If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
Herbert Stein.
September 23, 2026
Something is actually going on in the GOP for the first time since the Dixiecrat MAGA insurgency took control of the party and made it a populist party.
Bit and pieces of the signs are everywhere, all of a sudden. Stein's Law has arrived.
GOP candidates are in trouble all over the country and now they're starting to dump Trump. A good example of this is Congressman Ashley Hinson, who is trying to do the same thing that Harriet Hageman is trying to do, which is to move into a retiring Senator's spot. She's in real trouble in that effort and recent polls indicate that she's behind. The Republican seat appears slated to go to a Democrat. The GOP sent out John Barrasso to stump for her, an odd choice as Barrasso isn't inspiring on his alleged home turf, but the thought must have been that the Senate Whip could show how Hinson winning would help the Dear Leader.
Well, that message didn't seem to take. So Hinson started to bolt. From her Facebook.
Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran. We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices.
That includes suspending the gas tax, pausing diesel exports, unleashing E-15 everywhere we can, reinstating the $1/gallon biodiesel tax credit, and creating a diesel relief program to help our farmers and truckers being crushed by the high costs.
While doing this, we should also ensure our highway trust fund is replenished, so that Iowans don’t suffer from crumbling roads and bridges while relief comes our way now. These actions to lower costs are needed ASAP, and the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end.
I am working every day to deliver bipartisan results for Iowans and I will work with anyone who is ready to tackle this challenge immediately.
She otherwise demanded that the war against Iran be stopped.
Hinson had voted against the War Powers Resolution every time it's been voted on in the House, and did so just a week prior, so she's voted to keep the war rolling. Now she wants it over. Fuel prices are the reason why.
Closer to home, there are all of a sudden all sorts of die-hard right wingers who are criticizing Trump. Whether that translates over to opposing Trump lover Chuck Gray and Trump supported Harriet Hageman is another thing, but there's definitely stirring in the ranks.
Indeed, Cowboy State Daily carpetbagging columnist Dave Simpson went into a "boo hoo' fit about the whole thing, wondering if the imaginary Sweet Home Alabama Wyoming he believes to have existed has gone "wobbly".
Go home Dave. You drank too much WFC Kool aide.
Elsewhere, Wyoming teachers are organizing against the attempt to bankrupt the state:
And it's been noted that Wyomingites are voting their interests:
Elections are not over, until their over, but it is clear that the GOP, and for that matter Trump, have no idea on how to hold on to the Senate, let alone the House. Doubling down on all the old tired lines (the Red Chinese are coming to have babies, date your daughters, steal your lunch) isn't working. The MAGA base was always the demographic that was most vulnerable to an economic downturn and now it's suffering. Agriculture, a Republican base, can't deal with the high fuel and fertilizer prices. Trucking can't deal with the high prices either. Regular people don't like the high prices at the grocery store and nobody likes the high fuel prices in the West.
This can't and won't be fixed by the election. The war against Iran won't be over and fuel prices will be high unless a ban on exports tanks the price of diesel, which it likely won't.
It took a lot, but people seem to be waking up to being lied to. Moreover, as that happens, Trump gets weirder and weirder by the day.
One place that appears now almost inevitable to go to the Democrats is Texas, where Texas Democratic Senate James Talarico has seen a 28-point swing in vote share against Ken Paxton.
Cont:
Fresh from getting its head handed to it in the primary, where its endorsements didn't pan out for the most part, the Dixiecrat controlled central committee of the Wyoming Republican Party has endorsed the property tax cut bill that would gut local governments like fish.
Basically, the Dixiecrat Wyoming Freedom Caucus hates the Gubbement and figures that stuff like education and the like can be handled by Ella Mae back at home.
September 24, 2026
September 25, 2026
Dixiecrats are moving over to their rightful home:
Rod Miller wrote an op ed on this and I've been meaning to post on it, so I'll just comment here. Bextel moving over to the Constitution Party, delusional though she is, is a good thing if it causes other Dixiecrats of the WFC to follow her, and they should. Here, a prominent Hot Springs politician has done just that.
