I started drafting this, barely, as the Big Ugly started its final set of debates in the Senate. As I did that, this came out Musk broke, for the second time, with Trump, and claimed he'd form a new party if the Big Ugly passed.
And now Musk has announced he's doing just that.
Well, good for him.
I'm not posting this a a cheerleader for Musk. Musk is very much part of what's wrong with the United States. He's a poster child for what occurs in a country where has unrestrained capitalism. His caring about people claim can be doubted. The largest donor to the 2022 election, and the former Gauleiter of DOGE, there's no reason to trust that his view of what the nation's politics ought to look like comport with an actual decent set of political beliefs.
But this does symbolize something I'd noted at the time.
The 2026 election has begun.It'll interesting to see how this pays out.
Lummis is up for reelection, assuming she runs, and she will. She'll blame the Democrats for anything that goes wrong, and talk about being the Cyberqueen.
If she faces a solid challenger, after the Public Lands vote, she'll be in trouble.
The House seat is also up. Hageman won't run for that however, she's going to run for Governor. She's going to lose that.
Chuck Gray is going to run for the House, and he'll lose that.
Times are changing. Whether or not The Big Ugly passes, Trump has shot his bolt. True acolytes can wear "Trump was right about everything" truckers caps, but the opposite is proving to be true.
And this is about to get a lot worse for the GOP.
cont:
And now Nebraska's Don Bacon. The Congressman is in a district that's becoming increasingly Democratic, and my guess is it likely now will be a Democratic seat. The Republicans only hold a seven seat majority right now, which will be reduced to a five seat majority once the Democrats fill two vacant seats. Even assuming the Republicans hold every seat they currently have with out Bacon, that would reduce them to a four seat majority.
But they won't hold every seat. The House will flip.
cont:
Even Elon suddenly woke up.
At the time I posted that, I noted the departure of Don Bacon from the candidate rolls for the next election. Now, Tennessee's Mark Green has outright left. The GOP held 220 seats and the Democrats 213, but two of the unfilled seats will go to Democrats once vacant seats are replaced, reducing the pre Big Ugly margin to 220 to 215. With Green actually now gone, that's 219 to 215.
The House will return to the Democrats in the 2026 election.
By that time, it's my guess that the utility of Donald Trump will be gone, and the utility of being shocked that he has dementia will set in.
J.D. Vance will be President by then, with the NatCons hoping that he isn't tainted by anything that went wrong under Trump. Without Vance, nothing that's happened so far will last very long.
What will occur in the Wyoming midterm, which will address in another post on a somewhat separate theme will be really interesting. There's a good chance that Hageman and Lummis won't survive the midterms and that Gray will be defeated in his effort to climb the next rung of the latter, a sign that he'll he'll soon leave the state entirely, it no longer serving any purpose for him.
July 10, 2025
Interesting article pointing out that Musk's third party effort is a long shot, but still has a shot.
Already, I'd note, the one thing the Democrats and the GOP are agreeing on right now is that you must not vote for any new Musk party.
Not that I would. The values that the South African Mass Sperm Donor Billionaire hold are very far from mine. DOGE was stupid beyond belief. And frankly, I don't think that the Federal Government needed to be smaller in the first place, and that the common belief that it does is simply a "common sense" bromide that people believe because they believe it. But he is right about the looming budget crisis. I'd fix that much differently than Musk would.
But I don't think his party, should he form it, can necessarily be discounted. By next election the declining Trump, will sound more and more like mush. Trump already often sounds like this:
Or this:
The room to take Trump on is increasing, and the question is how much the NatCons really want to invest in a bowl of oatmeal as a figurehead. That could prove to be a bad strategy.
One thing I'll note is that I have a thread I haven't posted yet pondering a sort of Wyoming Party. I should have finished it as I could sort have been to this topic first.
And Musk certainly has the cash to get his views out. As he does that, the GOP will spend a lot of cashing yelling "don't listen to the right wing nut!"
Of course, the Democrats will agree with the Republicans on that, as not voting for a third party is the one thing they agree on. . . which is ironically one of the things that an American Party could point to as a reason to vote for it.
I'd also note that if an American Party was intelligent, which there's big reason to doubt that it would be, and carved off some of the real conservative topics from the GOP, and was actually fiscally conservative, it might appeal more broadly than the GOP suspects.
In more local news, former primary candidate Reid Rasner, who ran to the right of John Barrasso, and who forced Barrasso to run to the right of himself, has filed a lawsuit in the 2nd Judicial District against far right former state senator Anthony Bouchard for defamation.
July 10, 2025, cont.
