BOISE - Nicole LeFavour was in a hardware store in St. Anthony, deep in eastern Idaho, when several women wanted to know where the Democratic 2nd District Congressional candidate stood on hated "Obamacare."

"I could honestly tell them, I'm against the individual mandate," said LeFavour, who is retiring from the state Senate to run for Congress.

That LeFavour, considered one of the Idaho Legislature's most-reliable liberals since joining in 2004, falls on opposite sides of the health care overhaul from her Democratic president may sound like she's fishing for conservative votes, but the 48-year-old Boise resident insists the sentiment is heartfelt.

"It actually makes insurance companies more powerful," LeFavour said. "I don't think people trust insurance companies. They want consumer protections."

She's on Tuesday's Democratic primary ballot, for the district that runs east from Boise to Wyoming and Montana. Jack Wayne Chappell has filed against her, but the Buhl man's web site indicates he's not running a serious campaign. Chappell ran as a Republican in 2008.

LeFavour is vying for seven-term Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson's seat and said it's not merely a symbolic campaign. "This is a race to win," she said.

While Simpson's Republican primary foe, Chick Heileson, brands him a liberal, LeFavour insists Simpson is shifting further right. He was among 172 Republicans and five Democrats in 2009 who opposed a bill to help win women equal pay, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Simpson has "kind of lost what we would say is a reliable moderation," she said.

LeFavour, Idaho's first openly gay lawmaker, spent her legislative career seeking unsuccessfully to amend the state's Human Rights Act to include discrimination protections for gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people.

She doesn't see her sexual preference - her partner is Carol - as a major impediment to running in Idaho, despite the state's 2006 constitutional ban on gay marriage. In heavily Mormon eastern Idaho, she said, "They have a problem with gay marriage. They don't have a problem with gay people. Fundamentally, your average Mormon family has a gay kid."

In the late-1990s, LeFavour was embroiled in a personal dispute with a former girlfriend. She filed a protection order seeking to shield herself from stalking, but pleaded guilty in 1999 to violating the order, on what she calls poor advice from her attorney; she didn't believe she was guilty. She paid a $163 fine.

This March, the former girlfriend's brother released a statement to The Associated Press where he conceded he testified inaccurately a decade ago. LeFavour did nothing illegal, he said.

LeFavour says being a domestic violence victim informed her decision-making, in particular as a member of the House Judiciary and Rules Committee until 2008.

"Sometimes, nobody there had ever had to ask for a protection order from the courts," LeFavour said.

LeFavour moved to Idaho from near Aspen, Co., when she was nine and spent her teen years in rural Custer County where her family had a 120-acre ranch and her mom ran a cafe in Challis.