Bill Tallen

Never mind the Middle East; that struggle simmers along toward a conclusion, and we can take a break from it to consider conflicts closer to home — and less kinetic.

The August primary election in Wyoming was a hot mess. As with all midterm elections, turnout was low — 55% of registered voters bothered to vote, compared to the historical high of 63% in 2022 when Harriet Hageman challenged Liz Cheney and won the nomination for our U.S. House seat. Turnout has been lower in every other midterm over the last decade, but this was still nothing to be proud of. Especially when the 10:1 ratio of Republican to Democrat voters ensures that the victors in the general election will almost certainly be Republicans, you might think that more Republicans would show up for the primary, which effectively decides the general election outcome. You would have thought wrong, because they did not.

Out of about 212,000 registered Republican voters, less than 63% got up off their couches to vote in the primary. When you look at the primary outcomes in local and state races, remember that no victory required more than 51% (a simple majority) of Republicans who actually cast ballots, a few less than 68,000. In every case where there were more than two candidates competing for a nomination, the winner often got a lot fewer than 51%. For what you are about to receive ... accept your responsibility. If you did not vote in the primary, you left it to no more than 32% of registered Republicans to decide each outcome, or about 11.5% of the population of the state. I don’t think that’s the republic the Founders envisioned, but it’s nobody’s fault but our own.

Civic duty and pride in our system of government motivate voters who register and vote; but it’s also true that fear and gullibility have a role. 

Fear is what filled my mailbox and clogged my social media accounts every day for months leading up to the primary. It was the fear of the political establishment after the upset they suffered in the 2024 election. For every mailer or online ad I received that compared candidates’ stances on issues, or list the qualifications of one candidate, there was at least one, and often a lot more, that were purely negative and did nothing but attack opponents or members of this or that clique or caucus for their alleged faults and failures. I follow a personal rule in politics, that if you lie to me once, I assume you will continue, and you won’t get my ear again. Many of those attack ads were full of untruths and misrepresentations, but as the worst propagandists of the 20th century generally agreed, if a lie is big enough, and repeated often enough, it will eventually be accepted as truth. It is my opinion that the money that bought those overwhelmingly negative advertising campaigns bought the outcomes. Others have tracked the money. It tells a tale.

Another aspect of the continuing electoral drama is how the gubernatorial race is still in play. There were three serious contenders in the Republican primary: Brent Bien, Megan Degenfelder and Eric Barlow. The media has proclaimed Barlow the people’s choice. But which people? He won roughly 45% of Republican primary votes for governor, while Bien and Degenfelder split the more-conservative primary vote with 24% and 30% respectively. As is often the case, a three-way race gave the win to a candidate with less than half the total votes. 

Unsatisfied with that math, Rebecca Bextel, a longtime Republican from Teton County, is running for governor on the Constitution Party ticket, presenting herself as an unapologetic conservative Republican and campaigning hard for the 54% of Republican voters that supported either Bien or Degenfelder in the primary election. Her campaign is well-organized and increasingly well-funded, and her name will be on the ballot in November.

What, you might ask, is the Constitution Party? You can find out by visiting their website. I have, and find that for me, it meets the Ronald Reagan standard of 80% or better of acceptable platform positions. The party accepted Ms. Bextel as their candidate despite her long background as a conservative Republican, and neither she nor they are “Manchurian Candidates” — it is a minor party that has won no elected positions in the past, and will not, in any outcome, shake the towers of the mighty. That said, there are far more similarities than differences between the Constitution Party and the Wyoming Republican Party platforms. As a matter of principle, we should all remember that we did not relinquish our right to vote for every candidate according to their merits regardless of their or our own party affiliation, and we are answerable to no one for those choices. Let the true winner of general election votes serve the people of Wyoming as their new governor.