Kent Marmon
Lost 4 elections (2010, 2012, 2014, 2022). Won in 2024 against incumbent Yamamoto with 3x more money raised. Now scores 94.8% on IFF's own loyalty index. The playbook in action.
Who he is
Kent Marmon is the case study for the playbook. The cleanest way to understand how the IFF-aligned network actually operates is to read his arc end-to-end.
Recalled from local Caldwell office in 1987. Lost four straight Republican primaries between 2010 and 2022, including a 2014 write-in attempt that pulled 12 percent of the vote, and a 2022 loss to Chris Allgood at 31 percent to 44. Then in 2024 he raised three times the money of his 2022 attempt, beat incumbent Rep. Julie Yamamoto in the Republican primary 56.8 to 43.2, and won the general by 30 points. He now scores 94.8 percent on IFF’s own Freedom Index in 2026, with a 100 percent Spending Score in 2025. Lifetime: 95.5 percent Freedom, 97.1 percent Spending.
He votes the way he’s told. The receipts are on IFF’s own scorecard.
IFF grades its own loyalty
The Idaho Freedom Foundation publishes a public Freedom Index that grades every legislator’s vote against the IFF’s preferred position on every bill IFF tracks. The closer a legislator’s percentage is to 100, the more reliably they vote IFF’s position.
Marmon’s scores are not just high. They are near-perfect.
DOCUMENTED — IFF FREEDOM INDEX (2026)
Idaho Freedom Foundation's own legislator-profile page lists Kent Marmon's 2026 Freedom Score at 94.8% and his 2026 Spending Score at 94.2%.
DOCUMENTED — IFF FREEDOM INDEX (2025)
Idaho Freedom Foundation's own legislator-profile page lists Kent Marmon's 2025 Freedom Score at 96.1% and his 2025 Spending Score at 100.0%, a perfect score on the IFF spending-vote alignment.
A 100 percent Spending Score is the explicit organizational metric of doing what you’re told.
Act One. The 1987 recall. 71 percent said remove.
Marmon was recalled from the Caldwell City Council on April 28, 1987. The recall vote is documented in the official minutes of the May 4, 1987 Caldwell City Council meeting, Book 28, Page 62.
The vote was not close. 2,101 to 858. That is 71 to 29.
DOCUMENTED — CALDWELL CITY COUNCIL MINUTES
Per the official minutes of the Caldwell City Council Regular Meeting of May 4, 1987 (Book 28, Page 62-63), the Special City Recall Election held April 28, 1987 produced the following result: 'Shall Kent Marmon be recalled? 2,101 Yes / 858 No.' Council members Jack Carter and Durand Marcus were also recalled in the same election. Marmon was absent from the May 4 meeting where the canvass of votes was officially accepted.
Caldwell voters did not narrowly reject Marmon. They rejected him by more than 70 points in a special election convened to remove him. Two of his Council colleagues, Jack Carter and Durand Marcus, were recalled the same day. Marmon did not bother attending the meeting where the recall was certified. Then he spent 38 years trying to get back into elected office.
Act Two. The decade-long string of losses.
Per Ballotpedia’s campaign-history tracking:
| Year | Race | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Idaho House D10B (R primary) | Lost |
| 2012 | Idaho State Senate D10 (R primary) vs. Jim Rice | Lost 31.2% to 68.8% |
| 2014 | Idaho House D10B (R primary, write-in) vs. Greg Chaney | Lost, 12.2% / 251 votes |
| 2022 | Idaho House D11B (R primary) vs. Chris Allgood + Mike Miller | Lost, 31.1%, 1,062 votes |
| 2024 | Idaho House D11A (R primary) vs. incumbent Julie Yamamoto | Won, 56.8%, 1,912 votes |
| 2024 | Idaho House D11A (general) vs. Anthony Porto (D) | Won, 65.9%, 10,995 votes |
Four straight losses from 2010 through 2022. Every Republican primary he entered, he lost. He filed in 2014 as a write-in candidate after failing to qualify on the regular ballot, and pulled 12 percent of the vote against an established Republican.
Four losing primaries in 14 years. Then a fifth race that he wins by 14 points. The candidate did not change. The operation behind the candidate did.
