The 2026 Election, 18th Edition. Primary Voting Commences Edition. Vote like your future and that of your state depends on it, because it does, part three.
Less than one week to go until the primary, which unless something bizarre happens, Trump defects to Russia taking Chuck Gray with him. . . Hageman and Degenfelder join the CPUA. . ., that will be the election for a lot of positions.
Although maybe not quite all.
As earlier noted, I've already cast my vote. And honestly, in spite of the really disappointing overall choices at the statewide level, there were a few really good candidates.
I voted for:
Governor: Barlow.
Senate: Mead
House of Representatives: Christensen.
Secretary of State: Short.
Superintendent of Public Instruction: Harshman
Everyone of these candidates was somebody you could really get behind.
There are others. I'd note, more locally, Campbell for the House as well as Jarvis. And Engebretsen for the Senate.
And then there are a collection that really need to be sent packing. Ide, Bear, Allemand, for example. For that matter, Rasner, Gray, Friess and Hageman need to be retired from politics by the electorate.
We have, we note, only discussed the GOP candidates for the most part. The GOP, now, is practically two parties in and of itself. There's the Republican Party, and then there's the Calvinist Theocratic Party, the WFC. They could not be more different. One is a conservative party and the other a Protestant Christofascist party. That sounds extreme, but unfortunately, it's true.
We haven't discussed the Democrats hardly at all, and for the most part, they stand no chance. There are some exceptions. Provenza in Albany County will go back into the legislature, for example. But there are a few others worth noting. James Byrd, who is running for the U.S. Senate, is one. If Mead doesn't win, Byrd may give Harriet Hageman a real run as on Wyoming issues, he's a better candidate. I think Mead would beat him as Mead is a good candidate. If Hageman defeates Mead, and then defeats Byrid, it will be simply because a fair number of people right now would vote for Josef Mengele if ran as a Republican.
The race for Superintendent of Education features two good Democrats, Ana Cordova and Sergio Maldonado. Again, in a normal functioning democracy, either one would be a good contender in the general election. Probably neither stands a chance this year, but if Harshman does not win the primary, the race will at least be interesting.
August 12, 2026
A Freedom Caucus member:
Felony intimidation is not Rep. Gary Brown’s only conviction. He pleaded guilty to harassment in 2013.
This whole thing is sort of inside baseball. In terms of outright goofball positions Rasner is every bit as far right as anyone in the WFC. Distinguishing their positions from his own is impossible, as they're the same.
Gray, however, unpacked the Freedom Caucus from his carpetbag and is one of the founding members of the populist movement in the state, which figures, as he isn't from the state, like almost all of its major members. In endorsing Gray, they endorsed one of their own. They couldn't have not endorsed him as that would have caused a major rift in the organization and would really have been unthinkable.
And Rasner has always been the odd man out in other ways, one being that he's an acknowledged homosexual, even if he's not noisy about it in any fashion. He is noisy about almost everything else.
The WFC defended Gray and attacked Rasner in its response;
Reid Rasner is a failed career candidate who has brought division, dysfunction and political games to our state. Wyoming deserves strong conservative, like Chuck Gray.
Calling Gray "strong" is really rich. He's a whiny little weenie who likes to call people names. And more than that, really.
Gray is noisy, but Wyomingites know almost nothing about him whatsoever. Rasner has a much more open history, including having once run for a municipal position in Las Vegas and having been in a same sex legal union ending in divorce. We know Gray is from Los Angeles originally, went to Wharton, and then moved to Casper to work at his daddy's radio station, where he had a vitriolic radio show. His personal history is a complete mystery. He's not only not known to have a love interest, he's not even known to have a like interest.
And then there's Bo Biteman.
Biteman was regarded as fully WFC in the last legislature. WFC members, save for some of the core members, can usually disavow their membership when convenient as they keep no formal records of whose in and out. Biteman said, according to the article;
The Freedom Caucus brings plenty of noise, I’ve ignored them when they’ve attacked me, I’ve ignored them when they’ve taken credit for work I helped lead, and I’m going to keep ignoring the distractions.
Well, suck it Bo. You are WFC and simply pretending you aren't hasn't kept people from knowing that.
