Political leadership reflects on Wyoming primary results: A piercing look into what transpired two weeks ago

CODY — The yard signs are starting to disappear from front lawns and highway medians. The mailers have quit showing up in mailboxes. And after months of attack ads, Park County’s airwaves and Facebook feeds will go quiet for another two years after the general election in November. 

What’s left in the wake of the August 18 primary is a stark divide: A newly formed political action committee swept nearly every race it touched, while the Wyoming and Park County Republican parties watched almost all of their own endorsed candidates go down in defeat.

Park County Neighbors, a PAC formed just a month before the election, endorsed candidates for county and state legislative offices — and every one of them won. 

Its statewide counterpart, Wyoming Neighbors, backed candidates in top state races, and they won too. Denise Shirley, the group’s chairwoman, said the PAC endorsed roughly 100 candidates from governor down to precinct committee seats, and all but 14 of the precinct picks were elected.

Vince Vanata, chairman of the Park County Republican Party, declined to comment for this story. The Wyoming Republican Party had not responded to a request for comment by publication time.

The county and state Republican parties fared far worse. With the exception of federal races, almost none of their endorsed candidates won their primaries. 

The lone exception at the county level was Ericka Smith, who won the nomination for Park County attorney – a candidate with broad crossover appeal, her campaign signs appearing in yards with other signs for candidates endorsed by Park County Neighbors and the Park County Republican Party.

Park County Neighbors did not endorse a candidate in that race. Sandy Newsome, a former state legislator who helped organize the PAC, said members simply couldn’t agree between Smith and Marina Tucker.

“There was not a clear favoring of that candidate,” Newsome said. “So as a group, we just didn’t know, and we chose not to endorse anyone in that race.”

Kelly Jensen, who worked on precinct recruitment for the PAC, said the same thing happened whenever consensus wasn’t there. 

“If the group collectively couldn’t come to a decision about one candidate over another, or didn’t feel that they had enough information to make a really strong endorsement decision, then the group agreed collectively not to endorse,” she said.

The county and state parties’ decision to endorse candidates at all has drawn scrutiny over its legality. Both parties have said the practice is not illegal because they did not provide financial support to the candidates they backed. Critics argued that reasoning ignores the intent of state law.

“I think that we saw that the Republican Party was, in my viewpoint, breaking the law by endorsing candidates at all,” Newsome said. “By virtue of endorsing candidates, it was against, if not the letter of the law, the spirit of the law.”

Shirley put it more bluntly, calling the endorsements a violation of Wyoming statute and “telling people who to vote for instead of allowing the people of Wyoming to decide for themselves.”

Many of the candidates endorsed by the county and state parties were members of or aligned with the Freedom Caucus, a hard-right faction that has held sway in the Wyoming Legislature in recent years. Jensen said the contrast in messaging mattered as much as the endorsements themselves.

“Park County Neighbors made a concerted effort to think about the future of Park County, the future of Wyoming, and talk about a positive perspective,” Jensen said. Freedom Caucus-aligned candidates, by comparison, “focused a lot on what was wrong,” while the PAC’s candidates focused on “what’s right and what can be even better.”

Shirley said the PAC’s founding members deliberately steered away from the strident tone that had come to define local politics. “We didn’t want that type of interaction on our Facebook page,” she said. “The group was very clear about that. That was not our vision, and I think voters were just fed up with it.”

Turnout also played a role. 

Newsome said this year’s primary drew closer to 2022 levels of participation in her former district than the low turnout seen in 2024, which had benefited more hardline candidates in recent cycles. Jensen said Park County saw roughly 1,200 more voters than in the last comparable cycle, something she credited in part to a statewide voter-engagement effort and to residents reacting to what she described as parties trying to define who did and did not belong.

“We don’t like being told we don’t belong when we think we do belong,” Jensen said.

Shirley said Park County Neighbors plans to remain active heading into the general election and beyond, including weighing in on local ballot measures and endorsing candidates in 2028.

Newsome, for her part, doesn’t expect the Freedom Caucus to disappear – just to resurface under a different banner.

“They’ll be back,” she said. “They’ll change their name to something else, and they’ll tell you how terrible things are, and they’ll try to rile you up about things that aren’t important.” 

She noted the movement has rebranded before, tracing its roots to the local Tea Party faction years earlier.

 “I doubt that they’ll continue to use the Freedom Caucus name,” she said.