s also a group that supports public lands for an obvious reason: that’s where the birds, mammals and fish are. As is true of voters in most states, this bloc tends to sit out primaries. In 2024, Lentsch said, only 28,000 of the state’s 140,000 resident hunters and anglers cast primary votes. Protect Wyoming, which officially launched in January of this year, hopes to get more of them to the polls during state elections, with public lands high on their list of priorities.
In both Idaho and Wyoming, the GOP dominates public life. Idaho’s governor, both of its U.S. senators, and its two members of the U.S. House of Representatives are all Republicans, and the party currently holds 90 of 105 seats in the state Legislature. The statistics are almost identical in Wyoming, which, because of its smaller population — roughly 588,000 to Idaho’s 2.03 million — sends only one representative to D.C. In the state legislature, the GOP holds 85 of 93 seats.
The upshot: primaries are where the action is. “The political game in Idaho is all centered on the primary,” PAC for Public Lands’ Brian Brooks explained. “Whichever Republican wins it is usually going to win in November.”
For now, the two PACs only invest in state-level races—as opposed to those for seats in the U.S. Congress—in part because each is new and working with limited resources, and in part because their founders know where their spending can have the most effect. But both PACs were energized by the national backlash that happened in the summer of 2025 in reaction to Mike Lee’s proposal. Conservation Voters for Idaho commissioned a nonpartisan poll in the aftermath of Lee’s maneuver, and it justifiably labeled the results “striking”: 95 percent of Republicans and 97 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that Idaho’s public lands should remain public and protected.
“We have a state Legislature driven by ideological politics, which translates into people advocating for the disposal of federal lands,” Brooks said. “That is not what the public agrees with. And yet, we’ve had all these people getting elected in the primaries.”
Idaho’s 2026 primaries took place on May 19. PAC officials say their ground game — which, among other things, relied on 20 paid canvassers from Idaho who worked around the state — involved 240,000 text messages, 18,000 phone calls, 119,000 mailers and nearly 7,000 door-knocks to send the message that “selling off public lands is a political non-starter in the Idaho Statehouse.”
In a self-assessment of this year’s outcomes, the PAC gave itself a win rate of 59 percent, pointing to positive results that included the defeat of Kelly Golden and victories by state senator Jim Guthrie and state representatives Ben Fuhriman, Mike Veile and Stephanie Mickelsen. Guthrie’s race against fellow Republican David Worley was the most expensive in the 2026 primary cycle. (Shortly before election day, it was reported that PACs had spent a combined $375,107 on the race.) In a pattern similar to the Golden-Mickelsen race, Worley positioned himself to the right of Guthrie.
“The biggest accomplishment of the newly minted PAC for Public Lands was protecting public lands champions and defeating challengers who wanted to privatize and transfer public lands,” the PAC said in a release. “ … All three of these House races had challengers who either had voted to cut key budgets for wildfire, land management, hunting access and/or water resources, or had voiced support for sell-off. Those beliefs were soundly defeated.”
The PAC didn’t win them all, though: In a state race between frequent primary foes Jim Woodward (the incumbent) and Scott Herndon, an anti-property tax advocate who would like to defund agencies like Idaho Fish and Game, the PAC opposed Herndon. This time, he won.
“95 percent of Republicans and 97 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that Idaho’s public lands should remain public and protected.”
Wyoming’s primary happens on August 18. The tactics Lentsch described sound similar to those used by the PAC for Public Lands, but there’s at least one notable difference: Protect Wyoming makes use of public outreach events where they pitch voters face to face. At the first of these, held in Cody in late March, Protect Wyoming drew a capacity crowd to a local craft brewery, delivering a message that appeared to resonate.
Lentsch said the PAC chose Cody for its launch because the surrounding county, Park, contains the most public land of any county in the state. This is an area with a rich tradition of big game hunting and what Lentsch sees as a disconnect in terms of who best represents the needs of hunters.
“All of our Park County state representatives and state senators are squarely anti-public land,” he said in remarks quoted by the Powell Tribune, a Wyoming newspaper. “The biggest takeaway is that way more people hunt in Wyoming than vote, which is crazy, and with numbers like that, we shouldn’t be surprised that when our representatives don’t hunt and recreate by and large, we won’t have representation that reflects our values.”
Protect Wyoming produces a Lawmaker Scorecard that groups candidates under the labels Top Sellouts and Top Champions. State Senator Bob Ide, who introduced the 2025 proposal calling for a massive federal land transfer to the state, gets failing grades in all three categories they scored: Public Lands, Public Wildlife and Scientific Management.
In the aftermath of Kelly Golden’s Idaho defeat, her husband, Josh Golden — a real estate agent who helped manage her campaign — forwarded details to RE:PUBLIC about where the PAC for Public Lands’ donations come from, information that’s also available online in various places, including Idaho Sunshine, the state’s campaign finance and lobbyist disclosure portal.
What you’ll see is that a significant portion of the PAC’s total funding comes from a super PAC in Washington called the LCV Victory Fund, which is affiliated with the League of Conservation Voters. (Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in support of political candidates, but unlike traditional PACs, they can’t give money directly to candidates or coordinate their spending with them.) This fund donated $95,000 of the PAC for Public Lands’s total contributions of nearly $212,000.
Josh Golden declined to comment on the connection, but it’s been argued that accepting major out-of-state donations somehow detracts from the grassroots positioning of a group like the PAC for Public Lands. This was a theme in the hotly contested 2020 U.S. Senate race in Montana between incumbent GOP Senator Steve Daines and Democrat Steve Bullock, who was Montana’s governor from 2013-2021.
The race was supposed to be closer than the final result — Daines won by 10 points — and was unusually expensive, with money flooding into Montana from all over the place. In a Montana Free Press breakdown of the $96.6 million attributable to “third-party spending by political committees,” one group in the mix was the Montana Hunters and Anglers Leadership Fund, which supported Bullock.
“While the group is registered in Billings, the vast majority of the support it has reported … comes from outside Montana,” the report said. “Major donors include California liberal megadonor Karla Jurvetson and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, a national union, each of which contributed $500,000 to the fund. The group also reported a $265,000 contribution from the LCV Victory Fund.”
Jurvetson is a physician and philanthropist who has donated to many campaigns, including a major donation to a super PAC that supported Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential run. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site based in the D.C. area, called the PAC an “astroturf” group, which refers to the tactic of setting up a PAC that appears to be grassroots but isn’t. Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, called it a “decoy group that operates in Montana only during election season.”
Decoying can work in more ways than one. Daines isn’t running for re-election and has endorsed Kurt Alme, a former U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana. In a recent report on this race, the investigative Substack Public Domain suggests that a D.C.-based super PAC called the American Leadership Fund has been helping position Alme as being more pro-public lands than he really is.
For what it’s worth: There’s no sign the PAC for Public Lands or Protect Wyoming are astroturfing. A majority of the Idaho PAC’s donations so far come from in-state, and the second-largest donor ($60,000) is an Eagle, Idaho-based developer and philanthropist named Caleb Roope. Protect Wyoming does not have to disclose its fundraising totals until later this year, but Lentsch and Allen said that almost all their funding comes from small donors, mainly hunters and outdoorspeople in Wyoming.
As Williams added, he and Lentsch are already used to critics questioning their motives. “We’ve gotten messages saying we’re a greenie group trying to convert hunters and anglers,” he said. “I’ve also been told that I’m being fed propaganda and fear-mongering about public land being sold off. What I tell people is to go look at a legislator’s track record. We created the PAC to make it clear as day what these candidates introduced legislatively and what they’ve voted in favor of.”
