There’s no doubt after the presidential election that Wyoming is still “Trump Country.”
On Tuesday, Wyoming voted for former President Donald Trump with a larger margin than any other state for the third presidential election in a row.
It wasn’t Trump’s best performance in Wyoming by percentage of his margin of victory, but it was his biggest in the sheer number of votes he received compared to his Democratic opponent, at 192,576 compared with Vice President Kamala Harris’ 69,508 votes.
Trump won all but one of Wyoming’s 23 counties in the election, with Teton County voting overwhelmingly for Harris by a more than 2-1 margin.
The only other Wyoming county where Harris was competitive was Albany County, where she lost to Trump by 551 votes, or 3.1 percentage points.
Trump flipped Albany County after President Joe Biden won it in 2020, which marked the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won Albany County and two Wyoming counties in a single election since 2008.
Wyoming Democratic Party Chair Joe Barbuto expressed remorse about Harris’ loss to Trump in a statement Wednesday and said his state party is well acquainted with the feeling of adversity.
“We know what it means to face an uphill battle, to be outnumbered, and to keep pushing forward no matter the odds,” Barbuto said.
Shifts And Hotspots
Trump extended his margin of victory by one percentage point or more in 15 of Wyoming’s 23 counties Tuesday night. Harris only improved on Biden’s 2020 performance in three counties. She even lost four percentage points off Biden’s lead in Teton County, the only county she won in the state.
The decline in popularity for the Democratic ticket in Wyoming was matched on a national level.
Biden won the electoral college by 74 votes in 2020 and the popular vote by more than 7 million. Trump was able to flip those numbers Tuesday, projected to win the electoral college by 69 votes and the popular vote by nearly 5 million, the first time a Republican has won the popular vote since 2004.
Of the 15 counties that had their precinct-level election results posted by Wednesday evening, the Hat Creek neighborhood of Niobrara County was the most pro-Trump area of the state. Of the 80 votes that were cast in this precinct, 78 went to Trump and one to Harris, a 96% margin of victory for Trump.
Other notable performances for Trump were in northern Wyoming in Arvada, where he beat Harris 39-1, and Emblem where he won 70-2.
The most pro-Harris precinct in Wyoming was on the north side of Wilson in Teton County. Here, 507 of the 655 votes cast were in support of Harris, a 78% level of support. Only 119 votes supported Trump in this precinct, a percentage of 18%.
Harris also performed well in the reservation towns of Fort Washakie and Ethete in Fremont County, where she beat Trump by a 43 percentage point margin in both locations.
Turnout
In total, 271,043 ballots were cast in Tuesday’s election. There were 198,198 votes cast in the last general election in 2022, but presidential elections usually have higher voter turnouts than non-presidential years.
Overall voter turnout in Wyoming was slightly down from the last presidential election in 2020 when a record 278,503 people voted. Tuesday’s turnout was still the second highest in Wyoming history.
That level of civic participation was a welcome sign for many county clerks and voting advocates around the state after a paltry primary election that saw only 27% of the state’s eligible voters participate.
On Tuesday, about 59% of the state’s eligible voting population cast ballots.
Weston County Frustration
Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock told Cowboy State Daily that a suspected coding error with one her county’s ES&S electronic vote tabulators led to a miscount in the count for House District 1, where Rep. Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, was running uncontested.
The unofficial result out of this race was that Neiman only received 166 votes, with 1,289 undervotes, meaning that more than seven times as many voters chose not to vote in his race than cast a vote for him.
Neiman, who supports moving to paper ballots, said he found this miscalculation concerning. Even though his race was uncontested, there are often races determined by very close margins around the state, and coin-flips have even had to be done in the past for tie votes.
Also catching Neiman’s attention regarding this questionable result was the fact that in the Osage precinct, one of the most conservative precincts in the state, only two of the 164 people who voted marked his name. Neiman’s friend Dan Fouch, a resident of Osage, said he spoke to more than two people who said they voted for Neiman on Tuesday and found the count concerning.
“What we don’t want as constituents is to not have our votes count,” Fouch said.
Hadlock said ES&S is studying the issue and expects the correct tally in this race to be reported by Thursday, before her county’s election results are certified by its local canvassing board, a meeting that will be open to the public.
She feels confident the HD 1 race was the only one with an error and does not believe there should be large public concern about the matter.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
