Although it was a fierce primary campaign season overall, perhaps no local race proved more contentious than the one for county attorney.

The winner of the Republican nomination, Deputy Park County Attorney Ericka Smith, said the contest tested her in ways she never expected.

“I walked into this campaign believing I could serve Park County,” Smith wrote on Facebook after the Aug. 18 election. “I now walk forward knowing how much I am willing to fight for it.”

Smith faced one of her coworkers, fellow Deputy County Attorney Marina Tucker of Cody, in a primary race that divided the office.

Outgoing County Attorney Bryan Skoric — who’s led the office for the past 23 years — had encouraged voters to choose Tucker. However, Republicans around the county overwhelmingly picked Smith, who had touted her two-and-a-half decades of experience as a Wyoming lawyer. She received 5,238 votes (63.4%), while Tucker picked up 2,994 votes (36.3%).

“... I wish Ericka [Smith] and Park County well for the future,” Tucker told the Tribune in a text after the election.

Smith lives in Powell and drew stronger support on the eastern side of the county, but she also carried Cody, Meeteetse and Clark. Among the county’s 23 precincts, Smith won all but the Upper South Fork.

Seeking more cooperation

Smith is set to be the only candidate on November’s general election ballot, which means she’s almost certain to take over the office in January. She has described three priorities: being accessible and transparent, improving the way the county handles involuntary hospitalizations of mentally ill people and better utilizing resources and partnerships in the community.

In a statement to the Park County Neighbors political group, Smith indicated that she wants the office to work more closely with outside groups like Crisis Intervention Services, Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), Healthy Park County, food assistance organizations and the Park County Drug Court.

“We should rely on established resources before assuming that every problem requires a new program, new bureaucracy, or more taxpayer dollars, or worse yet, not utilizing the resources at all,” she wrote ahead of the primary.

In her conversations with people in organizations ranging from the Department of Family Services to law enforcement and court staff, Smith said some people shared that they haven’t felt heard by the county attorney’s office in the past.

She said one of the office’s biggest challenges “is the growing divisions and lack of trust among Park County residents and county officials.”

Accessibility and transparency, she said, can restore that trust.

Differing supporters

In addition to Skoric, Senior Deputy County Attorney Larry Eichele publicly backed Tucker, along with two other staffers in the Cody office. Roughly a dozen members of the Cody Police Department and Park County Sheriff’s Office also signed a document supporting Tucker.

Meanwhile, Smith drew support from Big Horn County Attorney Marcia Bean and quieter backings from multiple Powell police officers.

Additionally, Smith got the endorsement of the Park County Republican Party and the conservative Park County Patriots, which led to her being labeled as a “Freedom Caucus” candidate in some circles.

Smith was one of the only candidates on the Patriots’ “Good Guys List” to win the primary, which she said was because “I’m not beholden to anyone.”

She initially received the endorsement of the Park County Neighbors as well — a group that generally backed the inverse of the Patriots’ preferences — but it later withdrew the recommendation and stayed silent on the attorney race.

Race gets personal

The contest was heated.

In an Aug. 9 post on her campaign’s Facebook page, Tucker accused Smith and Smith’s supporters of generating a “smear campaign” against her.

Among other things, Tucker said Smith had called her a “F*ing B” for running for the position and that Smith had falsely told people she’d been fired from previous jobs. Tucker said she’d confronted Smith in writing in late June, but never heard back.

“All of this is a typical dirty political (Freedom Caucus) tactic. Spread false information, provide no proof, and don’t respond or lie more when called out,” Tucker wrote.

In a post-election interview, Smith disputed the charge that she ran a smear campaign.

“My campaign and everybody who worked on my campaign ran a clean, classy campaign,” she said.

Negative information about Smith also made the rounds.

On Aug. 4, an anonymous writer posted in a Powell Facebook group about the criminal history of Smith’s boyfriend.

“As someone who is supposed to put violent criminals away how do we know she [Smith] will do so when she is living with one,” the user wrote in part. “I’m worried for our community and kids that she will go easy on violent felons.”

The post was publicly shared by Michelle Horn, a staffer in the county attorney’s Cody office, who described it as “yet another reason I fully support Marina Tucker for Park County Attorney.”

In an interview, Smith said her boyfriend, Anthony “A.J.” Apodaca, has a federal felony conviction for an assault on the Wind River Indian Reservation that resulted in serious bodily injury. Federal records show the case against Apodaca was brought in 1997.

“We had nothing to hide,” Smith said, adding that the decades-old conviction is “not who he is.” She described Apodaca as a wonderful, hardworking man.

Smith also said his past wouldn’t play into her decisions as a prosecutor.

“People need to be held accountable for their actions. People also need to be allowed to rehabilitate,” she said, “and holding a 50-year-old man … to some standard that he’s a ‘violent felon’ from something that happened when he was a minor is absurd.”

Differing donors

Smith’s pre-primary campaign finance report gave little insight into her local backers, as 20 of her 22 listed donors were from outside Park County.

Another 13 donations included on the report had no name attached. The Tribune initially misinterpreted the document, believing the blank slots represented additional contributions from the donor listed above. In fact, they were contributions from different, undisclosed donors.

Though local candidates typically list all their donors, Wyoming state law allows them to withhold the names of those who give less than $100; Smith’s report indicates that the 12 “unitemized” donations ranged between $10 and $52, while some person she didn’t know purchased a $150 article in the Cody Journal on her behalf.

In total, about $654 of the more than $13,800 Smith reportedly spent on her campaign came from undisclosed or anonymous contributors. The largest chunk — just over $5,050 — came out of her own pocket, her report says.

On Friday, Smith amended her filing to disclose seven additional donations totaling $2,565 — including five contributions from Cody residents that she’d received before filing her initial Aug. 11 report.

In a Tuesday text, Smith said she’d attempted to include those donations in her first report, and only later realized they’d dropped off the “glitchy” electronic form she’d used.

Smith said the same thing happened when she tried using the digital form for Friday’s amendment, so she gave up and “begrudgingly turned in a handwritten one.”

As for Tucker, she made the decision to entirely self-fund her campaign and made that a part of her pitch to voters.

“I wanted to be very sure that people did not wonder if my views or what I'm saying in public or how I’m handling my campaign had anything to do with financial backing,” Tucker told the Tribune in early August.

She spent $6,272 of her own money.

The deputy also got a boost from Skoric, who independently purchased ads in the Cody Enterprise and Powell Tribune supporting Tucker’s candidacy.

‘Beholden to no one’

Smith generally described herself as someone who builds coalitions, noting the variety of support she received.

“I had [Park County] Patriots and people who were further right say, ‘Why should I support you? I saw your sign in a [gubernatorial candidate Eric] Barlow yard. You must be a pretend Republican,’” she said, “and I got the same, ‘You’re on the “Good Guys List,” so you must be a Christian nationalist,’ or, ‘You are for sure going to support hand [counted] ballots.’”

But Smith said her response to all of those people was that her campaign was based on her qualifications — namely, her 26 years of experience practicing law and building connections around Wyoming. 

She told the Tribune that she spent her campaign listening to people’s concerns rather than sharing her own political views, “and everyone was very responsive to the fact that I was willing to listen.”

Smith has said her aim is to bring people to the same table, determine the facts and law and help people move forward. 

“My job at the end of the day is to advise the county,” she said, “and I am beholden to no one except the county and the law for the State of Wyoming.”