David Giralt, whose positions seem to be about as far right as Gray's, Friess' and Rasner's, but who is more soft spoken about them, also threw rocks at the WFC, accusing them of “very aggressive culture war tactics that, at the end of the day I think, just work against what the legislative process should be: holding true to your political ideological convictions and then working to get things done.”
What a joke. Giralt may be a nice guy, but being a nice guy and a veteran doesn't excuse having the same set of positions as the WFC, as far as we can tell.
Friess took a page out of the national playbook, arguing that Republicans “fight the real enemy, the radical left AOC/ Mandami Socialists.”
M'eh.
Balow, at least, was honest, endorsing their views, but noting that they're a bit nasty in pursuing them. Her endorsement of their weltanschauung is part of the reason why we abandoned her in favor of Christensen. Christensen, for his part, noted how ideologically driven the WFC is and how that had a detrimental impact on the 2026 Legislature.
The fact that members of the populist hard right, both going down in flaming defeat in next week's primary, are now throwing rocks at the WFC is really remarkable. The WFC has always been downright nasty and full of hypocrisy, and they may now being getting ready to take on water. This is a good time to get off the ship.
Overall, however, this is a really interesting development. As campaigns begin to fail, and Biteman's, Rasner and Giralt's are failures, with Rasner's being a career ending failure, people are starting to be a more honest about things. Frank Campman, freed of tight fitting cowboy boots that look like he got them in the children's department, and his Woody's Roundup cowboy hat, move way to the center almost immediately after he dropped out of the race. Rasner just recently exposed Chuck Gray's campaign manager, Gabe Saint, who was terminated from his intern position with Harriet Hageman due to the Francoist websites he'd been following, which is unfortunately a story that didn't go anywhere because Rasner is such a gadfly and had his own hosts of absurd extreme reels, such as promising to prevent Sharia Law from entering the state.
So, the far right Carpetbagger Caucus Revolution is in trouble and its outliers, those who were always a bit careful about it, and those whom it wouldn't let in the door, are now attacking it. It hasn't seen that happen before.
There were some primaries across the country yesterday.
An amusing one is Mike Lindell, the "My Pillow" guy, going down in flaming defeat. Lindell comes across as not particularly smart, which puts him in the MAGA Not Particularly Smart Branch of that movement. Lindell has endorsed every wack job conspiratorial theory on Trump's 2020 election defeat that Trump has put out, and even was monkeying around with Wyoming's vote that election which was for Trump. Lindell recently left his company to run for Governor of Minnesota.
Lindell had no chance of winning the primary as only the stupid and ignorant would vote for him. That's what happened. He's not accepting that however, claiming, in true Trump/MAGA style that there were "irregularities".
Lisa Demuth won the race with 43.4% of the vote. Lindell did bring in 32.5% of the vote, which some have been shocked by. One person asked if his supporters were stupid.
Well, probably a lot of them are.
Let's be honest about stupidity, as the country has a real stupidity problem right now.
The United States has always had a strong anti intellectual streak, which endorsed the native intelligence of the common man. Frankly, it's been one of the problems the country's always been afflicted with. But at the same time, up until now, there's never been an era in which education was despised. Right now, we're seeing a lot of that. The reason is fairly simple. The really intelligent, through technology, have made it possible for the stupid to have a voice.
Which brings us to the bell curve.
Human intelligence it not really very well understood, even today. Perhaps in some ways we don't know that much more about it than we ever did. Btu what we do know is that in an average population, there's a mean. Half the people are above it, and half below it.
More than that most of the people are somewhere on the middle part of the curve. But if you divide it into thirds, 1/3d of it is considerably above the rest in terms of intelligence, and 1/3 considerably below. Like Larry David's skit lampoons, we let the bottom third vote.
Therefore, it'd be somewhat fair to say that Lindell's 1/3d of the Minnesota vote represents "the stupid ones", and to some extent, it actually does. While some of low intelligence would have voted for other candidates, Trump uniquely appeals to stupid.
He also uniquely appeals to the ignorant, which is not the same. And that's where the story of intelligence gets complicated, particularly in voting. I have a friend, for example, whose highly intelligent, but completely disinterested in politics. He still votes. A lot of rural people I know are big Trump supporters, not because they're dumb, but because they listen to their neighbors and they've all collectively bought off on BS Trump conspiracy theories. As part of that, however, I'll note, that they're mostly poorly educated.
