Mark Gordon did not have good news.
At the podium for yet another news conference in a string of press appearances since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wyoming’s first-term governor took to the microphone on July 8 with a stern and serious expression on his face, delivering the revelation that the state — long warned of economic collapse — had been grievously wounded.
Coal — the mineral state lawmakers have fought tooth and nail to save — was collapsing quicker than expected. Oil, long a critical source of revenue for state and county government, was still suffering under a months-old price war and a global collapse in demand. Gas had fallen victim to technological advances no policy decision could save, and the state’s investments — profitable, but underperforming — were set to shrivel under recession.
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Wyoming, it seemed, had run out of options, with only the unthinkable — dramatic budget cuts, new taxes — left on the table. And it had an election coming up.
“This election is essential to make sure we have quality candidates who understand the challenges and the choices we’re going to have to make in Wyoming’s case,” Gordon said at the time.
As a governor, Gordon’s statement was merely a recognition of realities facing the state, and a call for voters to elevate competent voices to serve as partners in an effort to solve them. But as the standard bearer of Wyoming’s Republican Party, Gordon’s statement could be heard as him wading into an existential war that has been raging within a political organization that controls nearly every facet of the state’s government.
While differences of opinion within the Republican Party are long documented in Wyoming, the past few years have been a turbulent time in state politics, as many state legislators have stopped participating in party activities and more mainstream Republicans have jumped ship, leaving an outnumbered resistance against the party’s right wing.
It’s been a process several years in the making: Dating back to the Tea Party revolution of the 2010s and the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the more moderate wing of the party — which controls most of the elected seats in Wyoming — has been under siege by the populist, far-right elements of the party, losing ground to the activist wing to the point where earlier this year the moderates lost control of the party apparatus completely.
After taking over the party, the right wing of the Republican Party has now set its sights on the Legislature, aggressively targeting incumbent Republicans who do not fit their distilled definition of what it means to be a “true” Republican — a definition broadly defined as having an aggressive stance against taxes, an uncompromisingly pro-gun value set and a keen focus on social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Their activism to redefine the party’s identity in the past several years has since turned an attempted purge of so-called “Republicans In Name Only,” or “RINOs,” from public life completely. In this year’s election, 22 incumbent House Republicans — or 36% of the party’s legislative representation — face primary challenges, double the number in 2018. A similar trend has been seen in the Senate, with 47% of the Republican field facing challenges in their primaries, up from 33% two years ago.
The threats of new taxes and massive spending cuts now hang over the heads of incumbents previously seen as safe bets, now forced to defend unpopular positions that will likely be necessary to save the state from financial ruin. Populist candidates, meanwhile, have fought to appeal to a “silent majority” of voters with concerns of taxes going up and guns being taken away, offering promises to bring back the state’s traditional industries and cut government waste with little detail on whether such efforts will be enough to address the massive shortfall.
“People are going to make even the incumbents work this year,” said Amy Edmonds, a Cheyenne-based political strategist and a former Republican member of the Wyoming House of Representatives. “I think people in general are much more skeptical of government and much more leery, and I think they’re not just going to pull the lever in the voting booth as easily as they have in the past.”
An organized challenge from the right
The party’s far right is coming into this year’s elections with a level of momentum and organization that hasn’t been seen in recent years.
While Tea Party favorite Cindy Hill’s ascension to Superintendent of Public Instruction at the start of the last decade was a defining moment in the state’s conservative movement, the party’s far right has built on its gains in the last two election cycles, with an eye on picking up even more legislative seats in upcoming cycles. Sen. Anthony Bouchard — a hard-line activist for Second Amendment rights — was among the first, ousting a long-time incumbent in a competitive primary in 2016. That same year, now-Sen. Bo Biteman’s surprising primary defeat of presumptive House Speaker Rosie Berger raised some eyebrows, as did the 2018 election of ultraconservative Sen. Tom James over longtime Democratic lawmaker John Hastert in a three-way general election for a reliably blue Sweetwater County district.
This year, members of the party infrastructure — who have successfully shunned moderates from their ranks and established themselves as a force against the state’s political establishment — are looking to replicate those successes across the state.
While not all of the state’s primary races feature title-holding party officials, figures of the state party establishment like Taylor Allred in Lincoln County, Karl Allred and Lyle Williams in Uinta County, Joey Correnti in Carbon County, and Camilla Hicks in Sweetwater County will oppose a number of entrenched Republican incumbents, And numerous Republicans who have attracted the ire of the GOP establishment — like Cody’s Sandy Newsome and Sundance’s Tyler Lindholm — have found themselves targeted by much more conservative challengers such as former Hot Springs County Clerk Nina Webber, who has attracted statewide attention for billboards of her holding a red, white and blue rifle with a pledge to “go western” on the state’s RINOs.