The donor names — Sunshine receipts
Per the Idaho SOS Sunshine campaign-finance database, Marmon’s $500-or-more donors across cycles:
| Amount | Donor | Cycle |
|---|---|---|
| $1,000 | Donald Bishop | 2024 + 2022 (paired) |
| $1,000 | William R. McCann, Jr. | 2024 + 2022 (paired) |
| $1,000 | William McCann III | 2024 + 2022 (paired) |
| $500 | RAY HORRELL | 2024 |
| $500 | Idaho Chooses Life (IFF-aligned PAC) | 2022 |
| $500 | Dominic Brandon | 2022 |
| $500 | Craig Sjoberg — also gave $1,000 to Cayler’s D11B campaign | 2022 |
| $500 | Scott Hoover | 2022 |
| $500 | Amanda Marmon Takagi (family) | 2022 |
| $500 | Leslie Batt Corbett | 2022 |
The IFF leadership donor names — Beck, Smith, Regan — do not appear on Marmon’s $500-or-more direct-donor list. The network’s funding came in through the broader infrastructure: the smear-and-fabrication operation that cleared Yamamoto, the IFF / Idaho Freedom PAC institutional support documented in the prior cycle, the YAL / Make Liberty Win national-PAC pipeline, and shared-donor giving from individuals who also gave to other Gang of 8 candidates (Craig Sjoberg paired across the D11 House delegation).
Act Three. 2024: the money triples.
DOCUMENTED — BALLOTPEDIA / OPENSECRETS / FEC
Kent Marmon's campaign raised $12,037 and spent $8,905 during his unsuccessful 2022 D11B primary. In 2024, his campaign raised $39,455 and spent $35,819, more than three times the prior cycle, and he won.
A 3.3x increase in fundraising between a losing race and a winning race is not the candidate suddenly becoming more popular. It is outside money showing up.
Act Four. Where the outside money came from.
The principal vehicles for the outside money are documented:
Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). National libertarian organization founded in 2008 from the Ron Paul presidential campaign. Per outside reporting compiled at Faculty First Responders, YAL took $5,920,023 from Koch-network sources (Koch / DonorsTrust / Donors Capital Fund) between 2012 and 2019, in addition to support from the Charles Koch Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and FreedomWorks. YAL’s policy stack, including its Hazlitt Coalition, advocates strict libertarian principles, including support for drug legalization.
Make Liberty Win. Federal PAC funded almost entirely by YAL, per the Wyoming News investigation linked below. Make Liberty Win has focused on electing Freedom Caucus-aligned candidates in state legislative races across the country.
Citizens Alliance of Idaho. State affiliate of Cliff Maloney’s Citizens Alliance of America. Per Steve Taggart’s April 7, 2026 Political Potatoes investigation, CAI is 99.72% funded by the national Citizens Alliance PAC out of Fairfax, Virginia. The national PAC is over 72% funded by POM of Pennsylvania, LLC, a company that manufactures gaming machines marketed under a “skill” classification and is currently being sued by the Pennsylvania Attorney General for using that classification to circumvent state gambling laws. Idaho banned similar machines in 2015. Doyle Beck is a documented personal donor to the parent organization.
DOCUMENTED — IDAHO RADIO COLUMN (BILL COLLEY)
In an August 11, 2025 column on Idaho's NewsRadio 1310, Bill Colley wrote that Idaho legislators were 'backed by a national organization known as Young Americans for Liberty, or YAL,' and framed the hypocrisy directly: 'If a politician is elected on the strength of YAL money, how is there a difference? Isn't that called hypocrisy?'
DOCUMENTED — WYOMING NEWS INVESTIGATION
Wyoming News documented the same pattern unfolding in Wyoming: 'rising influence of libertarian PACs and dark money' transforming legislative races. Sweetwater County GOP Chair Elizabeth Bingham estimated 'more than $1 million already sunk into the races by dark money alone' and stated, 'We have never seen anything close to this amount of dark money being spent in Wyoming.' The article identifies the same operating-model PACs, YAL, Make Liberty Win, and Americans for Prosperity, and notes the pattern extends to Idaho, Texas, Montana, Ohio, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Minnesota.
YAL has never explicitly promoted cannabis legalization in Idaho. They took $5.9 million from the Koch network. They run Make Liberty Win. Make Liberty Win pours money into Idaho House primaries. Marmon’s campaign tripled its fundraising the cycle he won.
The point is not that Marmon personally favors cannabis legalization. The point is that he accepted the support of a national network whose policy stack includes positions he publicly opposes, and whose money is what put him in office. He has not disavowed any of it.
Act Five. The Yamamoto seat-clearing.
The District 11A House seat Marmon won in 2024 had been held by Rep. Julie Yamamoto, a Republican who had originally been backed by the IFF-aligned network until she stopped voting the way the network wanted. Yamamoto is a retired educator. She chaired the House Education Committee. She helped open a charter school and sat on its board. She opposed the IFF-backed voucher program. She voted her conscience on library legislation.
When she stopped voting the IFF position, the network turned on her.
John Heida’s Stop Idaho RINOs PAC distributed a fabricated Playboy magazine cover with Yamamoto’s face superimposed, paired with the false accusation that she was “promoting pornography in schools.” The image did not exist. The PAC manufactured it using AI-generation and Photoshop. It distributed the fabrication through social-media at primary-election scale across Republican audiences in District 11A, before Yamamoto could effectively respond.