So, the news on Ranser and Bouchard seems more clear. Rasner claims that Bouchard ruined a major economic deal he was working on to buy TikTok by emphasizing that Rasner is a homosexual, which Rasner does not deny. Bouchard had a sexual scandal of his own that came to light earlier on, which, the way I typed it out, would seem to suggest that Rasner's being a homosexual is a scandal, which he doesn't deny (his orientation) in his lawsuit.
Bouchard dropped out of the legislature after his own rather gross sexual scandal came to light, so the fact that he'd make any kind of a big deal out of Rasner's homosexuality is really petty. Apparently screwing and impregnating 14 or 15 year olds, albeit when he was 19, is not as bad as Rasner having same sex attraction. At least, the argument seems to be, you are screwing the opposite gender, so that's better. I'll leave that to others to judge. But why would one far right figure go after the other?
Proper sexual orientation seems to be the only reason. So, really, in the MAGA world screwing a 14 or 15 year old when you are 19 is, well, one of those "Romeo and Juliet" type of deals, to use Bouchard's words, but being a homosexual is just wrong.
Of course, from an Apostolic Christian point of view, sexual relations are only licit between a man and a woman inside a valid marriage, which can occur only once, while both of the couple are living. Inclination doesn't matter, and is not sinful inside itself. But that's not the modern United States, where a serial polygamist is the alleged President and who was a friend of a procurer (which perhaps he was unaware of), but he's okay as he has the right attraction. Most Populist Americans seem to believe that there's nothing really wrong with 1960s sexual libertine behavior, as long as its directed towards the opposite sex.
Rasner must figure his bolt is shot politically, as publishing himself as a homosexual will kill any chance he has of office in contemporary Wyoming. He's not the first Wyoming homosexual to have sought office, and three Wyomingites who were homosexuals have served in elective office, with two of them being open about it. I'd be stunned if there aren't any now, other than the one legislator who admits to being homosexual. Indeed, it'd be interesting if the sexual conduct of every Wyoming political figure came to light so that the MAGA adherents could be exposed to the full sunlight. Maybe they're all pure in their carnal desires, and properly oriented, but I'd be surprised.
An interesting thing here, I'd note, is that Rasner ran to the right of Barrasso, which puts him in full NatCon territory. The NatCons feel that homosexuality is a total abomination. This points out a really curious aspect of it, however, as individuals who can carry the Populist banner don't seem to see a conflict with those who would basically burn them at the stake. No matter what a person thinks of it, homosexuality wasn't something that traditional conservative Republicans cared about at all. Hardcore NatCons sure do.
July 11, 2025
The Secretary of State, whose job in Wyoming is to be a Secretary, is once again criticizing the Governor, whose job is to govern.
Gray clearly can't stay in his own lane, and is clearly running for something else. Wyomingites are pretty sharply divided on him, with the far right seeing him as some sort of brilliant crusader, and many others seeing him as a self serving buffoon looking for the spotlight to shine on himself.
Yes, the 2024 Election hasn't even occured yet, and the 2026 one is clearly on, at least locally.
What we can tell for sure is that Chuck Gray is running for the office of Governor. He always was. The Secretary of State's office was very clearly a mere stepping stone in that plan, and the plan probably goes on from there. By coming to Wyoming, a state with a low population and a pronounced history of electing out of staters (we nearly have some sort of personality problem in that regard), it was a good bet, particularly when combined with his family money, although it was never a sure bet that he'd make the legislature and on from there. His plan requires, however, or at least he seemingly believes it requires, that he keep his name in the news, which he's worked hard to do, being involved in lawsuits, which is probably unconstitutional on his part, and releasing press releases that are extraordinary for his role, and for the invective language they contain. Mr. Gray has probably used the term "radical leftists" more in his two years of office than all of the prior Wyoming Secretaries of State combined.
This explains something that was otherwise a bit odd that we noticed recently, which was Secretary Gray's appearance in Casper in opposition of something he'd otherwise voted for:
Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows. But how strange, nonetheless still surprises.
Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, who rose to that position by pitching to the populist far right, which dominates the politics of the GOP right now, and which appears to be on the verge of bringing the party down nationally, has tacked in the wind in a very surprising direction. He appeared this past week at a meeting in Natrona County to oppose a proposed gravel pit project at the foot of Casper Mountain. He actually pitched for the upset residents in the area to mobilize and take their fight to Cheyenne, stating:
We have a very delicate ecosystem, the fragility up there, the fragility of the flows … the proximity to domestic water uses. All of those things should have led to a distinct treatment by the Office of State Lands, and that did not happen.
