What are the stakes for the 2024 elections in Wyoming?

The answer depends on the party and, even more importantly, the caucus. But there’s lots to lose.

JACKSON — While lawmakers representing Teton County in the Wyoming Legislature will go unchallenged in the upcoming election, battle lines have been drawn across the state.

All 62 seats in the Legislature’s House are up for grabs, and 15 out of 31 state senators are facing reelection. Only 15 of those 77 total races are uncontested. Four of those races with incumbents facing no challenger are Democratic Reps. Mike Yin and Liz Storer, Republican Rep. Andrew Byron and Republican Sen. Dan Dockstader, all representing Teton County.

But that doesn’t mean Teton County’s delegation isn’t paying attention.

“What’s at stake is quite a lot, actually,” House Minority Floor Leader Yin said. “We’ve seen across states what it means when extremists take over the government.”

Yin directs the Wyoming Democratic Caucus and is among three leaders of the political factions that make up the Wyoming Legislature who weighed in on what the 2024 election could bring.

The other two were members of sparring caucuses in the Wyoming Republican Party — one that seeks to remove “big government” from its constituents’ lives, and the other that says it desires responsible yet conservative governance.

The deepening division has accelerated in the past two election cycles. The Wyoming Freedom Caucus began to form in 2017 with just five lawmakers. By 2020 the group made up nearly a third of the House. Now, just three seats in the Wyoming House determine if the Freedom Caucus will take full control of the Legislature.

The Wyoming Freedom Caucus is part of the State Freedom Caucus Network tied to the U.S. House Freedom Caucus established in 2015. Farther right Republicans and Tea Party members were among the founders, and Pew Research Center conducted studies in 2015 that found the majority of members in that caucus were considered the most conservative Republicans in the U.S. House.

But in Wyoming, traditional GOP members argue the differences are less about the level of conservatism and more about how “anti-government” Freedom Caucus members are. This stems from the caucus’s approach to cutting as much funding from bills and budgets as possible, whether that’s voting against state employee raises, mental health services, free school lunch programs or affordable housing.

This tug of war for the Legislature is not unique to Wyoming, said House Speaker Pro Tempore Clark Stith, R-Rock Springs, a leader of the Wyoming Caucus at odds with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. “The Freedom Caucus prevailed in state legislative races in Idaho just a month ago,” he said. “In Montana, the Freedom Caucus was rebuffed. In South Dakota, the Freedom Caucus had more success.

“We’re right behind all three of those states, and that’s why I think Wyoming is kind of important.”

Stith said his caucus holds the majority in the House by just three seats, and with incumbents leaving such as Reps. Cyrus Western, R-Big Horn, and Sandy Newsome, R-Cody, he is concerned they will lose their 31-member voting bloc.

“The Republican primary race is crucial for the direction that our state goes in the future,” Stith said. “I wouldn’t normally use exaggerated language like that, but it’s really important, because if the Freedom Caucus takes over there will be a dismantling of programs that ordinary citizens come to depend on.

“It would be very destructive.”

The chair of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, Rep. John Bear, R-Gillette, believes taking control of the Legislature is possible heading into the 2024 election cycle. His caucus of 26 lawmakers in the House is pushing to grab a hold of the majority. It’s endorsing incumbents and candidates challenging traditional Republicans statewide.

And Bear argues the stakes are high for different reasons.

“This election cycle, much like the 2022 primary, demonstrates the clear ideological divide in Wyoming politics,” said Bear. “Then, it was ordinary grassroots conservative Wyomingites versus Liz Cheney Republicans and their Democrat allies. This summer that same divide exists.

“In 2022 the people of Wyoming overwhelmingly rejected the entrenched political machine.”

Liz Cheney lost the election to current U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman after losing traction with Republican voters for her criticisms of former President Donald Trump and her voting to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. She was censured by the Wyoming GOP and the Republican National Committee, and Hageman won the endorsement of Trump heading into the 2022 primary.

Bear said that when Wyoming rejected Cheney in 2022 by nearly 40%, it was clear constituents were tired of being lied to by politicians. He said the Freedom Caucus needs only to expose the voting records of many incumbents to win seats this cycle.

Many Wyoming Republican incumbents defend their voting records as entirely conservative, however, and Stith pointed out that there are similarities in the values of both caucuses. For example, both want to lower property taxes, support Second Amendment rights, are pro-life and support parental rights. But he said the difference comes in approach.

