As state legislatures around the country prepare to convene next month, Wyoming is wading into uncharted political waters: For the first time anywhere in the country, the hard-right Freedom Caucus has won control of a State House.
After ousting a slew of Republican incumbents they viewed as too liberal in a caustic primary, and then galloping to victory in November, members of the ultraconservative caucus hope to cement their meteoric climb to power by passing five priority bills in the first 10 days.
Their agenda, known as the Five and Dime Plan, aims to immediately tighten election rules, invalidate drivers’ licenses issued to undocumented immigrants by other states, prohibit college diversity initiatives, prohibit the state from considering environmental concerns when making investment decisions and reduce property taxes.
“We’re going to unwoke the state,” Representative Jeremy Haroldson, the next speaker pro tem, said. Members chose Representative Chip Neiman, also of the Freedom Caucus, as House speaker.
These are heady days for ultraconservatives in Wyoming and beyond who have zealously challenged establishment Republicans and embraced the Freedom Caucus label.
What started in Washington in 2015 as a Congressional bloc, led by provocateurs like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, has radiated into the states, inspiring similar movements in a dozen legislatures, including in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Idaho and Arizona. In Texas, the House speaker, Dade Phelan, a more traditional conservative, recently announced that he would forgo another term in leadership, underscoring the movement’s surging statehouse might as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to return to power.
Wyoming is the first state where the Freedom Caucus has won control of a legislative chamber, and as such represents a laboratory, and a test, for governance. Mr. Neiman and his slate were all first elected in 2020, and when the session begins in January, more than a third of the State House will be freshmen — including some with no prior government experience.
In the State Senate, Freedom Caucus allies now hold two of the top three leadership positions.
“This is all new territory,” said U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, who joined U.S. Senator John Barrasso and U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman in Casper, Wyo., last month to congratulate their fellow Republicans on their legislative victories.
“The success of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus is part and parcel of the whole American desire to look at the Constitution as the guiding document,” said Ms. Lummis, who served in the Wyoming House and Senate before becoming a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus in Washington. “To have the people more in control.”
As the first territory, in 1869, to give women the right to vote, and the first state, in 1924, to elect a female governor, Wyoming has long cultivated its own brand of pragmatic Cowboy State conservatism. As the nation’s least populous state, with 580,000 residents, Wyoming can feel like a “small town with one long street,” as Susan Stubson, a Republican lawyer and writer in Casper, put it. And though Republicans have dominated the legislature for decades, former Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, served two terms, until 2011.
The political milieu began to change when conservatives in some states, hoping to emulate what was happening in Washington with the Tea Party and the House Freedom Caucus, sought to yank their party further to the right. That endeavor expanded with the beginning of the State Freedom Caucus Network in 2021, said Matthew Green, a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, and the co-author of a new study on Freedom Caucus membership in state legislatures.
By 2023, members of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which formed in late 2020, were receiving texts from the caucus instructing them on how to vote on bills. One law they helped pass made it harder for voters to change their party affiliation. Another banned the use of pills for abortion, though the ban is now tied up in court. More than a dozen bills that committees had already spent significant time and resources crafting, and would normally have easily passed, were abruptly torpedoed.
But the new caucus also ran into obstacles. Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican whom the Freedom Caucus has criticized as being too moderate, vetoed bills the group had prized, including measures to ban gun-free zones and defund the University of Wyoming’s diversity office.
Freedom Caucus supporters vowed to unseat Republican incumbents deemed insufficiently conservative.
“The citizens are conservative, but their government representatives were not following that same kind of representation,” said Representative Scott Heiner, the incoming majority whip. “It was more liberal-minded. And so we saw this as a grass-roots effort to bring representation of the citizens to the government.”
More than $4.5 million in campaign spending flooded August’s primary — a whopping figure by Wyoming standards. Among the biggest spenders were Make Liberty Win, a Virginia group that backed Freedom Caucus candidates, and Mr. Gordon’s Prosperity and Commerce PAC, which supported the party’s traditional wing, known as the Wyoming Caucus.
The upstarts managed to defeat House Speaker Albert Sommers, who was vying for a Senate seat, and Speaker Pro Tem Clark Stith. Two Republican moderates who barely held on to their seats sued the Freedom Caucus’s political action committee for defamation. They claimed the group knowingly disseminated false information about their voting records; a court date has been set for Jan. 31.