Marmon was endorsed by the same Stop Idaho RINOs PAC that produced the fabrication. He was endorsed by IFF. He was endorsed by Idaho Freedom PAC. He accepted all three endorsements knowingly. The fabrication ran in his primary cycle. The seat-clearing operation was the price of admission, and he paid it.
The 2024 Republican primary result:
| Candidate | Vote share | Vote count |
|---|---|---|
| Kent Marmon | 56.8% | 1,912 |
| Julie Yamamoto (incumbent) | 43.2% | 1,455 |
A 457-vote margin in a race that drew only 3,367 total Republican primary voters. The fabrication moved enough voters to flip the seat. A House Education Committee Chair who was also a retired educator and a charter-school board member lost her primary to the fifth attempt of a candidate who had been recalled from city council in 1987.
DOCUMENTED — STOP IDAHO RINOS YAMAMOTO PLAYBOY FABRICATION
In the 2024 Idaho Republican primary cycle, John Heida's Stop Idaho RINOs PAC distributed a fabricated Playboy magazine cover image with sitting Rep. Julie Yamamoto's face superimposed, paired with the false accusation that she was 'promoting pornography in schools.' The image did not exist. The PAC manufactured it using AI-generation and Photoshop. Marmon was endorsed by the same PAC. Yamamoto lost the primary to Marmon by 457 votes.
Act Six. The personal-record backstop.
Per Ballotpedia, Marmon’s career experience includes owning and operating a family printing business, positions at Albertsons, building Ace Hardware stores for a franchisee, and a training-development role at MotivePower. By 2026 he is listed as Retired. He receives a $25,000 base salary plus per diem ($86 per day if within 50 miles of the Capitol, $253 per day if farther) for his House service.
A federal tax lien is also documented:
DOCUMENTED — FEDERAL TAX LIEN
$17,200.05 federal tax lien recorded against Kent A. Marmon at the Canyon County, Idaho recorder's office on June 16, 2009. Tax type 1040 (individual income tax), tax year 1993.
The IRS does not record liens immediately. A 2009 lien recording for a 1993 tax year is a sixteen-year unresolved obligation.
What he sponsors now
A snapshot of bills Marmon has sponsored or co-sponsored since taking office tells the story of what the network expects in return for putting him in the seat:
- HJR004 (2025), constitutional amendment to give the legislature exclusive authority over psychoactive substances (an anti-cannabis-legalization framework)
- HJM017 (2026), calls on the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges and restore “the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman”
- H0238 (2025), mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools
- H0557 (2026), pre-empt local-government antidiscrimination ordinances (overrides local civil-rights protections)
- H0601 / H0745 (2026), prohibit taxpayer funding of government unions
- HCR028 (2026), establish a state day of fasting and prayer
- S1059 (2025), define “embryo,” “fetus,” and “preborn child” for wrongful-death and homicide statutes
- HJM015 (2026), federal action on weather modification (a chemtrails-adjacent framing)
The IFF policy stack. Marmon’s sponsorship calendar reads as the IFF’s legislative agenda, item by item.
Why Marmon is the playbook
The model is:
- Pick a candidate who needs the machine. Financially stressed, politically marginal, repeatedly-failed candidates are ideal. Their continued political existence depends on the network’s continued support. They will not defect.
- Clear the path. If an incumbent is in the way, the propaganda network manufactures a controversy. The Yamamoto “porn in libraries” campaign is the cleanest documented case.
- Triple the candidate’s funding. Outside PACs (Citizens Alliance, Young Americans for Liberty, IFF-aligned vehicles) bring the campaign infrastructure the candidate cannot generate himself. The result looks like a competitive primary. It is a placement.
- Collect the votes. Once seated, the candidate votes the IFF stack with near-perfect fidelity. The IFF’s own scorecard publishes the loyalty grade.
Marmon is the most documented case of this model running end-to-end. Recognizing the model in Marmon’s story is how to recognize it when it runs again. It is being run again, in real time, in the Worley vs. Guthrie Senate D28 race, documented in Anatomy of a Lie.
Connected pages
- Lucas Cayler dossier, D11 paired-vote partner
- John Heida dossier, Stop Idaho RINOs operator who ran the Yamamoto smear
- State Freedom Caucus Network organization page, Maria Nate’s whip apparatus
- Citizens Alliance organization page, the funding pipeline
- Idaho Freedom Foundation organization page, the policy shop publishing the loyalty index
- The Propaganda Network organization page, Pruett / Hurst / Heida amplifier stack
- Doyle Beck dossier, CAA donor and IFF board
- Cliff Maloney dossier, CAA founder and CEO
- Anatomy of a Lie investigation
- Follow the Money investigation
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The Connections