Two formidable candidates with legitimate state party experience are challenging each other be the next leader of the Wyoming Republican Party early next month.
On Monday, Sheridan resident Bryan Miller announced on the “Just Blame Joey” podcast and confirmed to Cowboy State Daily that he’ll be running for state chair. His opponent will be Jackson resident Rebecca Bextel, who announced her campaign last fall. The election will happen at the May 3 central committee meeting in Cody.
Although their conservative political views are almost identical, the two possess substantially different backgrounds and personalities.
They’ll be running to replace outgoing chair Frank Eathorne, who announced last winter he won’t be seeking reelection.
Miller has been involved in state party politics at varying levels for more than a decade, serving as the Sheridan GOP chair for the last seven years until this spring.
Bextel is newer to the party but has made her impact felt quickly, raising $130,000 for the state party in addition to around $300,000 she’s raised for individual state Legislature candidates and political action committees, and $450,000 for President Donald Trump’s campaign, all of which in the last year.
She’s both the chair of the state party’s revenue committee and state committeewoman for the Teton GOP.
Both candidates are putting a concerted focus on fundraising, an area that Eathorne didn’t make as big of a priority during his seven-year run as state chair, raising significantly less money than in the past.
Who’s Miller?
Miller hasn’t raised nearly as much money on a state level but points to the growth he’s fostered in the Sheridan GOP as proof of fundraising ability. He said his local party has grown from around 40 dedicated volunteers to now more than 500 people involved in his local party, hosting numerous events and fundraisers throughout the year.
Miller said he’s visited eight different county parties to share how they grew their party and wants to bring the same strategies to a state party he believes is already in solid shape.
“We’ve had super success here in Sheridan building the party,” Miller said. “I think I can help bring that to the state level.”
Although he wants to raise as much money as possible for the party, he said the party must be careful to avoid becoming beholden to big donors, which he believed made the state party largely irrelevant around 10 years ago. Depending on more, smaller-level donors, he said, solves this problem.
Bextel said her large-scale donors have no intention of trying to skew the direction of the party.
Miller has run for many different political positions in the past, most recently vying for interim secretary of state in 2022. He’s never won any of these races.
But he’s been a consistent face in state party politics for a number of years, an experience that could resonate with the central committee voters. Miller believes the vast majority of members know who he is, which is giving him confidence to run.
“It comes down to experience with the party, knowing the party, knowing the counties, and having everybody know who I am,” Miller said.
Both he and Bextel have a desire to grow the party’s ranks as well. Miller mentioned how even though 84% of Sheridan’s voters are registered Republicans, only around 72% voted for Trump. He mentioned his collaborative work in the Air Force to bring different groups together.
“The bottom line is, not everybody thinks the same,” Miller said. “I get that and you deal with that.”
Miller said there’s three main factors that are leading him to run against Bextel, who he believes needs to get more experience before running for state chair. He believes she needs to expand her interest on issues beyond Teton County to be more prepared.
“She certainly needs some seasoning,” he said.
Bextel raised eyebrows at the Legislature this year for helping get an amendment added to a bill that would have prohibited cities and counties from charging developers fees or requiring the construction of affordable homes, a move specifically targeted at her local lawmakers.
The amendment had little to do with Senate File 40, a bill centered around requirements to protest a zoning change, and the add-on was blamed by many for killing the bill.
The way Bextel handled her lobbying efforts, Miller said, caused him to receive nearly two-dozen calls from annoyed legislators and members of the public.
“SF 40 drove a lot of angst and it drove some wedges in both the House and the Senate with Rebecca,” Miller said. “There’s a lot of folks that witnessed the way she interacted and they were not pleased.”
Mending a beleaguered relationship between the state party and the Legislature is one of Miller’s goals if elected chair. He doesn’t see why this can’t improve and wants to remind legislators that they work for the grassroots, as well as let them use the party to get their messaging out.
With the Legislature drifting to the right in recent years, Miller believes it’s time a different approach like this could work.
“We need to be more oriented from the bottom-up on messaging,” Miller said.