Anyhow, take the dumb, the ignorant, and the poorly educated together, you probably have at least 33% of the population. Technology makes the difference. In prior eras, those people were influenced by the smarter and the well educated around them. Now, they're influenced by themselves.
Amy Klobuchar, who have (and still would) make a good President, won the Minnesota Democratic nomination. She's going to be Minnesota's next Governor.
In the Wisconsin gubernatorial race, Democrat David Crowley narrowly beat Democratic Socialist Rep. Francesca Hong.
This was a failure in the polls, by the way, as Hong was heavily favored in polls to win.
Whether they should be or not, Democrats are probably breathing a sign if relief over that, but they probably should actually be taking stock on what's really going on. It's being interpreted as the party base going to the radical left, but in reality Democratic Socialism is simply the smarter kid brother of MAGA. I.e., it's populism wearing the educated team jersey rather than the Kelly's bar and grill jersey. There was always a really strong chance that MAGA's today would be rooting for Bernie Sanders tomorrow, and its starting to happen. And frankly some of the Democratic Socialist platform, like universal healthcare, are ideas that have not only arrived, they arrived and should have been adopted 80 years ago. In other words, as we've said before, the rise of Democratic Socialism isn't necessarily a bad thing, but both the Democrats and the GOP need to find a way to steal its popular platforms.
In a sane political system, it'd be really easy for the American Solidarity Party to enter right here, but unfortunately we lack that.
Trump backed Tom Tiffany, a Freedom Caucus member, won the GOP nomination.
The Republicans hold the legislature in Wisconsin, the Democrats the Governor's office. My predictions is that the Democrats retain the Governor's office and gain the Senate there.
Showing the emerging trend, in Connecticut 78 year old Democratic Rep. John Larson went down in defeat to 47 year old Luke Bronin, the former Hartford mayor and a former Navy intelligence officer. The Democrats are booting out the boomers.
About time.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on This Week as the Press is treating her as the national leader of the Progressives and the Democratic Socialists. I really think that this is wholly in error, although she was a very early member of a Democratic Socialist chapter to be elected to Congress.* There's a lot of things I disagree with Ocasio Cortez politically, including her support of abortion, but her analysis on the state o things in these elections, which came before yesterday's' primaries, was astute. She noted that Millennials are mad, and are implicitly mad at the Baby Boomers. They are, and they aren't the only ones. Generations Jones and Generation X are also really angry with the Boomers, even though the Boomers seem wholly clueless about this.
Going back to Minnesota, progressive, but not Democratic Socialist, candidate Peggy Flanagan defeated a centrist Rep. Angie Craig for the Democratic Senatorial primary. She'll now face Republican winner Michele Tafoya, a former National Football League sideline reporter.
Flanigan is a Native American.
The seat is presently held by Democrat Tina Smith. Flanigan is likely to win it.
cont:
From the Governor:
OP ED by Governor Mark Gordon: Wyoming Doesn’t Need More Mud Slinging
August 12, 2026
My friend and erstwhile opponent in the 2018 Primary for Governor approached me a few days before election day and said, “Mark, I might actually beat you.” He had good reason to think that. It had been a hard campaign.
His entrance into the race had been a surprise to the entire field, but he approached it with grace, humor, and enthusiasm grounded in his faith. He earned his spurs, so to speak, by traipsing all over Wyoming with the rest of us, walking parades, answering questions at forums and debates. Campaigning is tough for anyone but this 79-year-old man, it was clear, had demonstrated he had the stuff it takes to be a strong leader.
I took his comment seriously. By then he had Chuck Norris backing him and Donald Trump Jr. Foster Friess was a fierce competitor eventually gaining President Trump’s endorsement shortly before the primary.
Foster and I agreed to keep the race above board – and I believe we did. Sure, there were some clumsy and ineffective 3rd party shenanigans towards the end, but neither of us ever condoned them.
Foster was always a gentleman, as were Sam Galeotos and Taylor Haynes. All were among the first to offer help to a new Governor with so much to learn from each. I am grateful because I know it isn’t easy to offer a hand after such a hard fought election . It sucks to lose and it really hurts.