I am, frankly, stunned.
I frankly never really expected Mr. Gray to darken visage of the Pole Stripper monument on the east side of Casper's gateway, which you pass by on the road in from Cheyenne again, as he's not from here and doesn't really have a very strong connection to the state, although in fairness that connection would have been to Casper, where he was employed by his father's radio station and where he apparently spent the summers growing up (in an unhappy state of mind, according to one interview of somebody who knew him then). Gray pretty obviously always had a political career in mind and campaigned from the hard populist right from day one, attempting at first to displace a conservative house member unsuccessfully.
We have a post coming up which deals with the nature of populism, and how it in fact isn't conservatism. Gray was part of the populist rise in the GOP, even though his background would more naturally have put him in the conservative camp, not the populist one. But opportunity was found with populists, who now control the GOP state organization. The hallmark of populism, as we'll explore elsewhere, is a belief in the "wisdom of the people", which is its major failing, and why it tends to be heavily anti-scientific and very strongly vested in occupations that people are used to, but which are undergoing massive stress. In Wyoming that's expressed itself with a diehard attitude that nothing is going on with the climate and that fossil fuels will be, must have, and are going to dominate the state's economy forever. The months leading up to the recent legislative session, and the legislative session itself, demonstrated this with Governor Gordon taking criticism for supporting anything to address carbon concerns. Put fairly bluntly, because a large percentage of Wyoming's rank and file workers depend on the oil and gas industry, and things related to it, any questioning on anything tends to be taken as an attack on "the people".
Natrona County has had a gravel supply problem for quite a while and what the potential miner seeks to do here is basically, through the way our economy works, address it. There would be every reason to suspect that all of the state's politicians who ran to the far right would support this, and strongly. But they aren't.
The fact that Gray is not, and is citing environmental concerns, comes as a huge surprise. But as noted, given his background, he's probably considerably more conservative than populist, but has acted as politicians do, and taken aid and comfort where it was offered. Tara Nethercott ran as a conservative and lost for the same office.
But here's the thing.
That gravel is exactly the sort of thing that populists, if they're true to what they maintain they stand for, ought to support. It's good for industry, and the only reason to oppose the mining is that 1) it's in a bad place in terms of the neighbors and 2) legitimate environmental concerns, if there are any. But that's exactly the point. You really can't demand that the old ways carry on, until they're in your backyard.
Truth be known, given their nature, a lot of big environmental concerns are in everyone's backyard right now.
The old GOP would have recognized that nationally, and wouldn't be spending all sorts of time back in DC complaining about electric vehicles. And if people are comfortable with things being destructive elsewhere, they ought to be comfortable with them being destructive right here. If we aren't, we ought to be pretty careful about it everywhere.
There actually is some precedent for this, FWIW. A hallmark of Appalachian populism was the lamenting of what had happened to their region due to coal mining. John Prine's "Paradise" in some ways could be an environmental populist anthem.
Right about the time I noted this, Rod Miller, opinion writer for the Cowboy State Daily, wrote a satiric article on the same thing:
We have no idea, of course, who his opponent will be, unless it's Gordon, who is theoretically term limited out, but we already know from prior litigation that the restraint on his running again is unconstitutional. And Gordon clearly doesn't like Gray, a dislike that's not limited to him by any means. Gordon would have to challenge that in court, however, unless 1) a group of citizens does, and 2) the court ruled they'd have standing.
As voters, they should.
If that happens, I wouldn't be surprised to see Gordon run again, and to be asked to run again. While he was a candidate initially I worried about him, as he was further to the right on public lands issues than any candidate since Geringer, but he's actually acted as a very temperate Governor, something made difficult by 1) the intemperate level of our current politics, and 2) the occasional shortsightedness of the legislature.1
Anyhow, if you've ever had the occasion to see, Gordon and Gray together in an official setting, it's clear they don't get along. Indeed, on the State Land Board, it's clear that Gordon isn't the only one that's not keen on Gray. Gray for his part reacts back, as he did recently when he sent an unprecedented lengthy letter to the Governor on his vetoes.
Gray, like Donald Trump, has some feverish admirers.2 Indeed, this seems to be a hallmark of the populist right. They not only run candidates, but they develop personality cults routinely.
Rod Miller, again, in a recent column noted a real problem that Gray has. As, so far, they haven't really been able to advance their agenda without the help of conservatives, they have an advantage there as they always portray themselves as besieged by the numerous barbarians, the last legionnaire on Hadrian's Wall. Trump has actually, at a national level, worked to keep that status by ordering his party to defeat immigration legislation that was probably a once in a lifetime conservative opportunity.