“There are these themes that you start to see,” said Gail Symons, a Sheridan County Republican Party member and co-founder of the Frontier Republicans, a conservative group that has positioned itself in opposition to the party’s far right. “They say they’re pro-gun, pro-life, pro-family, no new taxes. ... They put these out there and don’t go any further than that, and they create a boogeyman and then run themselves as the warrior against that.”
“When you are on a crusade, the crusade becomes more important than the endgame,” she added. “And I think that’s what’s happening here.”
And while officials within the state Republican Party itself have not formally weighed in on any of the races, a newly emergent ecosystem of far-right political action committees operated by those close to the establishment has given its favored candidates added credibility.
Evidence Based Wyoming — a data analysis website founded last winter by former Campbell County Republican Party Chairman Doug Gerard — recently began endorsing candidates opposing incumbents whom, it has determined, vote out of line with the Republican Party. The site has taken stances against Evanston’s Danny Eyre (opposed by Karl Allred), Lindholm, Converse County’s Aaron Clausen (opposed by Hicks), and Senate District 18 candidates David Northrup (a current state representative) and Stefanie Bell, whom the website described in a blog post as a “big-spending anti-gun hall monitor.”
The Wyoming Conservative Alliance — a “nonpartisan” political action committee founded by college student and conservative activist Jesse Campbell earlier this year, according to filings with the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office — has been grading candidates using ratings issued by organizations like the National Rifle Association and Wyoming Right to Life and endorsing candidates largely representative of the party’s right wing. Lawmakers earn compulsory “F” grades with even a single sign of support for measures like “increased spending and high taxes.”
While other established organizations — like the Wyoming Campaign for Liberty (run by Natrona County GOP member Cathy Ide) and the conservative blog TheWyoming.net — have targeted races and issued endorsements of their own, the website that has attracted the most attention this cycle has been that of WyoRINO, a mysterious conservative organization propping up a select group of less than two dozen lawmakers as true Republicans while dismissing the rest of the party’s electeds as “RINOs.”
Despite having no record with the Secretary of State’s Office and no public face, the organization has been actively working to discredit a majority of the Republican delegation in Cheyenne with billboards and online advertising boosting its arbitrary rating system based on several select bills out of the hundreds lawmakers vote on each year. Sometimes, those records are used to target lawmakers through a monthly feature called “RINO of the Month,” which often features incumbents facing primary challenges from the far right.
“We’re in a campaign where we’re not mudslinging and things of that nature,” said Gillette Republican Rep. Bill Pownall, named a “RINO of the Month” after his sponsorship of a piece of gun control legislation last session. “I’m a firm believer in that, and if you disagree with me on something, that’s fine. But as we’ve seen across the country and in even in some elections around the state, civility has not always been at its best this year. I won’t lower myself to that standard, but unfortunately the candidates that are running against me don’t seem to be doing that.”
A frequent target of the far right, Sen. Michael Von Flatern — a longtime moderate Republican in the Legislature — has received more scrutiny than just about any candidate in the state for his perceived weakness on Second Amendment issues and his amenability to tax increases.
He’s grown accustomed to attacks over the years, but he said this year’s elections feel far different, particularly as he faces attacks from both the local Republican establishment and well-funded political organizations like Wyoming Gun Owners, which is backing his opponent, Troy McKeown. Recently, Von Flatern even took to blocking negative commenters from his Facebook page before being told it was likely illegal to do so, leaving him to absorb even further abuse through social media and other formats.
“My wife would say it’s been more vicious,” he told the Star-Tribune in early July. “With COVID-19 and everyone cooped up, we’re finding the reaction to be a little more than what we dealt with before.”
Meanwhile, anyone willing to work with him or stand up for him has been dragged into the fight as well.
“I live close enough to Von Flatern and frankly, it’s embarrassing what they’ve tried to do to him,” Senate Vice President Ogden Driskill said in a recent interview. “Let’s be honest: Mike is a pretty liberal Republican. But I talk to the guy. We’re on a delegation together. We represent a county together. And because I’m willing to talk to the guy and not talk trash about him, they want to trash me and him together. It’s guilt by association, and I don’t operate that way.”
“I’m not embarrassed to say that I deal with Democratic members or deal with moderate or liberal people,” he added. “My job is to make Wyoming a better place. And that doesn’t mean that I gather up with a little group of my cronies and exclude everyone else. I work with anyone I can to forward good policies for the state of Wyoming.”
Negative campaigning or brutal honesty?
In the southwestern corner of the state, Kemmerer Republican Fred Baldwin has been facing ample amounts of vitriol from members of a “silent majority” of voters ready to oust the state’s more moderate leaders in favor of a more right-leaning government.
Most of those who are coming after him, however, don’t actually seem to be from his district.
