Shiva Rajbhandari wasn’t even of legal voting age when he decided to take on a 47-year-old incumbent on the Boise school board. The high school senior turned 18 days before election day last month – and won.
The young climate activist ran against Steve Schmidt, who was endorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, a local group agitating to ban books from the public library that contained LGBTQ+ themes. The group also planned an armed protest at Rajbhandari’s high school after a student was suspended for bringing a gun near campus.