Anyhow, as noted, Rod Miller recently noted a problem that Gray has. He's not married.
Indeed, without going into it, there was a figure in Wyoming decades ago whose marriage was questioned by whisperers on the basis that they believed he married just to end the speculation on why he wasn't married. The marriage lasted a very long time, so presumably the rumors were without foundation, but there were questions, which is interesting and shows, I guess, how people's minds can work.
Another way to look at it, I supposed, was prior to Trump if a person was a conservative people would ask about things that appeared to be contrary to public statements about conservatism. Not being married, for a conservative, was regarded as odd, and for that matter there are still people who whisper about Lindsey Graham, while nobody seems to worry about AOC being shacked up with her boyfriend or whatever is going on with Krysten Sinema.
And then there's Gray's age. It will make people suspicious of him at some point, or people will at least take note. Indeed, some of his critics from the left already have, but in a really juvenile way.
Actually determining Gray's age is a little difficult, and indeed, knowing anything about his background actually is. But Cowboy State Daily, a conservative organ, managed to reveal about as much as we know.
Gray was born in California and raised outside of Los Angeles. According to somebody close to the family, or who was, he was homeschooled by his mother.3He felt uncomfortable about his birthplace, and stated in the campaign
I come from a divorced family, like many people in our country. A judge said I was to live in a different place, but my dad lived here, built a business here, and I spent my summers here during the time that was allocated by the judge.
According to the same source, he didn't seem all that happy in Casper, Wyoming as a kid, but the circumstances could well explain that. The same source, who probably isn't a family friend anymore, reported to the Cowboy that Gray's father had a focus on the family owned radio station impacting legislation at a national level. Photos have been circulated of the father with President Reagan.
Gray graduated from high school in 2008 and the respected University of Pennsylvanian in 2012, which makes it all the more remarkable that he's been a success in Wyoming politics.4 If we assume the norm about graduation ages, he would have been 22 in 2012, which would make him 34 now.
In Wyoming, the average age for men to marry is 27.8 years on average, while for women it's 25.6. Gray's now notably over the median age, but that is a median. I was over it too when I married at age 31. My wife was below the female one. That's how averages work.
My parents, I'd note, were both over the median, although I don't know it with precision for the 1950s. In the 50s, the marriage age was actually at an unusual low. My father was 29, and my mother 32.
So his age, in the abstract, doesn't really mean anything overall, although it might personality wise.
As has been noted elsewhere on this site, Gray is a Roman Catholic and indeed I've seen him occasionally at Mass, although I would never have seen him every weekend as there are a lot of weekend Masses and my habits aren't the same as his. I have no reason to believe that he didn't attend weekly as required by the church.5 Catholics are supposed to observe traditional Catholic teachings in regard to sex and marriage. I'm not really going to be delving into that, but again we have no reason to believe that Gray isn't observant, in which case, as he is not married, he should be living as a chaste single man, and he probably is (something that has casued juvenile left wing ribbing).
Wyoming, however, is the least religious state in the union and while Catholics, Orthodox, Mormons and Protestants of traditional morality observe that morality, here, as with the rest of the United States, the late stage mass casualty nature of the Sexual Revolution means that a lot of people in these faiths don't, and the society at large does not. We've gone from a society where such outside the bounds of marriage behavior was illegal in varying degrees, to one where, nationwide, society pushes people into things whether they want to or not.
Be that as it may, save for Casper, Laramie, and probably Cheyenne, sexual conduct outside the biological gender norm is very much looked down upon. Indeed, in a really dense move, a Democratic Albany County legislator went to a meeting in Northeast Wyoming a while back on homosexual issues and was shocked by the hostile reception she received. She shouldn't have been.
No, I'm not saying this applies to Gray. I have no reason to believe that, and indeed I believe the opposite.
However, we've gone from a state whose ethos was "I don't care what you do as long as you leave me alone" to one in which, largely due to the importation of Evangelicals from elsewhere, a fairly large percentage of the population really care about what you do, particularly if they don't like it.
Indeed, at the time that Matthew Shepard was murdered, I was surprised when I heard an anti-homosexual comment. Such comments do not surprise me now, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear one now in the context of a murder. As noted, the exceptions seem to be Laramie (where Shepard was murdered, but which has never been hostile to homosexuals), Casper (which has had a homosexual 20 something mayor and which has a lesbian city council member) and Cheyenne (which has a homosexual member of the state House, as does Albany County). Well, I omitted Jackson and should include it here too.
