Phil McGrane is not what most people picture when they think of a politician. He’s warm, self-deprecating, and genuinely enthusiastic about the machinery of government in a way that most people reserve for things they actually love. As Idaho’s 28th Secretary of State, he’s modernized voter services, testified before Congress on election administration, overseen one of the most scrutinized election cycles in recent memory, and somehow managed to bring baby goats into the Idaho Capitol as part of a staff onboarding plan. He’s also been through a divorce, a daughter’s diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes, and the particular emotional wilderness that follows a hard-fought statewide campaign.
On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, host Tommy Ahlquist sat down with McGrane for a conversation that wandered through all of it: the work of running elections, the culture he’s built at the Secretary of State’s office, the very human cost of public life, and his conviction that Idaho’s best days are still ahead.
Running Government Like You Mean It
McGrane came into the Secretary of State’s office with something most incoming officials don’t have: a list. Years of watching the office from the outside, first as Ada County Clerk and then as a close observer of state government, had given him a clear picture of what he would do if he ever got the keys. When he did, he moved quickly.
The office has replaced numerous software systems, added dedicated staff for election equipment oversight, and brought on a data visualization specialist whose specific job is making voter and election information engaging rather than impenetrable. The voter services platform at voteIdaho.gov has been rebuilt into something actually useful for the people who need it. McGrane testified before Congress on the administration of Idaho’s 2024 elections, a signal of how the office’s credibility has grown.
None of it happened by accident. McGrane describes a culture built around a simple conviction: anything worth doing is worth doing well. He also describes an office that is, by his own cheerful admission, the most fun place to work in the Capitol complex. The goat story is real. On his communications director’s first day, McGrane arranged for baby goats from a farm in Murphy, Idaho to be waiting in the office. His team thought he had lost his mind. By the end of the day, everyone was holding goats and laughing. It’s a small story, but it illustrates something genuine about how he thinks leadership works: people do their best work when they feel like their environment is worth showing up for.
The Cost Nobody Talks About
The most candid part of the conversation is the section where both McGrane and Ahlquist talk honestly about what running for office actually takes from a person and a family. It’s a conversation that doesn’t happen often in public, and it’s worth the time of anyone who has ever wondered why more good people don’t run.
McGrane’s 2022 primary race for Secretary of State was the most competitive statewide primary that cycle. He won, narrowly, and the result wasn’t called until 9 the following morning. There was no champagne toast, no victory speech. He and his then-wife went to bed not knowing if they’d won. The photo from election night shows an empty room with signs coming off the walls.
In the same campaign cycle, his daughter Kennedy was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. His phone can buzz at any moment with a blood sugar alert. He started marriage counseling during the campaign, a decision he credits with making it through at all. He recently went through a divorce, 20-plus years of marriage, and was clear that he’s sharing it not because it’s dramatic but because people who observe public figures from the outside rarely understand what the life actually looks like from the inside.
Ahlquist shared his own version of this story. The toll on families. The people who know you for 20 years and say things online that genuinely shock you. The moment near the end of his governor’s race when a close friend finally said out loud what he already knew: you’re going to lose. The wave of emotion that followed. The way the campaign office is there one day and empty the next, and how nobody quite warns you about that specific hollowness.
What both men agree on is that the grief is real, the bonds formed in those trenches are lasting, and the experience is genuinely impossible to prepare for or fully describe to someone who hasn’t been through it.
The Dirk Kempthorne Standard
Governor Dirk Kempthorne came up naturally in the conversation, as he has in many Ever Onward episodes this year. McGrane served as master of ceremonies for the lying in state ceremony after Kempthorne’s passing, and spent time in deep reflection preparing for it, reading and listening to the recurring themes in what people said about him.
What struck McGrane was how consistently people described feeling personally seen by Kempthorne, grown men talking about feeling loved, everyone describing a moment where he made them feel like the center of the universe. Ahlquist described watching Kempthorne at the end of a private dinner, unable to find him until he looked in the kitchen hallway and saw him working his way through every single member of the wait staff, genuinely asking about their lives, looking them in the eye, thanking them. Not performing it. Doing it.
McGrane’s takeaway, and Ahlquist’s, is that this is the standard that Idaho politics needs more of, not nostalgia for a past era, but people who bring genuine care and humanity to public service in this one. McGrane’s own contribution to that is a lunch he organized early in his tenure that brought all of Idaho’s statewide elected officials together for the first time in years. He handed out icebreaker cards and had everyone share something no one else in the room knew about them. By the end, people were laughing. Walking out, it was harder to see colleagues as adversaries and easier to see them as Idahoans who, whatever their differences, had all survived the same gauntlet to get to the same table.
Why Good People Still Need to Run
The conversation ends on a theme that has quietly run through the entire Ever Onward political series this year: the bench is getting thinner. The combination of social media hostility, personal scrutiny, and the sheer grind of modern campaigning is making it harder to convince capable people to put themselves forward. McGrane has received death threats. Election officials around the country are leaving their jobs. The acceptance of political violence as a legitimate response to election outcomes is rising in polling data in ways that should concern everyone.
And yet both McGrane and Ahlquist come down firmly on the side of optimism, not naively, but with eyes open. They see the Debbie Critchfields and the Brad Littles and the people coming up behind them. They see a new generation of 30-somethings organizing and paying attention. They see a state that has consistently produced leaders who genuinely love it and want to serve it well.
McGrane put it simply: we are not going back to the good old days. We are moving forward. The question is whether enough people with the right values and the right temperament are willing to step into the arena to shape what forward looks like.
As Ahlquist has said before, and repeated here: we need the next Dirk Kempthornes. They’re out there. The work is convincing them to run.
Phil McGrane serves as Idaho’s 28th Secretary of State.
