POCATELLO — Terri Pickens Manweiler, a Pocatello native who is running to become Idaho’s next lieutenant governor, visited Centennial Park on Saturday afternoon for a meet-and-greet, where she spoke with voters in her hometown about her candidacy.

Manweiler said her bid for lieutenant governor was inspired in large part by current Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, whom Manweiler said she wanted to run against in the 2022 election in order to return Idaho’s political conversation “back to normal.”

“I thought, ‘I’m going to run against her because what she’s done is she’s taken the statesmanship out of politics in Idaho,’” she said of McGeachin. “She’s taken her ideology and made it so far to the extreme that we’re at a point where we’re not even having conversations anymore with the people that matter. We need to start having conversations again about how we can work together and be better in Idaho.”

McGeachin isn’t running to keep her position as Idaho’s lieutenant governor and instead has launched a campaign to oust Gov. Brad Little and take over Idaho’s governorship.

Manweiler said she still decided to throw her hat in the ring, though, to challenge some of the Republican candidates on the lieutenant gubernatorial ticket. Manweiler is the only Democratic candidate running against three other hopefuls — Scott Bedke, Priscilla Giddings and Luke Malek — who are all running as Republicans.

Manweiler said “for too long” Republican candidates haven’t been challenged enough in Idaho in their bids for statewide public office, and she wants to change that.

“It’s so important to challenge them because the dialogue can shift,” she said. “As soon as people start having conversations, they realize that they’re voting against their own interests.”

Manweiler acknowledged that her bid for lieutenant governor is an uphill battle and that she needs to raise a lot of money to keep up with her challengers in a Republican-majority state.

“I have to raise $500,000 to get across the state, and that’s a lot of money,” she said. “That’s a lot of money for this race, it’s a lot of money for a Democrat to raise an Idaho, but that’s what I need to raise … because we have to be at the table, and in order for us to be at the table, we have to be taken seriously and in order for me to be taken seriously, I need to have a nice war chest going into the general election against whichever one of them comes out of the primary.”

The funds Manweiler raises, she said, are going to “put the spirit” in her opponents so that they have to start having difficult conversations about the issues that matter to Idahoans.

“That’s when we’ll start seeing a shift, when they’re forced to the table to have the conversations that they’re not having to have right now,” she said.

Manweiler, a fourth-generation Idahoan who was born and raised in Pocatello, announced she was running for lieutenant governor in August. She was a lifelong Republican until 2016 and has not previously run for partisan office.

Manweiler graduated from the University of Southern California and University of Idaho Law School. She helped found Pickens Law, where she practices commercial, construction and real estate law, in 2008. Manweiler currently lives in Boise with her husband, Mark, and her two children.

While there are going to be groups of Idahoans Manweiler “won’t be able to reach” because of their aversion to Democratic politicians, Manweiler said her strategy is to find issues on which they can agree.

“When you get into conversations with those people, you have to just say, ‘OK. Let’s talk about where we agree. Let’s find one thing we can agree on,’” she said. “There’s always going to be at least one issue we can talk about.”