At any rate, being an open homosexual and aiming for major office probably is impossible, although for minor ones it hasn't proven to be. The point is, however, that Miller is right. At some point, people are going to start wondering why staunchly populist Gray isn't married.
Maybe it's because he is in fact a staunchly populist out of state import. There aren't that many women in that pool. Indeed, having a one time vague contact with our staunchly populist Congresswoman, I was very surprised when it turned out she was a populist, or even a conservative. I'm not saying that she's not, I'm just surprised.
Gray is in a sort of oddball demographic. Not being from here, he wouldn't be in any circles in which women from here, professionals or otherwise, would be in. He appears to really be a fish out of water in terms of the local culture. When he appears at things, he does wear cowboy boots, but you can tell they've never been in a stirrup, and he otherwise is, at least based on my very limited observation of him, always dressed in what we might sort of regard as 1980s Denver Business Casual. I'd be stunned if I saw him on a trout stream or out in the prairie with his bird dog, Rex. I've seen him at a bar once, for a grand opening of something, but I don't imagine him walking up to the tender at The Buckhorn or The Oregon Trail and ordering a double Jack Daniel's either.
I was once told by an out-of-state lawyer who had been born in the state but who had moved to Denver after graduating from law school, regarding Wyomingites, that "you have to be tough just to live there". People who live here probably don't realize that, but there's more than a little truth to it. I'm often shocked by the appearance of populist legislature Jeanette Ward, as it's so clear she just doesn't belong here. She's not the kind of gal who would be comfortable sitting next to the ranch girl chewing tobacco who has the "Wrangler Butts Drive Me Nuts" bumper sticker on her pickup truck.6 Gray probably isn't comfortable with such a gal either. "Tomboys", as they used to be called, are sort of the mean average for Wyoming women.
Gray is well-educated, of course, which is part of the reason that I suspect a lot of his positions are affectations. I don't think he really believes the election was stolen, for example, unless he's doing so willfully, which would mean that he really doesn't believe that. Recently he's taken on the topic of firearms arguing, as part of the State Facilities Commission, that the state needs to open up carrying guns at the capitol, which is frankly absurd. While I don't know the answer, I suspect that Gray isn't really a firearms' aficionado.
Up until very recently, Wyomingites knew a lot about the people they sent to the legislature and public office, often knowing them personally to some degree. We actually knew the Governor and the First Lady on some basis other than politics, quite frequently, and our local reps we knew pretty well. The populist invasion defeated that to some degree, and in some cases, a great deal. The question is whether this is permanent, or temporary. It wasn't until the last election that people looked at Gray's background at all, and they still have very little. People haven't really grasped until just now that many of the Freedom Caucus are imports, not natives. We don't know much about some of them or their families, and chances are an average Wyomingite, or at least a long term native, would regard them as odd on some occasions. Chuck Gray just ran an op ed that was titled something like Only Wyomingites Should Vote In Wyoming's Elections. Most long term and native born Wyomingites feel that strongly, and wouldn't actually regard a lot of our current office holders as being Wyomingites.
There's evidence that the populist fad is passing. We'll see. This and the 2026 election will be a test of it. 2026 is a long ways off. For that matter, it's sufficiently long enough for these candidates to evolve if they need to. Some are probably capable of doing that. Others, undoubtedly not. The question will be if they need to.
May 11, 2024
It's very clear, to those paying any attention, that Wyoming elected executive branch officials really dislike Chuck Gray, including those who are very conservative. This became evident again when Superintendant of Education Degenfelder indicated Wyoming would join a Title IX lawsuit in opposition to the Federal Government's new rules on "transgender" atheletes. Degenfelder indicated that she'd been working behind the scenes with Gov. Gordon on this matter. In doing so she blasted Gray who earlier made comments wondering where the state's officials were on this matter, even though his office has less than 0 responsiblity in this department. Degenfelder stated in regard to Gray, "I would encourage Secretary Gray to join those of us actually making plays on the field rather than just heckling from the sidelines". Gray, who is a Californian who has lived very little of his life in Wyoming save for summers here while growing up, declared in response he was on "Team Wyoming".
FWIW, Wyoming really doesn't need to particpate in lawsuits maintained by other parties, as they're already maintained.
July 8, 2024
Now here's an interesting development. . .
I may have mentioned on this blog before that I feel Gov. Gordon should consider running, text of the Wyoming Constitution aside, for a third term. In doing so, if I did (I know that I've discussed with people) I've noted that the Constitutional prohibition on him doing so violates the Wyoming Constitution.
Turns out that I'm not the only one speculating on that.
