If YouTube viewership of the Wyoming Legislature is any indication, politics in the Cowboy State is becoming more of a spectator sport.
The Legislature’s YouTube page has nearly 220,000 page views through 2025 so far, more than it received in all of 2024 and up about 15% from all of 2023. In addition, since the start of 2023 until now, the channel has exploded to post more views than its entire existence beforehand, dating back to when the page was created in 2017.
In total, the channel has more than 1.3 million page views overall, according to the Legislature’s YouTube analytics report.
Sheridan resident Gail Symons, who runs the civics advocacy group Civics 307 and has been closely following the Legislature since 2016, believes adding this online access to what state legislators are doing has been a positive for public engagement.
“I think it is absolutely wonderful,” she said. “What happens in the Legislature has always been kind of a black box. The Capitol is located in the corner of the state, it’s hard to get to in the heart of the winter.”
Previously, the only way people could watch the Legislature was either by coming to the Capitol in person, catching some of the action on Wyoming PBS, or by getting lucky enough to find an audio recording of a meeting.
Now, not only are all committee meetings and floor sessions recorded and available to view, they’re also livestreamed so people can watch as they happen.
“It allows for being able to be involved without going down there,” Symons said. “People can see how the process works, it’s more robust.”
An Entry Point
But Carbon County resident Joey Correnti of Rural Wyoming Matters questions whether increased viewership inherently means a more informed public, and said it only matters how the public uses the information.
“It’s another tool in the tool kit for civics and government, but just because I’ve got more tools doesn’t mean my project is going to turn out any better,” Correnti said. “It just means I have more tools.”
In some ways, the YouTube page has likely helped launch the careers of a few sitting members of the Legislature, or at the very least helped fuel their interest to get involved in state politics. Some like state Sen. Laura Pearson, R-Kemmerer, frequently watched and testified online in the past before entering the political ring themselves.
Having every meeting of the Legislature livestreamed has not only helped with a sense of public transparency, but also documented some off-color moments that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, ranging from legislators calling other members derogatory names on a hot mic to more lighthearted events such as catching a representative taking a big bite out of a piece of fried chicken.
Correnti believes remote viewing of the Legislature is finally gaining steam among a Wyoming populace that’s typically adverse to almost any kind of change.
State Rep. John Bear, R-Gillette, chairman emeritus of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, sees people getting more connected with the YouTube page as a sign of a larger trend in Wyoming he’s played a part in himself: people taking advantage of the fact they can make a much bigger impact on their state and local community through politics than they can in Washington, D.C.
“It’s about focusing energy into an area where you can make a difference,” he said.
Similarly, increasing the public’s connection to the Legislature, Bear believes, has led the Legislature to discussing topics the public is more interested in.
Having every meeting live streamed does come with a financial cost.
Matt Obrecht, director of the Legislative Service Office (LSO), said he now has to staff one more employee per meeting to facilitate the IT needs that come with broadcasting the meetings. Wyoming PBS helps broadcast the 25-30 meetings not held at the Capitol or the Thyra Thomson Office Building in Casper, at a cost of $14,000 per year.
“In every way they’ve been good partners,” Obrecht said of PBS.
Backstory
The Legislature sporadically streamed its committee meetings in the early days of the YouTube page with increasing frequency from 2018 to 2019, but did not record any of the live floor debates. It also offered some remote testimony opportunities as far back as 2010.
Obrecht said the decision to continue limiting access came as a result of legislative leaders who thought installing cameras might impact the substance of floor debates with more performative politics.
Correnti, who’s been following the Legislature closely since 2012, believes that has happened, as he now sees lawmakers making speeches specifically addressed to their constituents about why they are making a particular vote, and even sometimes directly looking in the camera when doing so.
“I watch them stand up on the floor and explain to the voters why they’re voting for something, they’re definitely not doing it for their colleagues,” Correnti said. “It affects a little bit of everything.”
When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, the Legislature moved into its current era of broadcasting, expanding to live coverage of every meeting, despite the protest of some legislative leaders at that time as well.
This coverage has not gone away since that time and there appears little appetite among members to reduce it.
Obrecht commented at a Management Council meeting last week that the number of people now testifying on bills, many remotely via Zoom, has made the legislative process more difficult because of the limited amount of time lawmakers have to pass bills.
“It does affect standing committees with the amount of people from the public testifying, good or bad. These committees have such a short amount of time to work bills assigned to them,” he said. “It’s a lot for chairmen. They’re going to have to develop tools as they’re going to help to manage that.”
As far as discouraging people to show up at the Capitol because they can tune in online from home, Obrecht said it’s had the opposite effect, as he believes more people than ever are showing up to the Legislature in person, also spurred by the use of social media to spread the word about topics.
Correnti disagrees and believes the presence of YouTube, a larger number of news sources and the rise of the Freedom Caucus has given people a sense of confidence they don’t need to follow the Legislature as closely as they did in the past.
Let’s Not Kid Ourselves
Correnti questions whether providing YouTube access to every meeting has actually increased transparency, but he does believe it has increased the public’s perception that transparency has increased. He also believes it will serve a valuable historical data tool decades into the future.
Symons, Correnti and Bear all agree that the YouTube page is not motivating people who otherwise wouldn’t care about the Legislature into watching the action, nor is it leading people to watch meetings at random who have no idea what’s going to take place in the meeting like they would their favorite TV show.
“The average person wouldn’t just watch,” Correnti said.
But what it is doing is giving people an opportunity to easily dive into a particular topic at length that they know is being discussed, or have been pointed to through social media or another communication outlet, rather than rely on sound bites or press releases.
For instance, Correnti estimates that 60% to 70% of the people who watch online do it to share links to the YouTube videos on Facebook with a specific time stamp included for when other people should start watching, a tactic the Freedom Caucus often employs and Bear said has contributed to the rise in Legislature viewership.
“There’s been an effort of those of us on the right to make everything more transparent,” Bear said. “Our counterparts really didn’t want to change that. We like to put the word out to what’s happening on a number of things and I’m glad these things are working.”
Similarly, Symons frequently uses it to poke holes in Bear’s and other Freedom Caucus members’ arguments on social media she believes are lies or misrepresent the facts.
“Having that allows me to refer back to exactly what occurred,” she said.
One Piece Of The Pie
Symons believes this has broadened and deepened the knowledge of people who already had some interest in Wyoming politics to begin with.
“I still feel it’s brought a significant increase in the understanding of those involved previously,” Symons said. “It’s brought a deeper understanding for those interested to begin with. It explains for those who had an interest in why decisions were made.”
Ultimately, livestreaming the meetings is just one piece of the larger pie that is today’s modern news and political landscape, where more avenues than ever exist for people to get information.
Symons pointed out that conservatives and the Freedom Caucus have particularly excelled in recent years in using social media to get their messaging out to the public in Wyoming and nationwide.
“They just do a better job of it,” she said.
Contact Leo Wolfson at leo@cowboystatedaily.com
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
