The 2026 Election, 3rd Edition: The Self Inflicted Wound Edition.

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.

November 18, 2025

A Federal Court in Texas has blocked the state from using its recently redrawn Congressional District map.

Oops.

This will be appealed, but if the decision is upheld it would mean that the five GOP (probably) seats that the state added won't be, while California, in a recent election, added five.

Oops.

Additionally, early indicators are that Texas Hispanics are following the national tread and are becoming disenchanted with the GOP, so some Texas districts may swing Democratic on their own.

Oops.

All of this could mean that the 2026 election could see the House not only swing Democratic, but perhaps massively so, and that some of the Returning Republicans are no longer big fans of Trump, to which those survivors will be reassessing their loyalty to Trump.

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.

Last edition:

The 2026 Election, 2nd Edition: The early season.

Labels: 2026 Election, Carpetbaggers, Chuck Gray, Cynthia Lummis, Elon Musk, Errare humanum est perseverare diabolicum, Harriet Hageman, homosexuality, Hypocrisy, Lies, Politics, Populism, Republican Party, Sex, The Big Ugly, Wyoming

Wyoming's broken politics.

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.

Wyoming’s congressional delegation should follow neighbors’ lead on public lands

Wyoming’s congressional delegation should follow neighbors’ lead on public lands: Republican counterparts in Montana and Idaho are taking bold steps to protect public lands, writes guest columnist Pete Madsen.

The Best Post of the Week of May 18, 2025.

It was quite a week.

We started the week off with a look at the Vietnamese Diaspora

A Sunday Morning look at the Vietnamese Diaspora.

And we delved into local politicians betraying local values.

Looking for Nate Champion.

The occupant of the Oval Office was on display again.

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Second Edition.

I posed a query to our readers, but received no response.

A query for the retired readers.

We noted a momentous anniversary for Christianity.

Thursday, May 20, 325. The opening of the Council of Nicea.

Republicans were all atwitter about alleged coverups of Joe Biden's decline, while they're covering up Donald Trump's.

The elephant in the room.

Some depressing news in the age of science denialism. 

Pandemic Part 10. A new paradigm?

Monday, May 21, 1945. British government falls apart, French mandates want out, Himmler arrested.

Women were on the blog a lot.

Mid Week At Work

Appearance. Shape and being in shape and women (men will come next).

We considered authenticity.

Occupational Identity and authenticity, a rambling thread.

Tuesday, May 22, 1945. Operation Unthinkable.

The amazing ability of the Palestinians to self sabotage.

The 2026 Wyoming Legislature, Part 1. The way too early edition.

The U.S. took a giant step towards economic disaster.

Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 6. “Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.”

Froma Harrop: The tax cut fantasy needs to end

Here's Six Ways Trump’s Budget Will Hurt Rural Americans

Saturday, May 23, 1925. Memorial Day Weekend.

Governor Gordon called  Chuck Gray out on the carpet.

Governor Gordon has enough of Chuck Gray.

Tuesday, May 18, 1915. The Amos Barber Effect.

The 1st Canadian Division attacked the German line at Festubert with support from a British division but failed to progress against enemy artillery.

Division patch of the 1st Canadian Division.

British submarine HMS E11 infiltrated Turkish waters past the Dardanelles.

Today In Wyoming's History: May 19: 1915  Dr. Amos Barber, Wyoming's second governor after statehood, whose governorship was marred by the Johnson County War and his general ineffective reaction to it, died.  Barber had a successful career as an Army surgeon before entering private practice, and he followed up on that with service again during the Spanish American War, but his having participated through acts of omission in the large cattleman's invasion of central Wyoming is principally what he is remembered for.

This appears on May 19 on the above referenced site, but likely because that's the date hit hit the press.

Barber was 54 years of age at the time.  He stands as an example of a weak willed politician that caved to the seeming authority of the time, and came to be tainted by it. An example, as it were, for modern politicians.

Last edition:

Monday, May 17, 1915. Van abandoned.

Labels: 1910s, 1915, Armenia, Armenian Genocide, Defense of Van, Ottoman Army, Turkey, World War One