Retrospective audit: Way Back funded both 2024 party-primary replacement and 2026 Republican-primary candidate intervention

Applying the new influence/use methodology reveals a concrete cross-cycle pattern around Way Back PAC that should be tested further rather than treated as ideological proof. In 2024, campaign-finance reporting based on Idaho Secretary of State records identified Way Back PAC as a $250,000 donor to Idahoans for Open Primaries. Idaho's official ballot summary states Proposition 1 would have abolished party primaries, replaced them with a single top-four primary in which all voters could vote on all candidates, and allowed candidates to list an affiliation without representing or even being associated with that party. The current 2026 Idaho Republican Party platform takes the opposite institutional position: it says Idaho Republican primaries should be open to people affiliated as Republicans for at least one year who support a vast majority of the platform, says allowing people with no loyalty to the party/platform to select Republican candidates is improper, and expressly opposes ranked-choice voting. In 2026, Way Back then reported $350,000 to Defend and Protect Idaho, $100,000 to Hometown Heroes and $100,000 to Idaho First in its Apr.1-Jun.3 filing. Idaho Capital Sun reports Defend and Protect Idaho spent more than $752,800 in Republican primary races, supporting 23 Republican candidates and opposing 14, and quotes chairman Gary Raney saying Way Back sought his group's perspective on Idaho politics and that the groups concluded their missions aligned. This establishes that the same national PAC materially financed two different mechanisms affecting candidate selection in Idaho across adjacent cycles: first, an attempted structural change eliminating party-nomination primaries; second, direct financial support for Idaho PACs intervening in Republican primary candidate contests. The evidence does NOT by itself establish that Way Back's objective was to move the Idaho Republican Party left, that it selected individual Idaho targets, or that the 2024 and 2026 programs were centrally coordinated as one strategy. Those are now high-priority questions. To test direction rather than infer it, compare the 2026 supported/opposed candidates' actual legislative records against the contemporaneous Idaho GOP platform, then seek Way Back/WFF/recipient statements, research products, polling, grant terms, or communications that identify desired candidate traits or policy outcomes.