This election, similar to the one two years ago, has amplified the sorts of big city, big money, nasty half-truths and flat-out lies or falsehoods that have become all too common in other states. It’s not the Wyoming I know.
Here we respect the Code of the West, and most candidates always worked to discourage that sort of campaigning. They understood it was offensive to Wyoming people, who pretty well know right from wrong. Contrast is one thing, but bearing false witness is taboo for a population that appreciates all ten of the Commandments.
Where has that sensibility gone? This election we have been abused by cynical political operatives whose stock-in-trade is to twist facts and foment suspicion with incomplete, dishonest tales and misinformation. Especially galling are out-of-state political operatives who get paid big bucks for duping voters. I hope their vilification is misplaced in the Cowboy State. Wyoming voters are honest and they care.
I believe voters will see through the baloney that passes for politics elsewhere and will come to rest on those candidates who know what they are talking about, know and care about Wyomingites and know what is important to Wyoming – jobs, family, the economy, and our way of life.
Ask yourself, is this candidate talking mostly about someone else, or, as they should be, are they listening and talking about the things that will keep our core industries vital, our way of life secure, our kids safe, and our communities whole. Ask yourself if what they are saying is valuable to your community, to your family, to your grandchildren – or is it just political blather and mud?
Ask what a candidate has actually done to make the state better and why. Ask for details.
I say enough with the name calling, the false information, the nasty for nasty sake. Enough with the schlock that uses Wyoming voters as fundraising bait. Let’s elect people for who they are and what they will do, not for what some mysterious, never-heard-of-them-before organization ginned up to make voters mad. Let’s elect people to represent our interests, not puppets who parrot consultants’ talking points.
Ride for the brand!
Cont:
The number of mailers per day has now reached the absolutely insane level.
Real attack mailers are now coming, and they are quite frankly absurd. The ones directed at Barlow are at the level where the authors should be forced to memorize the Summa Theologica in the original Latin and be able to recite it back without looking, particularly the part on lying.
One that came today compared Liz Cheney to Reid Rasner.
There were three Steve Friess ones, all devoid of content, as all of his hard. He promised to use his "Conservative" values to help President Trump.
Trump isn't a conservative, he's a fascist, with it often failing to be noted that both fascism and communism are populist movements (so is socialism). And at this point, for those wanting to "help" Trump, these questions should seriously be asked:
- Do you intend to help him launch more illegal wars?
- Do you intend to pursue the illegal wars without a declaration of war, and are you willing to bear the cost of the dead on your souls?
- Do you intend to support illegal tariffs?
- Do you intend to help subvert the result of the election?
- Do you intend to help Donald Trump get richer while the lower middle class gets poorer?
- Do you intend to help wreck Christianity in the country by pretending that Trump's a Christian?
Footnotes:
*She's not the first. The first outright Socialist to be elected to Congress, which she is not, was Rep. Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin, who was elected in 1923. The first Democratic Socialist to be elected to Congress was Korean War Marine Corps veteran Ronald Vernie Dellums of California, who was elected in 1971. He served in that position until 1998.
It's notable that with quite a few Democratic Socialist their affiliation is rather mixed. It's almost more akin to being a member of a Caucus, like the Freedom Caucus, than actually being a member of a party, even though it is a party. Typically, Democratic Socialist run as Democrats, just as Freedom Caucus members run as Republicans rather than as fascists or Francoist.
Last edition:
The 2026 Election, 18th Edition. Primary Voting Commences Edition. Vote like your future and that of your state depends on it, because it does, part two.Labels: 2026 Election, Chuck Gray, Eric Barlow, Harriet Hageman, Jillian Balow, Joan Barron, Kevin Christensen, Phil Roberts, Reid Rasner, Samuel Mead, Steve Friess, Tom Lubnau, Wyoming Freedom Caucus
The 2026 Election, 17th Edition. Primary Voting Commences Edition. Vote like your future and that of your state depends on it, because it does.*
The 2026 Election, 18th Edition. Primary Voting Commences Edition. Vote like your future and that of your state depends on it, because it does, part three. More labels.
The 2026 Election, 18th Edition. Primary Voting Commences Edition. Vote like your future and that of your state depends on it, because it does, part three. Yet more labels.