And it turns out that Chuck Gray doesn't like the idea at all.
January 7, 2025
I managed to miss it, but back in November, Brent Bien announced for Governor.
Bien is on the far right, and is a Wyoming native, but he spent 28 years in the Marine Corps before retiring in 2019 and coming back to the state. This puts him in the camp of far right Republicans in the state who spent their entire working lives drawing on one of richest portions of the government t** while also never actually having to make sure a business actually functioned.
I've never quite grasped "trust me, I know how run things for the common man. . .I've never actually had to work in a business. . . "
Moreover, Bien was a prime mover on the initiatives that will be on the ballot to cut property taxes 50%, essentially meaning he's backing bankrupting local governments and schools. So, after living off of taxpayers for his adult life, having retired, with a retirement funded by taxpayers, he doesn't want to pay them himself.
1. There are numerous examples of this, but a really good one is Gordon's effort to buy the UP checkerboard, which the legislature defeated. It would have been a real boon for the state, but fiscal conservatives just couldn't see it that way.
Recently, Gordon hasn't been shy about vetoing highly unadvised bills that have come out of the legislature, or shutting down bad regulations that come out of the Secretary of State's office.
2. And not just Gray, Harriet Hageman does as well.
3. Homeschooling, for whatever reason a person does it, can be developmentally limiting. I don't know about Gray's case, but its notable that some on the far right have done it, as they believe that schools are left wing organs and there are things they don't want their children exposed to them. The problem this presents is that children who are homeschooled grow up in a very narrow environment, whereas, at least here, those who go to public, and for that matter religious schools, do not.
4. There used to be a school interview of him from the University of Pennsylvania, in which he expressed a desire to become a lawyer. He's clearly not going to do that now, unless of course his political career ended, which is perfectly possible.
5. As noted here in prior posts, lying is regarded as a potentially serious sin in Catholicism, and lying about something like who won the 2020 election would be, in some circumstances, a mortal sin if you were a political figure.
6. Ward is from Illinois and openly calls herself a political refugee. At the time of moving here, she posted something about her children not having to wear masks in our public schools, adopting the far right wing view that trying to protect others in this fashion is somehow an intrusion on liberty. I suppose it is, but not relieving yourself in public is as well. Anyhow, at some point, presuming those children remain in public school, she'll be in for a shock as Casper's schools truly have a really wide demographic and are not exactly made up of an Evangelical populist sample of the population.
While a non partisan race, in Wisconsin the liberal Democratic candidate for the Supreme Court prevailed over the Musk backed conservative Republican.
The race was widely regarded as a test of how people are feeling about Trump.
In Florida two Republicans won election in open House seats in heavily Republican districts, but the Democrats did better than expected. A Democratic victory would have been a huge upset, so in some ways this also showed that people aren't keen on the GOP path.
April 17, 2025
And the race for Governor is sort of on.
Now in the GOP race are two declared candidates, one of whom has filed, Joseph Kibler. Brent Bien has said he's running as well.
Both are in the far, far, right. Kibler moved to Wyoming (his wife is from Wyoming) in 2020. Bien is a Wyoming native, but completed a Marine Corps career and therefore fits into the crowed of Wyoming anti government candidates whose careers were in the government.
Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger 10m
It’s a struggle to understand why @SenThomTillis is now suddenly “over it” in DC after personally ensuring Kash Patel gets the FBI director job
Kinzinger knows the answer, he's just justifiably angry.
The answer is that The Big Ugly is just a bridge too far for anyone who's following it and is awake, including real fiscal conservatives. None of those people, who if they have actual following constituents, want to be there in the fall of 2026 trying to explain things.
The 2026 election has begun.
It'll interesting to see how this pays out.
Lummis is up for reelection, assuming she runs, and she will. She'll blame the Democrats for anything that goes wrong, and talk about being the Cyberqueen.
If she faces a solid challenger, after the Public Lands vote, she'll be in trouble.
The House seat is also up. Hageman won't run for that however, she's going to run for Governor. She's going to lose that.
Chuck Gray is going to run for the House, and he'll lose that.
Times are changing. Whether or not The Big Ugly passes, Trump has shot his bolt. True acolytes can wear "Trump was right about everything" truckers caps, but the opposite is proving to be true.
And this is about to get a lot worse for the GOP.
cont:
And now Nebraska's Don Bacon. The Congressman is in a district that's becoming increasingly Democratic, and my guess is it likely now will be a Democratic seat. The Republicans only hold a seven seat majority right now, which will be reduced to a five seat majority once the Democrats fill two vacant seats. Even assuming the Republicans hold every seat they currently have with out Bacon, that would reduce them to a four seat majority.