After starting with eight legislators in 2020, the Freedom Caucus’s roster is now at 26. Factoring in an additional half-dozen or so reliable supporters, the caucus can claim a majority of the 62-member House. That was reflected in the selection of Mr. Neiman and three other Freedom Caucus members to the top four leadership posts.
The 31-member State Senate, traditionally more moderate, has also chosen a caucus ally, Senator Bo Biteman, as its next president. His three-person leadership coalition also includes a moderate Republican.
“My primary focus in the Wyoming Legislature is that we go back and look at the bills the governor vetoed in the last session and work on passing conservative Wyoming First and America First legislation that serves the citizens of Wyoming,” Senator Cheri Steinmetz, a Freedom Caucus ally, said in an interview at her clothing, jewelry and home décor store in Torrington.
When asked about the Freedom Caucus’s gains, Mr. Gordon, whose second term ends in 2026, said through a spokesman: “The governor remains committed to civility and decorum, particularly when engaging with those who share differing views.”
Mr. Gordon added that he looked forward to working with fellow conservatives on an agenda that would include diversifying the economy, responding to this year’s debilitating wildfires and continuing to pursue energy innovation.
The Five and Dime Plan, it is not.
Two long-serving Republicans who lost to insurgents were Representatives David and Dan Zwonitzer, father-and-son legislators from the Cheyenne area.
In an interview at his ranch, where he raises yaks and Muscovy ducks, Dan Zwonitzer, the son, said door-to-door campaigning had once been a neighborly and enjoyable part of public life. But this year, with people being bombarded by negative campaign materials — he counted 22 mailers against him alone — there was a noticeable strain of anti-incumbent sentiment, he said.
“Now it’s like, get off my doorstep,” said Mr. Zwonitzer, 45, who was first elected in 2004.
Mr. Zwonitzer did note that Representative Jeanette Ward, a right-wing transplant from Illinois whom Wyoming’s former Freedom Caucus chair hailed as the legislature’s “Joan of Arc,” lost to a more moderate challenger. Traditional Republicans, like his brother, Ty, a candidate for Laramie County commissioner, also prevailed in contested local and school board races.
Mr. Zwonitzer was critical of the Freedom Caucus’s focus on social issues like sex, books and bathrooms.
“A lot of us who’ve been in the last four years — it’s not fun,” he said. “If the Freedom Caucus is in power for four years and we don’t get the right governor elected, the effects will show up in four to five years, and then it’ll be a decade for us to pull ourselves back.”
House and Senate Democrats invoked similar warnings during their post-election caucus in Cheyenne.
Democrats actually flipped a seat, and will have eight members — six in the House, two in the Senate.
But unlike in recent years, when a bipartisan group collaborated on pay increases for teachers and public employees, Democratic legislators said they anticipated being ignored by the Freedom Caucus on most issues, with the possible exception of property taxes.
Chief among the concerns for Senator Chris Rothfuss, a Democrat who represents Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming, was safeguarding the state’s $30 billion sovereign wealth fund, more than a third of which comes from taxes on oil, gas and natural resources. Interest income from the fund has been crucial in funding schools and the state’s annual budget, but Freedom Caucus leaders, determined to shrink government, are contemplating giving some of that money back to residents.
“I think it’s up to us to try to protect that system, minimize that damage,” Mr. Rothfuss said. “We have had a change of leadership over in the House that frankly wants to burn it all down.”
Democrats are already miffed about being shut out of the House and Senate education committees. Indeed, all incoming House committee chairs have ultraconservative credentials, including the state Freedom Caucus’s new chair, Representative Rachel Rodriguez-Williams.
Last year, she sponsored Wyoming’s Life Is a Human Right Act, which, if upheld, would make performing an abortion or administering abortion medication a felony. Now, she will run the labor, health and social services committee, replacing Mr. Zwonitzer.
Other topics potentially on the legislature’s agenda are gender definitions, sanctuary cities, school vouchers and transgender athletes’ participation in sports.
Mr. Neiman and his leadership team said they were humbled, as business owners and political neophytes, to steer their state.
“I give the Lord credit for the success we’ve had,” said Mr. Neiman, a cattle rancher, speaking from a government building in Casper, after meeting with the Republican caucus. “I honor him in my decision-making, and I just rely on Him to guide my actions and thoughts.”
Mr. Neiman opened a handsome wooden box. Inside was a ceremonial gavel, made from a cedar tree on his ranch, courtesy of Representative Bill Allemand, a Freedom Caucus member.
“Elections have consequences,” Mr. Neiman said.
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