The party's Central Committee has been meeting and it proposed a new method of selecting the party's national delegates that would weight the votes of the smaller, less populated counties. Those counties are seen (although not entirely accurately) as considerably more conservative, and frankly considerably more in the tea party camp, than the more populated counties like Natrona and Laramie Counties.
This was received poorly, to say the least, by the larger counties and indeed, the dissension became blisteringly open when a Laramie County delegate opened the story up to the public through a Laramie County blog, starting off with:
Beware of corruption at the Wyoming GOP
BY DANI OLSEN
Republicans, this is my call for you to open your eyes to what is happening behind closed doors in the Wyoming Republican Party’s State Central Committee.
I recently was elected as chairwoman of the Laramie County Republican Party. The chairperson is one of the three representatives of each county that becomes a member of the State Central Committee – the governing body of the State Party.
Having filled in as a proxy for the previous county chairman at previous State Central Committee meetings, I am not new to the process and the going-ons of the State Central Committee.
But, the special election meeting that was held in June left me feeling disgusted at the over-assertion of power that certain members of the State Central Committee believe they have. And I feel as the chairwoman of Laramie County that I owe it to the Republicans I represent in my county – heck, to all Republicans in the state – to be the whistleblower on what I can only describe as closed-door political corruption.
Wow, an internecine dispute in which a committee member is accusing others of corruption is a pretty serious rift. And she goes on from there, stating:
Now, back to my whistleblowing. The State Central Committee has long been controlled by a few members who do not represent Wyoming Republicans and who have long surpassed what most would view as a conservative length of service on the State Central Committee.
This group of individuals has an agenda it wishes to press that goes far outside of the Republican Party’s platform. You know who I am talking about. They have grown to adopt an “if you do not agree with me, you are not welcome in the party” mentality even if the issue you disagree with is not in the Republican platform.
You can link in to read the rest of that item if you wish to.
I don't know a thing about that blog or the person who wrote the article, but frankly that there's a rift in the GOP is rather obviously clear and was plain in the 2018 election. In that election, tea party elements and very hard right elements came to view the nominated Governor as some sort of unfairly nominated usurper, and were open about stating that. And prior to that, under Governor Mead's last term, there was a big rift between these elements and the Governor's office and more traditional Republicans.
It apparently doesn't stop there, as in today's Tribune the Natrona County delegates released a statement openly noting that they opposed the delegate change and went on to further note that the Central Committee vetted a proposal to score legislative votes with an eye towards declaring certain Republicans not to be Republicans if they voted to frequently in a manner contrary to the platform.
This is all a serious development and one that the state's GOP had better be very careful with. The GOP in Wyoming has been the absolutely dominant political party since the Clinton years, when the local Democratic Party simply collapsed. Since that time, the Democrats have not been able to muster any sort of serious reappearance in no small part as those remaining highly active are so far to the left of the average Wyomingite that they tend not to reflect anything but themselves. But a residual mainstream group of Democrats remain, something that the hard right Republicans are convinced caused Gordon to be nominated due to registration crossing over (which UW has proven to be statistically false) and if the GOP takes steps to drive its elected officials away, there's an obvious place for them to cross into.
Indeed, the GOP Central Committee may well want to recall that a selection of their influential legislators since the Clinton years were in fact former Democrats. And they may also wish to recall if a majority of counties chose not to go with the harder right candidates in 2018, they may start to wonder off from the GOP entirely if it weights certain views in a non democratic manner. A rift sufficiently serious that delegates from the state's two most populous counties are complaining about the Central Committee is a pretty serious rift.
As we so often post on the first couple of decades of the 20th Century, we'd pause here to take one big historical diversion to note an analogy. What the Central Committee did in terms of delegate selection is how the pre World War One German Reichstag operated for parliamentary seats and is why that body is disregarded as being democratic in spite of a wide franchise. German aristocracy has arranged for that as it assured continued support for an institution that didn't have popular support. And that arrangement helped fuel the violent extremism that came to a head in 1918 and which gave the world horrific results by 1932.
Not that we're going to have revolution in the streets by any means. . .but putting aside a more democratic process for a less democratic one, and then threatening to declare who can, and can't be a Republican not only has constitutional implications, its not politically wise.
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