“The inclusion of a state gun on Idaho’s ballot is silly,” the South Idaho DSA noted in their endorsement of the Colt M1911.South Idaho DSA; Mother Jones illustration
The Winchester Model 1873, an early American lever-action rifle, was branded as “the gun that won the West” by its manufacturers.
In the eponymous Western film Winchester ‘73 (trailer tagline: “a weapon that promised life, but dealt out death”) the rifle stars in a massacre of native people and in multiple shootouts, helping a gruff cowboy hero win the heart of a tragically beautiful bleach-blonde saloon pianist.
This week, the Winchester ‘73 won an election in Idaho—endorsed by the state’s Republican attorney general. It defeated the Colt M1911 pistol, which supporters backed as the most antifascist option on the ballot.
528,641 people in Idaho filled in ballot bubbles for a gun in Tuesday’s election. They voted on the 2026 Official State Gun question, which asked the people of Idaho to choose whether the Winchester models 1894 or 1873, the Remington Model 700, the M1 Garand rifle, or Colt’s Single Action Army or M1911 .45s best represented the state’s values.
The ‘73 eked out a narrow victory, with about 30 percent of the vote.
That disappointed South Idaho Democratic Socialists of America member Isaac, who had written a resolution endorsing the M1911—the first time a DSA chapter has ever, to his knowledge, endorsed a firearm.
“I figured that if the state legislature is willing to put this stupid thing on the ballot, we as socialists have an obligation to intervene in any way possible,” he said. “So I was researching, you know, which guns were woke.” He concluded that the M1911 was the most socialist option: it was used by US troops against fascists in World War II, and 1911 was the first year a socialist won office in Idaho.
John Travers Wood, elected Coeur d’Alene mayor in 1911, was a member of the Socialist Party. (Four decades later, as a member of the House of Representatives, he would transform into a McCarthyite Republican, but in 1911 he was the socialist mayor who would found Coeur d’Alene’s first hospital.)
The state gun measure quickly became the highest-profile item on the Idaho ballot outside the state. Jimmy Kimmel did bits about it.
The local DSA’s decision to endorse the gun followed “the most contentious debate we had in our chapter the entire year,” Isaac said. Some of the chapter’s 74 members were against any endorsement; others wanted to endorse the M1 Garand, another iconic Second World War weapon, alongside independent senatorial candidate Todd Achilles.
The South Idaho DSA’s endorsement (“Whereas: it would be funny”) ended up passing by a 70 percent margin. In large part, Isaac said, the endorsement was done in order to encourage people not to write in “spud gun” or similar, which some feared could lead to their ballots being voided.
The gun measure ended up overshadowing more serious questions, such as a “crushing, but expected” defeat of an attempt to overturn the state’s abortion ban, according to retired gymnastics coach and voting-rights organizer Sam Sandmire. Idaho has some of the most regressive anti-abortion laws in the country, and unlike other red states, didn’t see much of a shift on that front in Tuesday’s blue wave. Sandmire expects that Idahoans, at least in the immediate future, will keep having to fly to Utah—“you know, that bastion of progressivism”—to get abortions.
The reproductive rights measure was rejected by 55 percent of the more than 700,000 people who voted on it.
Some speculated that state House Majority Leader Jason Monks put the gun question on the ballot in order to drum up young men’s turnout so that they’d also vote against items like the reproductive rights amendment. But it had the lowest share of ballots cast of any of the state’s ballot measures, including the one that made English Idaho’s official language.
In a state where hunting and the outdoors are cross-partisan pastimes, a state gun might inspire greater unity than, say, the state dinosaur Oryctodromeus cubicularis. And ten other states have already designated state guns.
“I mean, we have a state amphibian,” Sandmire said.
But most people Sandmire knows, she said, simply left the question blank. Her son, Trevor Hattabaugh, framed his non-vote as a political choice. “I didn’t vote on a state gun,” he said. “‘The gun that won the west’ is essentially saying this gun committed the most genocide of Native Americans.” (Hattabaugh, his mother said, plans to go out hunting this weekend.)
And since the State Gun ballot question was nonbinding, the legislature may yet choose an entirely different gun to represent Idaho.