There are areas of government that should be pulled back, he said, such as business and housing regulations. But he said his caucus also believes in the responsible use of government and Wyoming-based solutions. Appropriate times for the government to provide solutions, he said, include investing in public education and ensuring access to health care.

He wants voters to consider who has their best interests at hand.

“It’s an opportunity for voters to say that we in Wyoming want to find Wyoming solutions,” Stith said.

As a Democrat, Yin has his own policy frustrations with the Freedom Caucus. Some overlap with the Wyoming Caucus includes community college funding, which Freedom Caucus lawmakers tried to strip out of the budget this year.

Others fall where party lines are drawn, such as pushing back on legislation that infringes on reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ rights. The Freedom Caucus pushed legislation to ban abortion without exceptions, banned gender-affirming care for minors and ripped funding from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs at the University of Wyoming.

There are only seven Democrats in the Wyoming Legislature, and voting with either block is difficult ideologically, Yin said. He’s particularly disinterested, though, in aligning with a 26-person group that “gets their voting marching orders from a national group.” He’s witnessed Freedom Caucus members on the floor receive text messages and emails from the national network in Washington D.C. telling them how to vote on various bills.

In some cases, Yin said, they were simply politically grandstanding.

“What is the Woman Act, right?” Yin said, referring to a bill that would have established definitions of gender to enforce distinctions between the sexes with respect to athletics, prisons or other detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms or public schools. “That’s being used as an ideological burden. It’s not a bill that actually did anything at all, except for stick a definition into our statute.

He said it’s an effort to get attention from the press. “They don’t actually help the government do anything other than be a campaign tool.”

“I think our freedoms are at stake,” Yin said. “I really do believe that, and I think that we’ve seen bills that try to have the state decide what people can and can’t do.

“We’ve seen more of those bills each year and I think that truly is an indication that we have extremists in government.”

Bear outlined the risks he sees with the establishment Republicans gaining seats.

“The amount of spending they have already demonstrated they’re addicted to combined with their refusal to fight the Biden administration’s assault on our legacy industries will result in an income tax,” he said.

He also said they created challenges for the Wyoming Freedom Caucus and allies in the Senate to pass legislation.

“In 2023, common-sense conservative measures like Chloe’s law were blocked by liberal Republicans and Democrats,” he said “Some would call this a failure, but our communications team quickly and effectively let the people of Wyoming know what happened. This year, Chloe’s Law became a reality in Wyoming.

Chloe’s law bans gender-affirming care for minors and went into effect July 1. The bill passed the Senate in a 26-5 vote in 2023 but failed to even make it to the floor of the House. The 2024 version passed the Senate with the same numbers, but managed to secure a 55-6-1 approval in the House. The Wyoming Caucus joined the Freedom Caucus on this vote.

“What is seen as the Wyoming Freedom Caucus falling short, we use to accomplish the desires of our constituents,” Bear said.

At an event on the Town Square of Jackson on Tuesday, Rep. Storer and Democratic Tennessee Rep. Justin Pearson spoke about the future of the nation’s democracy and what was at risk if lawmakers with these kinds of agendas continued to gain power in state legislatures.

“Here in Wyoming and across the nation we are facing a similar threat to equality under the law,” Storer said before she introduced Pearson, a freshman lawmaker who was expelled by the Republican-majority General Assembly for speaking out for gun control on the House floor following a school shooting in Nashville that left three children and three adults dead in April 2023.

“The very essence of democracy itself is on the ballot,” she said.

Storer said now more than ever, states need voices that preserve the belief that the power to govern must come from the consent of those who are governed.

“They want a system that keeps them in power,” she said, referring to far-right candidates. “That dictates how the majority of society acts, what we should believe, who we should love, what we can read and who can vote. And that’s happening here in Wyoming, as well as Tennessee and across the country.”

In Wyoming, Stith believes the Freedom Caucus has reached its “high watermark.”

“It’s sort of an angry anti-government message only carries you so far, because I think when people look at what they want their state government to do — I think they realize they want their roads to be paved. They want their schools to be open. When they call 911, they want someone to answer.”

That won’t be decided until Wyoming polls open Aug. 20 and voters cast their ballots in 48 Republican primary races.

This story was published on July 17, 2024.