And can they recover?
A major turn occured in the Wyoming election when all three of Wyoming's congressional delegation members supported Mike Lee's Deseret Dream to swipe Federal lands for land raping purposes. The move was hugely, overwhelmingly, unpopular in Wyoming, but the delegation in part assessed the voters dim, and in part, trusted on them to forget.
Right now, it doesn't look like they will.
And the candidate are beginning to line up. We have, so far:
Governor:
GOP.
Eric Barlow. Barlow is a state senator from the 23rd district and announced earlier this week. So far, he's receiving a lot of accolades from the none Freedom Caucus Republicans and condemnations from the populist Freedom Caucus, which frankly makes him the front runner.
Brent Bien. Bien is retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel and another member of the recent Wyoming crowd who declares "after sucking on the government tit my whole life I hate the government and know best for people who haven't had such secure jobs as me". He's on the far right.
Joseph Kibler. Kibler is a web designer and might as well drop out right now.
Reid Ranser. Far right gadfly who doomed his chances, which were non existent anyway, by filing a lawsuit which states that he's a homosexual and was slandered by certain GOP figures. The slander aside, branding yourself as a homosexual is a bad political move in this atmosphere. He's highly likely not to be the only homosexual running for a statewide office or perhaps in office, but Wyomingites tend not to draw attention to themselves in that manner during an era such as the one we currently live in.
Waiting in the wings are Chuck Gray, who is already campaigning for something on the far right wing of the far right, save when it comes to nuclear power, were the populist are flower children, so he is too. Holding Gray up is Harriet Hageman, who seems likely to try to run, but whose position in opposition to the Federal lands is likely to sink any campaign of hers, or at least seriously damage it.
Also waiting in the wings is Mark Gordon, who has clearly not wanted Gray to replace him. With Barlow throwing his broad brim in the ring, he likely won't run now.
August 15, 2025
This is interesting:
Wyoming crowd boos Hageman retort that protections against greenhouse gases based on ‘false science’
Wyoming crowd boos Hageman retort that protections against greenhouse gases based on ‘false science’: U.S. Rep. Hageman's comment didn't go over well in Pinedale, where residents struggled for years to clean up health-threatening pollution from oil and gas drilling.
Pinedale calls itself the "Icebox of the Nation" and the introduction of oil and gas operations near it are relatively new. Given both of those, it clearly didn't drink the GOP Koolaide on global warming being a fib.
Hageman has so far received rough crewed treatment in Pinedale, Rock Springs, and Laramie. I suspect she would in Casper as well. I also suspect she might want to start thinking about selling her house in D.C. and looking to move back to her brother's ranch, as she may be out of work next year.
Labels: 2020s, 2025, 2026, 2026 Election, Climate Change, Harriet Hageman, Petroleum, Wyoming (Pinedale), Wyoming (Sublette County)
Wyoming has been a prime example of "if I make money from it, it must be perfectly okay". If we could grow big fields of opium here, we'd be loudly in favor of heroin.
Given that, and given that a lot of Wyomingites are imports from warmer regions of the country, people here are huge climate change deniers, even though if you've lived here your whole life its extremely obvious that its going on.
And Hageman comes from the agricultural which is bizarrely resistant to accepting the reality of climate change, even though if nothing is done, it'll destroy their livelihoods.
So she no doubt thought stepping in front of a Sublette County audience would mean that the "climate change is a fib" line would be well received. It wasn't.
Something is finally really starting to change here. Part of it is that people are waking up to reality, and part of it is that Hageman took a stand for something Wyomingites detest, transfering the Federal lands, and then basically asserted we were dumb for not supporting it ourselves. She's so all in on these positions, she really can't change them, and stepping in front of audiences makes her situation worse.
August 20, 2025
Congressman Elsie Stephanik was booked off of a New York stage two days ago.
Stephanik likely sacrificed her career for Trump.
Elsie of course crawled into bed with Trump. She originally was opposed to him. Harriet Hageman, on the other hand, was never openly opposed to Trump and took the seat of her former friend Liz Cheney opportunistically.
Hageman has had a lot of simple adoring fans since that time, but the bloom is really off the rose. She was booed in deeply Republican Sublette County last week, and received a hostile crowd in Casper on Monday night. Indeed, the Casper event was notably not only for the outright hostility to Hageman, but to extent to which a lot of Republicans flatly did not show up leaving a lot of room in the auditorium.
Hageman had her sights set on the Governor's mansion and still might. If nothing else, she's doubling down on her position on everything. But that ship has likely sailed, and she stands a good chance, right now, of having to vacate her Congressional seat.
August 29, 2025
And yet. . .
Joseph Kibler running for governor on promise of ‘being something different
being yet another carpetbagger coming in and complaining of too much bureaucracy, particularly in a state you just moved to, isn't actually different.