He initially announced last fall that he’d run for vice chair, but said on Monday he didn’t want to run for chair until he knew for a fact that Eathorne wasn’t running again. Bextel said she doesn’t believe this and thinks Miller has been purposely coy and is “playing games.”
After meeting with Bextel in person last month, Miller decided the two have different visions for how the party should be led moving forward and chose to run.
Who’s Bextel?
Bextel has garnered significant attention for her fundraising efforts, which she takes credit for playing a part in some of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus’ candidates’ success in the 2024 election cycle.
“I helped move the House to the right and I was very proud of that,” Bextel said. “I was very proud of the voting record of the people I helped get elected.”
She believes she’ll bring more energy, enthusiasm, and love for the job than Miller.
Bextel said she has put around 4,800 miles on her car campaigning for the chair role and will have visited all 23 counties around the state before election day hits.
This level of campaigning is highly unprecedented for the state chair position, a role that in the past hasn’t drawn much public scrutiny outside the party itself.
Bextel said the reason she announced as early as she did was to show party members how much she wants the position and to be open and transparent about her intentions.
“I wanted to give everybody plenty of time to get to know me,” she said. “There’s nothing I’m trying to hide from.”
Bextel played an instrumental role in turning the Teton County GOP more conservative this spring, which she said came as a result of scrutinizing the voter rolls for conservative candidates to run for party precinct committee positions over the last four years.
She also has been an outspoken critic of the Jackson town council, espousing a theory that the council intends to sell its fair and rodeo grounds to build affordable housing.
However, coming from ultra-blue Teton County, Bextel has focused more of her political efforts statewide rather than locally, a venue that’s given her the vast majority of her recent success.
Bextel said she has no regrets about the way she handled the situation with SF 40 at the Legislature and wants to see the will of the people enacted in legislation, which she believes is sometimes lacking.
“The people of Wyoming are conservative, but I don’t always see that enacted in the legislative sessions,” she said.
There’s also been chatter about some actions she made around the time of Trump’s inauguration this past winter. Bextel admitted she yelled at Eathorne for giving away two tickets to an inauguration ball to people from New Hampshire after she had been told she could give them to other Wyoming people.
“I’m just trying to get tickets for people who couldn’t afford the $50,000 (price),” she said. “I’m trying to give the average Wyoming citizen a ticket.”
She was also accused of being highly inebriated at this ball herself when she reprimanded Eathorne, which she vehemently denies and said she was merely in a bad mood from being hungry and very sick.
Bextel believes her critics are holding a double-standard when it comes to public intoxication, anyway, considering she’s seen multiple male party members get so drunk that they fell over in a bar.
“It does annoy me that a woman can have two glasses of wine, and here I am having to answer for it, and a guy will get so drunk that he actually crawls out of the bar and falls down and people help him up,” Bextel said. “Never even spoken of.”
The Bigger Picture
Bextel has been endorsed by U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman for chair, but Miller said it’s likely that Eathorne will endorse his campaign. Eathorne did not immediately respond to Cowboy State Daily’s request for comment.
Both Bextel and Miller said they want to let the party members dictate the future of their organization.
The chairman position is more of an organizing, human relations-type role rather than one focused on creating policy or platforms. Many people criticized Eathorne during his time as chair for failing to make efforts to promote party unity, a goal both Miller and Bextel said they would like to achieve.
“You have a much more effective organization if everyone buys in,” Miller said. “You get buy-in by people getting to speak and able to talk and able to be a part of the process.”
However, Bextel said this doesn’t take away from her desire to see lawmakers voting in line with the party platform and plans to attend most of the 2026 legislative session to help achieve this goal.
She’s also open to the idea of verbally supporting and opposing candidates during the primary election, despite state law prohibiting political parties from making endorsements at the primary stage.
“I want to see platform candidates in office, and our bylaws state that you have to be voting with the platform 80% of the time to receive any funding from the GOP,” she said.
Running with Miller as a slate will be Fremont County resident Ginger Bennett for vice chair. Also running for vice chair is Cody resident Bob Ferguson. Current vice chair David Holland said he would run for vice chair again if he receives a nomination to do so.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
