OPINION: What’s not to like about Dorothy Moon?

Give Idaho Republican Party Chairperson Dorothy Moon her due.

She may be an election denier, an agnostic when it comes to telling the truth and a divisive figure within her own party.

But her antics have galvanized the very political forces she so vehemently opposes.

Start with some of the Republican office holders she’s trying to purge. For example, there are Republican House members who have a bull’s-eye on their backs because they opposed school vouchers or stood by Gov. Brad Little’s veto of a bill putting a bounty on librarians. Among them are Reps. Lori McCann, of Lewiston, and Education Committee Chairperson Julie Yamamoto, of Caldwell.

Whether it involves standing up to Moon’s acolytes on local GOP central committees — as McCann has done — or organizing under the banner of the Main Street Idaho group, which consists of 11 GOP state senators and 18 House members, these Republicans are done keeping their heads down or even pandering to the party’s fringe. They’re taking the battle to Moon and her minions.

More importantly, they are acting now. That means talking to the public. It means organizing their campaigns and working on mobilizing their voters. And it involves honing their political skills long before they get ambushed from the right during next May’s closed GOP primary.

The most graphic example occurred last week when 2nd District Congressman Mike Simpson — a frequent target of the right — rebuked Moon as a relative newcomer to a state that she has yet to understand. Simpson was responding to Moon’s criticism of his opposition to Ohio Republican Jim Jordan’s candidacy for speaker of the House. Ultimately, Simpson supported another right-wing candidate, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, but not before he issued this blistering takedown of Moon:

“Perhaps Chairwoman Dorothy Moon has not lived in Idaho long enough to understand how important things like agriculture, delisting wolves, our nation’s military and the Idaho National Laboratory are for our state,” Simpson wrote. “And I will not take Chairwoman Moon’s ill-advised input when I have been fighting for Idaho longer than she has lived in the state.”

Next comes the rank-and-file members of central committees who have openly pushed back against Moon’s tactics. Among them:

Bingham County Republicans have gone to court to stop Moon from interfering with their election of a new central committee chairperson. Seventh District Court Judge Darren B. Simpson has issued an order barring Moon and the state GOP from taking those steps.

The leadership of Ada County’s GOP central committee resigned en masse.

“The energy of the party is more about infighting than collaboration — more about beating each other than beating Democrats,” they wrote.

Last week, GOP central committees from Madison, Jefferson, Fremont, Lemhi, Clark and Butte counties backed Little and the 14 House members who sustained his library bill veto.

Madison County GOP Central Committee Chairperson Randy Sutton told the Post Register of Idaho Falls: “There’s some divided parts of the party right now, and the majority of this group is more supportive of a more moderate approach to governing.”

Moon has also proven to be the poster child for eliminating the closed GOP primary and the voter suppression that restricts access to the GOP ballots only to registered Republicans. It would launch a top four primary in the spring — the top four vote-getters would advance to the general election in November regardless of party affiliation. Presumably in solid Republican or Democratic districts, general election voters would get a chance to consider moderate candidates who otherwise would be eliminated by the ideological voters who dominate the primary.

In November, an in-state runoff — or ranked choice voting — would determine the outcome. Voters state their first, second and third preferences. If no candidate captures an outright majority, the least successful drops out and the second and third preferences are split among the remaining candidates until someone reaches a majority. It would have the effect of encouraging candidates to appeal to the broad center.

By adopting a rule makingit even more difficult for non-Republicans to vote in the GOP primary, as well as its silencing of the Idaho Federation of Republican Women, the Idaho Young Republicans and Idaho College Republicans, Moon’s GOP incentivized even more prominent Republicans — notably former Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter — to endorse the Open Primary Initiative than the measure’s supporters had any right to expect.

Moon has been such a good foil for the initiative campaign that supporters believe she’s one reason their drive to secure the 63,000 valid voter signatures needed to qualify the measure for next year’s ballot is ahead of schedule.

A more collaborative party chairperson might have lulled all these forces into complacency. So, keep it up, Dorothy.

You’re doing a great job. — M.T.