September 30, 2025
Sec. Gray has flagged over 2,000 Wyoming voters for County Clerks to investigate s voters who may no longer reside in Wyoming.
This entire topic has been a fictional bee in Gray's bonnet.
Progressive Palestinian American Palestinian State Rep. Ruwa Romman has entered the Georgia Governor's race.
October 22, 2025
The Barlow Effect: Candidates can’t officially join the race till next year, but an unmistakably powerful ingredient has entered the mix, writes columnist Rod Miller.
On the last item, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in a flat out war with Trump, and Trump is losing. Greene has gone from one of Trump's most loyal adherents to an outright anti Trump insurgent.
There's a year to go, of course, but Trump is already acting like unstable and clearly under pressure. Having pulled out all the stops to prevent the release of the Epstein files, he now is claiming to once again support the release, putting the Senate in the hot seat. If Trump is acting behind the scenes at the Senate, it puts Senators in a terrible spot at the same time that they have the example of Massie and Greene, who aren't being hurt by opposing Trump.
Locally, it'll be interesting to see if Lummis and Hageman remain lashed to the deck of Trump. I bet Lummis won't.
December 11, 2025
From the New York Times.
Indiana Lawmakers Reject Trump’s New Political Map
Republicans hold an overwhelming majority in the Indiana Senate, but more than a dozen of them defied the president’s wishes, voting against a map aimed at adding Republicans in Congress.
December 19, 2025
Cynthia Lummis will not run for her Senate seat next year. We can bet that Hageman will run for it and probably already is. It'd be interesting to see if Gordon runs for the seat.
This means Gray, whose political hopes were dead, will now run for Congress, although I doubt he will get Hageman's seat. It'll be interesting to see if Stubson runs.
Elise Stefanik is dropping out of the New York Governor's race and will not run for Congress next year.
December 20, 2025
Lots of speculation up in the air following Lummis' surprise announcement that she's giving it up after a single term as Senator, including why she's doing that.
Included in speculative candidates are, as already noted, Gray, Hageman and Gordon. Degenfelder has also been mentioned, whom I didn't think of. Degenfelder would have a good chance against any of these three, although I'd prefer Gordon.
Reid Rasner has been mentioned , and I'd guess that he will run. . . and lose in the primary.
Matt Mead has been mentioned as well.
Of course, this shuffling will also bring out the hard right "I worked for the government my entire life but now that I'm retired and on a Federal pension let me run from the far right" candidates. Brent Bien is running for Governor now, but he might take a run at this as it seems Barlow is in such good shape.
With oil declining, the weather being rather weird, and a large percentage of Wyomingites about to lose their healthcare, this election will also present opportunities for moderate Republicans we haven't thought of yet, as well as with conservative Democrats, if any can be found. I don't think that Karlee Provenza will want to give up her seat in the state legislature, but if Hageman runs for the Senate, which I think she will, and Chuck Gray for the House, which I think he will, Provenza would be an interesting dark horse candidate who might win against Chuck. Indeed, it's not impossible to imagine Gordon and Provenza in, which would move Wyoming's Congressional delegation overall to the center, as Barrasso will do what he needs to do to keep his job, assuming he'll run again.
An interesting thing to note is that it's quite clear that Liz Cheney was going to run for Enzi's Senate seat when he died, but Lummis took her spot It seemed pretty clear that there was animosity between the two because of that. In spite of all the MAGA hatred of Cheney now, she was a very popular Congressman up until she failed to bow to Trump and took him on. Had she won that seat, she'd still be in the Senate today.
The spectacular fall of Elise Stefanik is quite notable, and should serve as a warning to the flag of convenience politicians. Stefanik hitched her wagon to Trump and failed to get what she wanted. Now she's dropping out of politics, for awhile.
Stefanik made an incredibly bad set of calculations and more or less sold her soul, Marco Rubio style, for power, except she lost power, rather than gain it. She'll reemerge, I'm pretty sure, after Trump is out of office, banking on Americans having short political memory. My prediction on her is that she, like Rubio, will declare they never really loved Trump.
Cont:
And we are in fact off. There are two filed candidates.
One is the predictable Reid Rasner. Rasner took a pounding in the last election trying to run to the right of John Barrasso, and he'll go down in flames again here.
The other is Jimmy Skovgard. I checked his website and have no idea what he stands for. He has a blog, with poor production values, and perhaps if I'd waded through all of it I'd know more, but I didn't.
I suspect his campaign will likewise go nowhere.
December 23, 2025
Lummis not running again changes 2026 political strategies: From Miss Frontier to the U.S. Senate, columnist Kerry Drake writes, Lummis has had remarkable success in state and federal offices.
With this entry, we close out this edition.
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