But they won't hold every seat. The House will flip.
Provenza is a Democratic legislator, one of Wyoming's few, who used blaze orange t-shirts recalling big game hunting for her campaign last year. She names names in this article, which is very much worth reading.
The best posts of the week of June 15, 2025, a week dominated by the news on the reprehensible inclusion of public land sales in the budget reconciliation bill.
Former Wyoming Governor Francis E. Warren, and sitting Senator at the time of the Johnson County War, F. E. Warren was a Republican Senator who knew how to cover his ass, whic his why he was able to survive the scandal of Republican support for the invasion of Johnson and Natrona Counties. That scandal took down the GOP in the state for a period of time.
Back at least a decade ago I had a conversation with a high ranking member of the Wyoming Republican Party about some really odd going ons down at Cheyenne. He stated, broken hearted, that Wyoming politicians had been "bought".
That's a pretty broad accusation. What he likely really meant is that right about that time the state started to be flooded by out of state political money, and it often went right into the most radical right wing politicians. Wealthy people moving into the state brought their politics with them, and in a few cases if was radically far right. That gave us, for example, the absurd example of Foster Friess and his goofball Dukes of Hazzard campaign for governor.
It also gave us, however, some people who moved in specifically for political reason. Chuck Gray, the family money backed son of a wealthy Republican, who was born in California and went to school at Wharton, like Trump, moved into the state and ran for office nearly immediately. Living in a district in which the long time occupant of a legislative seat died, he managed to leverage a position at his father's radio station into a legislative seat, and then captured the office of the Secretary of State in spite of having very little connection with the state in which he sits. He's been a constant stream of Trump like invective. His seat was taken over by Jeanette Ward, who was if anything even further to the far right. Ward, from Illinois, came to Wyoming as a "political refugee" and had been here so briefly that she barely qualified for her seat when she ran. Her politics were too far to the right for even that district, which booted her after one embarrassing term in Cheyenne where she espoused far right populist, far right Evangelical, positions.
The state GOP was likewise taken over by far right populists, about whom we hear less now, but who went to war with the traditional GOP. They were largely successful, duping, although I expect only temporarily, a large number of Wyoming voters into believing the sh** sandwiches which Trump and his allies serve up as alleged filet mignon.
That they can be duped is because the state is in economic distress, and regular people don't know what to do about it. Global Warming is real, not some sort of fib, and long term coal and oil are doomed. A large number of workers who relocated form Texas and Oklahoma, and the like, are fairly poorly educated on top of it and are relatively easy to lead by being told that what they want to be true, is true. The agricultural sector, which has deeply ingrained conservative tendencies, is rolling over from a generation that basically stopped its education at high school to one which is now college educated, but in the meantime the older agriculturalist who control the operations deeply want to believe that operations can be run the way they were in the 1970s, and that threats they need to deal with, which include Global Warming and the buying power of the Super Rich, really don't.
Basically, Wyoming's current politics can be explained by people voting for what they want to believe, over reality. Coal and oil are never going way. You'll always be able to get a job in the extractive industries, or as a truck driver, with a high school diploma, or even without one. There are no deep existential problems with the economy here that aren't the result of a conspiracy against us.
It can't be us.
But it can be.
And right now, it is.
A further part of the problem, however, is that the Democratic Party in the state has displayed a level of intellectual denseness that would suck light out of a black hole It's stunning.
It wasn't all that time that Wyoming had a viable Democratic Party that could serious contend for statewide and national seats. That started to change, however, during the Clinton Administration for reasons that are now hard to discern, although the decline of unionized mining jobs in Wyoming are likely part of that problem. Even after that, however, we had a Democratic Governor.
As the Democratic Party in the state declined it took on a lot of the same trend lines that the national Democratic Party did, which has helped explain the rise of Trump. In a state that was both sort of conservative and sort of libertarian, they became goofball left wing as an organization, although not all of their candidates reflected that. Over time, the Democrats never saw a fetus in the womb that they didn't' want to kill, or a brand new perversion that they didn't want to celebrate. A party which at one time was lead by burly miners or grumpy rural lawyers is now lead by a guy who has the appearance of a bow tie wearing nerd.
Recent promo photograph of the Democratic Party. This is a far cry from a party that once put a World War Two Marine Corps Raider in the Governor's office, a World War Two infantryman in Congress and a gruff prosecutor into office. Marine Corps Raider gets votes, and inspires confidence. Bow Tie Wearing Doofus does not. And is that buffalo smiling?
