The ultraconservatives in Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus entered Tuesday’s Republican primaries with visions of a clean sweep of the state government, from the governor’s office to the State Senate and House.
Instead, the pendulum swung the other way — hard.
Republican voters in Wyoming rejected Freedom Caucus candidates who ran for governor, secretary of state and schools superintendent, siding with more mainstream conservative Republicans, The Associated Press reported.
In the primary to succeed the low-key outgoing governor, Mark Gordon, State Senator Eric Barlow, a rancher and veteran lawmaker, topped Megan Degenfelder, the schools superintendent who was endorsed by President Trump, and another hard-right candidate, Brent Bien, a retired Marine colonel backed by the Wyoming Republican Party.
At least a dozen Freedom Caucus incumbents were ousted from the Legislature, including three of the four leaders of the caucus in the State House. Among them was Chip Neiman, the House speaker who ran for State Senate.
Rather than seizing control of the state’s upper chamber, the Freedom Caucus lost its majority in the House.
The results — a “near-total massacre,” as Wyoming’s Cowboy State Daily put it — were a stinging rebuke of the hard-right agenda and aggressive style that had propelled Wyoming in 2024 to become the country’s first such caucus to control a statehouse chamber.
The caucus had used that power to expand a voucher program to pay private school tuition and make Wyoming the first state to ban abortion pills, a law struck down by the State Supreme Court. But without a majority in the State Senate, it failed to enact deep cuts to the University of Wyoming, gut the state’s economic development office or revamp the judiciary — prompting Mr. Neiman and others to run for Senate.
“Wyoming citizens spoke loud and clear tonight!” State Representative Landon Brown, a Republican and frequent Freedom Caucus critic, wrote on Facebook. “They want TRUE governance, not child’s play.”
Tuesday night’s winners now advance to November’s general election. Most will be heavily favored against Democrats in a Republican state that delivered President Trump his biggest margin of victory in 2024.
The wipeout of far-right candidates did not extend to federal offices. Harriet Hageman, who ousted one of Mr. Trump’s fiercest Republican critics, Liz Cheney, to take Wyoming’s lone U.S. House seat in 2022, on Tuesday easily won the Republican primary to succeed retiring U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis. Chuck Gray, the current secretary of state, emerged first in a hard-fought, expensive and crowded primary to replace Ms. Hageman in the U.S. House.
But Cheyenne was another story.
In the Legislature, five state representatives who have identified with the Freedom Caucus tried to unseat more traditional Republicans in the State Senate. In the most highly anticipated showdown, Mr. Neiman, who represents a district in the shadow of the Devils Tower national monument, lost to State Senator Ogden Driskill, a self-described “Reagan conservative” who has been in office since 2011.
In another notable race, State Representative Rachel Williams, the Freedom Caucus chairwoman who had urged Governor Gordon to join the fight against certifying President Biden’s victory in 2020, lost her bid for secretary of state, the state’s top elections official. Voters sided with Robert Short, a county official who has praised local election officials and volunteers for doing “a spectacular job.”
State Representative John Bear, a former Freedom Caucus chairman, was defeated by Doug Moore, a coal industry manager and political newcomer who pledged to focus on deregulation. Mr. Moore was backed by Americans for Prosperity, a veteran conservative group, and Common Sense Republicans, a new organization that had warned that an empowered Freedom Caucus would enact deep cuts to schools and law enforcement.
Americans for Prosperity opposed numerous Freedom Caucus legislative candidates, but its spending was dwarfed by Make Liberty Win, a pro-Freedom Caucus political action committee.
Make Liberty Win and other groups prioritized defeating Mr. Barlow in the governor’s race. But he won handily after promising to lower the temperature of Wyoming’s politics, and work on bread-and-butter issues such as energy, rural health care and water.
In one memorable video referring to the negative mailers inundating voters, Mr. Barlow — who is also a veterinarian — pulled on a long plastic veterinarian’s glove, reached into his mailbox and retrieved a pile of yak dung.