The Constitution Party, which believes in a double secret constitution written in crayon and visible only through secret decoder glasses may pull over 10% in the election, which would make it a good place for people from the WFC to pack up their gray kepis and go and be "real". As is actually they, not traditional Wyoming Republicans, who are the aberration, they'd be doing themselves a favor, they'd have more voice in the CP, but the Republican Party and the State one as well. It'd allow the GOP to shake off the chains of the Confederacy which the WFC is attempting to bind it with.
In this environment, it might be noted, it's amazing that the Democrats can't get more traction than they are, but they aren't. Byrd still stands a good chance, but he's about the only one outside of the very few Democrats holding seats in the legislature.
September 29, 2026
From here on out in the election we're going to see Bat Shit Crazy on full display nearly every day.
Apparently not realizing that the election is a referendum on Donald Trump, a couple weeks ago Trump urged votes to imagine he's on the ballot.
The Republican problem is that voters are doing just that.
If people think back to the 2024 Presidential Election, most voters were never very keen on Trump. The most commonly expressed opinion going into the election was that voters disliked both candidates. The Democrats screwed themselves by running Biden, which was simply insane. Republican voters in the primary were in part MAGA true believes, but that misses the point that a lot of Republicans have left the party. When Biden dropped out, way too late, the Democrats did the typical Democratic thing and killed themselves by nominating a Kamala Harris, about the most irritating candidate they could have found.
2024 is in the rear view mirror of course, but what's been missed in the Trumpian Reign of Terror is that most people went into 2025 disliking Donald Trump and it's gone downhill from there, something made worse by the fact that this administration is made up of the cynical advantageous and those with some agenda, often a deluded one.
With that mix, Trump has had a free hand in acting like a mad king, and he's made the most of it. People with an agenda, moreover, are fully exercising their one and only chance to try to pull it off.
Trump's pretty clearly aware of this, in spite of his addled state. It explains the constant effort to build monuments to himself. In spite of what some in the far right Evangelical camp believe, there's pretty good reason to doubt Trump's belief in an afterlife. He certainly hasn't lived like he believes in one. So he's trying to make sure we remember him as a great man in terms of architecture and conquest.
It's all going to fail.
Trump doesn't seem to be able to grasp that people do not love him. He's a narcissist who is profoundly in love with himself. The worst, therefore, nightmare of his life is unfolding. A lot of motivated people who range from horrified to absolute contempt are going to boot the GOP out of the House, and now it looks like the Senate, and for the very reasons that Trump has urged us to do. They're voting on him, as the GOP has become a sycophantic personality cult.
People don't love him.
From now until the election Trump will pull out all the stops to try to keep the result he fears from happening. Anything he can legally get away with he will try. It'll be a long month until the election.
On not loving Trump, it's a shame Wyomingites don't have a better option to contest Chuck Gray.
Gray has made a career out of loving Trump more than Trump loves Trump. That's about all he has going for him. We're about to send somebody completely unqualified to do anything for the State to Congress. Would that somebody other than Johnson and Kinney were running. Neither stand a chance, and they don't really deserve to.
If none of the above were an option in that race, that'd be the one that would win.
Speaking of Gray, Gray has been showing up at UW football games recently and having pictures taken with students.
It's pathetic.
September 30, 2026
Wyoming Secretary of State and GOP candidate for Congress Chuck Gray emerged from hiding from debate requests, while he's not going to UW football games to be photographed with students, to congratulate the Supreme Court for temporarily upholding
October 1, 2026
The backers of a data center in Natrona County invited Republican candidates for the County Commission to tour the site and omitted the Democratic candidates.
The GOP candidates are Lisa Jamieson (Democrat), Matt Keating (Republican), Ray Pacheco (Republican), Candace Machado (Democrat) and Dallas Laird (Republican).
We haven't addressed this race much yet, but Laird is a 1,000,000 years old and needs to go. Keating was a somewhat controversial commissioner and then a somewhat controversial assessor. He's been battling cancer. Pacheco is a City of Casper councilman. Machado was a controversial mayor of Evansville.
Appendix
Last edition:
Labels: 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, Alabama, Bill Allemand, Carpetbaggers, Chuck Gray, Dixiecrats, Donald Trump, Harriet Hageman, inflation, James Byrd, Questions for politicians, Rebecca Bextel, Taxes, Tom Lubnau, Wyoming Freedom Caucus
Additional labels: