Wyoming, one of the most conservative states, has a legislature divided between a hard-right House and a merely right Senate. Ultraconservatives want a complete takeover in the Aug. 18 primaries.
David W. Chen
David W. Chen and Will Warasila reported from Senate District 1 in northeastern Wyoming, bordering South Dakota and Montana.
In the shadow of Devils Tower, the national monument immortalized by Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” an election-year fight has erupted between Wyoming’s right and its far right, with serious implications for the state’s political future.
On the far right is State Representative Chip Neiman, the House speaker and a member of Wyoming’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, the country’s first such caucus to control a statehouse chamber. On the merely right is State Senator Ogden Driskill, whose chamber has often thwarted the Freedom Caucus agenda.
In an unusual gamble, Mr. Neiman is giving up his speaker’s gavel to take on Mr. Driskill, a former State Senate president, in the Aug. 18 Republican primary.
“Challenging the status quo — I think it’s critical,” Mr. Neiman said at his cattle ranch in Hulett, Wyo. “We need to move more conservatives to the Senate.”
With U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis declining to seek re-election, Harriet Hageman, a hard-core conservative, vacating the state’s lone U.S. House seat to run for Senate, and Gov. Mark Gordon facing term limits, Wyoming voters face a choice, from the statehouse to the governor’s mansion to the U.S. Capitol. They can expand — or check — ultraconservative power.
The schism echoes struggles between institutionalists and insurgents elsewhere, especially among Democrats, but it feels especially personal in Wyoming. The nation’s least populous state has produced national figures, Dick and Liz Cheney, the now-deceased Senator Alan K. Simpson and the current Senate majority whip, John Barrasso. It has also attracted an influx of billionaires, heightening class anger and affordability issues.
If hard-right candidates triumph, some groups such as Common Sense Republicans warn of deep cuts to schools, towns and law enforcement. Americans for Prosperity, a veteran conservative group that targeted moderate Montana Republican legislators this year, is now championing more than a dozen non-Freedom Caucus legislative candidates, Mr. Driskill included.
Freedom Caucus legislators “weren’t willing to work with others to find a solution,” said Tyler Lindholm, the Wyoming state director of Americans for Prosperity and a former state representative who lost to Mr. Neiman in the 2020 primary.
The first plank of the Wyoming Republican Party’s 23-plank platform, trumpeted by the Freedom Caucus, declares that life begins at conception. Others highlight the role of faith and biblical principles in the nation’s founding and the “freedom” to decline childhood vaccines.
“I hate the Freedom Caucus and how they do business,” he said.
Mr. Neiman, 59, says Mr. Driskill has “Freedom Caucus derangement syndrome.”
Elected in 2020, Mr. Neiman pushed to make Wyoming the first state to ban abortion pills, a law struck down by the State Supreme Court. He supported a program that offers $7,000-per-student vouchers to pay private school tuition. He criticized the State Senate for failing to ban what he called sexually explicit books from libraries and schools.
“I don’t know what the Lord’s plan is, but I’m glad to just let Him order my steps,” he said, pounding in campaign signs with his son Preston on Highway 14.
Future priorities include shrinking government, tightening voting rules and curtailing “activist” judges, said State Representative Rachel Williams, the Freedom Caucus chairwoman, who is running for secretary of state.
“The left tends to be very loud in Wyoming,” she said, “and our supporters tend to be the silent majority.”
Early voting started on July 21. In Sundance, Wyo., where signs warn “Do Not Jackson Hole My Sundance,” Amy Goodson, executive director of the Crook County Museum District, said Mr. Driskill helped save a historic school by turning it into a cultural center.
“Every roadblock they put in front of him, he said, ‘That’s not a ‘no,’ that’s a ‘what else can you do?’” she said.
At Wyoming’s oldest general store in Aladdin, near the South Dakota border, Jordan Yates, a co-owner, likes that the Driskills protected 5,000 acres surrounding Devils Tower from future development.
But Trent Tope, her fiancé and co-owner, said Mr. Neiman is more approachable; he has been to the store, goes to churches and shows up to pie socials.
“Even though I don’t agree with everything, at least I can speak to the man and not feel like a peasant,” he said.