Hypocritical or not, Wyomingites aren't going to vote for a party that they associate with men in tutus and that it's all okay. Men might go into the voting booth with their third wife at home, before they go to see their mistress, but they're going to regard that as contrary to the moral law. Interestingly, if politics returned to the "I don't care what you do, just leave me alone" ethos it once had, they'd be fine with that. Indeed, that's how their living their private lives already.
In fairness, however, the last two chairmen of the Wyoming GOP don't win high marks either. The current one, Bryan Miller, is another of the "I spent my life in the military and hate the government" Republicans. After decades of drawing on the government tit, they claim to know what's wrong in a state where most people don't, or at least not openly.
We may, just might, be at a turning point, however.
We are certainly at a point where Republican office holders ignoring the real views of the state can be exploited.
Dr. John Barrasso. He went from orthopedic surgeon to the Senate, having been appointed by the Legislature. At age 72, he's now the Senate Whip and doesn't appear to have any desire to retire any time soon.
Wyomingites are overwhelmingly opposed to public lands being transferred out of government control. In spite of that, Dr. John Barrasso supported Federal lands being transferred to the states in the 2016 GOP platform. That didn't happen in part because Eric Trump is a hunter. Barrasso darned well knew that Wyomingites didn't support that, but somebody he was listening to did, as he supported it against the wishes of his constituents.
72 year old Barrasso is in that class of politicians who desperately seem to want to hang on to their jobs in spite of their advancing old age. At 72 he ought to be retired, but he hung on and is how the Senate Whip. Once a Republican moderate, he became a Trumpite by necessity. That means he could become a moderate again, and if the political winds shifted, he would.
This issue is one in which he's hearing from hundreds of Wyomingites per day. He's heard from me twice.
He hasn't responded, but he hasn't said what his position is.
If the proposals to transfer public lands advance, he ought to be sent packing.
Cynthia Lummis. Once the State Treasurer, she entered the U.S. House in 2009, but stepped down in 2017 to take care of her dying husband, a very admirable thing to do.
70 year old Cynthia Lummis is likewise in the age group that ought to be out of politics. She actually returned to it, however, to take her current Senate seat. Lummis condescendingly stated that all Federal lands didn't need to remain in Federal lands forever, which is intellectually the same as maintaining that all privately held lands don't either, something she'd be in horror about as she comes from a ranching family. She's also shown an ability to tack into the wind, however, as she was once a Trump opponent and now is a Trump backer.
Lummis is making sort of a big deal right now about her cryptocurrency bill which just passed the Senate, and nickname Crypto Queen she's been tagged with. The truth is, however, that the overwhelming majority of Wyomingites don't give a rusty rats ass about this topic and aren't going to remember diddly squat about this bill. It'll soon be a "what?" sort of topic.
The public lands vote, however won't be.
Harriet Hageman. She ran an unsuccessful campaign for Governor against Mark Gordon and then, when Liz Cheney ran into trouble, ran against he rand obtained her seat.
Harriet Hageman is on her first time as Congresswoman, having been able to take advantage of her former friend Liz Cheney's downfall. Hageman is the only one of Wyoming's Washington delegation who probably comes by her public land vote, which was in favor of the Federal sales bill, honestly. Daughter of Jim Hageman, who spent 23 years in the Wyoming House of Representatives, Hageman is from a farming family from Southeastern Wyoming where there is very little public land. Jim Hageman was one of the backers of a proposal to allow for the privatization of wildlife in Wyoming, which almost destroyed the GOP during its go around.
This issue could be a similar one.
Wyomingites should make it.
At the top of this page is a portrait of Francis E. Warren. Warren had been territorial governor, and then the first governor, of the State of Wyoming.
I don't admire him.
But his ability to read the political winds is admirable.
The state Republican Party was complicit in the invasion as so many of those in it were connected with Republican politics. Planned at the Cheyenne Club, people kne what was going on. Republican Governor Amos Barber did and had arranged to activate the National Guard in order to keep it from being deployed to Central Wyoming to stop the invasion.
Barber lost his seat following the event.
The Republicans lost the legislature.
Warren kept his.
There's a lesson there for those currently in office. . . and those who wish to be.
Amos W. Barber. A dentist by profession, like Barrasso is a surgeon by profession, he disgraced himself with his support of the invaders in the Johnson County War and then thereafter by attempting to retain his office after he was defeated for reelection. He became Wyoming Secretary of State immediately after that, as that was his prior office at the time of Warren's elevation to the Senate, and then returned to his dental practice. Oddly, like the current occupant of the Secretary of State's chair, he was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