The “RINO of the Month” for July, Baldwin is currently facing a challenge from Williams, a Second Amendment activist and perennial candidate for public office who — despite widespread support from state party leadership — has yet to win a race, losing a 2014 House primary campaign against Baldwin by more than 40 points. However, Baldwin has faced plenty of opposition from outside the district, hammered for voting against an abortion bill in the 2020 budget session, as well as for a pair of modest fee increases that, according to WyoRINO, earned him a 0% rating as a conservative.
Given his popularity in recent years, Baldwin, seeking a fourth term after several safe wins, says if there is a silent majority out there, the people who have been vocally coming out against him are not part of it.
“I think there may be people that will vote to stop that movement, to stop that sort of name calling and mudslinging that traditionally is not a part of Wyoming politics,” he said. “I don’t think people like it.”
Academic opinions vary on the effectiveness of negative campaign methods. A 2015 paper in the American Journal of Political Science found that candidates can actually be helped by negative advertising when conducted by an outside organization, while a more recent study published in the journal Market Science concluded the opposite.
Moderate incumbents have decried a perceived lack of context surrounding their votes, but conservative challengers see attacking candidates’ records as a means of holding them accountable to a set of values they see as emblematic of “true” conservatism.
“You just can’t get elected in this state unless you’re a Republican,” said Richard B. Jones, a candidate in a competitive Republican primary race for the Senate. “The race is over in the primary in most in almost all cases.”
For Jones, a precinct committeeman for the Park County Republican Party, this understanding has led to a growing number of candidates who may not fit the party mold running as Republicans in an effort to get elected as “stealth candidates” whose voting records may not necessarily align with what it means to be a conservative. This trend, he said, has led to growing discontent within the state Republican Party as a whole, causing some to begin a movement to purify the party to match that ideology.
It’s why some see negative advertisements and questionnaires by organizations like Wyoming Gun Owners not necessarily as smears but as an intensive means of ensuring candidates will represent values their party supports, regardless of whether the general population outside of the Republican Party supports them.
“I believe that our freedom is at stake,” said Craig Malmstrom, a candidate running to the right of Rep. Dan Furphy in a competitive Republican Senate primary in Laramie. “I believe that our gun ownership is at stake. I believe that Republican, conservative values are at stake. I believe that free elections are at stake. To maintain free elections, maintain gun ownership and to maintain a growing thriving economy and to maintain a robust diversified economy, we need to make sure that conservative Republicans maintain and are elected to office and that the values of voters are reflected by their state legislators.”
Those appealing to the moderates, however, disagree with that approach.
“There’s this narrative that’s got people convinced that we’re under attack, and what they’re doing is they’re taking what happens in another state and they’re overlaying it on Wyoming,” Symons said. “Well in Wyoming, even our Democrats are pro-gun. But people are falling for it. We have some of the same people who always vote for more restrictive abortions but who voted against making contraceptives easier to get to. Like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s nonsense.’”
A battle of ideas
Still, Republican incumbents in this year’s elections face difficult choices as they try to survive their primaries. While facing populist conservative candidates, many must also sell voters on candidates who, in all likelihood, will vote to cut their school budgets, reduce infrastructure funding and potentially raise their taxes because of the state’s economic situation.
And the rationale behind those decisions, candidates say, aren’t typically the type of thing that translate into catchy campaign slogans.
“It isn’t something that you do for fun,” said Republican candidate Mickey Shober, a former Campbell County Commissioner running in a competitive, open-seat primary in Gillette. “A lot of this are dry topics that I know because I had to know it. I didn’t have a desire to know it beforehand. It’s because of what I was elected to do. When I talk to people, if taxes come up, we try and have this discussion so people can understand things a little and get an understanding of the situation Wyoming is in.”
“I understand people’s thoughts and beliefs,” he added. “But I also understand we receive way more in benefits than what we pay in taxes.”
For candidates like Baldwin, the most effective message so far has centered around the need for progress in a time of crisis and impressing on voters the need for experienced voices in shaping those solutions.
“It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle they’re on, but we need people that can work together and maybe come up with some answers to some of the problems we got,” Baldwin said. “Because it’s a pivotal year; Wyoming’s never been in this position before. We’ve had some bad times, we’ve got some bad years, but nothing like we have now.”
And the decisions that will have to be made, these candidates say, should not be left to a newcomer.
“What I’m running on is experience and leadership,” said Northrup, the Senate District 18 candidate looking to make a leap from the House. “That’s what’s going to count — that we cannot have that start-over learning curve. Because if we spend our time reeducating and reeducating, we’re spending our time spinning our wheels. They don’t have an informed opinion. They have an opinion that they were campaigning on.”
“People who know what’s going on need to be in the Legislature at this time,” he added. “It’s not a place for a newbie.”