Wyoming’s Superintendent of Public Instruction is running for governor, she announced Monday.
Megan Degenfelder had been “strongly considering” a bid for the Republican nomination and the seat, she told Cowboy State Daily on Dec. 23.
Then on Friday, President Donald Trump promised his endorsement if she sought the office, posting the words “RUN, MEGAN RUN!” to his Truth Social account.
The Republican incumbent Gov. Mark Gordon is at the end of his two-term limit this year. The state has court history indicating he could get the limit overturned, but not without a legal challenge.
Gordon has not announced his political intentions for the 2026 election.
Meanwhile, former state House Speaker and state Sen. Eric Barlow, R-Gillette, announced his gubernatorial run in August. Republican and 2022 challenger Brent Bien is also running for the seat, as is Joseph Kibler, a Republican-turned Independent.
“I am humbled and inspired to have the support and encouragement of President Trump,” Degenfelder said in a Monday morning press release. “Coastal elites and liberal activists are coming for our oil, gas and coal jobs. Radical extremists seek to redefine genders, threatening our young women. And the political establishment cares more about undermining President Trump than serving the people who elected them. Not in Wyoming. Not when I’m Governor.”
Degenfelder pointed to her family history of six generations in the Cowboy State, her upbringing in a ranching family, and her work in the oil, gas and coal industries.
“I coach female athletes at the highest level at the University of Wyoming, and I have fought for our future serving as the elected Superintendent,” she said. “Wyoming values are my values and my experience, and I will stop at nothing to protect them.”
As Top Educator…
Though she has Trump’s endorsement now, Degenfelder lacked it in 2022 – but she won anyway, becoming the only statewide candidate in Wyoming that year to defeat a Trump endorsee in the primary election.
She told Cowboy State Daily at the time that she would have been pleased to have Trump’s endorsement, but the opinion of the people of Wyoming mattered even more to her.
In her campaign, she said later, Wyomingites across the state lamented the proliferation of sexually-explicit books in school libraries. That’s an issue that multiple school boards have addressed on their own, without a state law change.
But Degenfelder’s state Department of Education crafted guidance to help those boards navigate the issue.
She’s allied with school-choice expansion as superintendent, defending the state’s new school choice scholarship program both as the automatic defendant in the legal challenge against it, and by vocalizing her support of it.
She also aligned with the Trump administration by backing the president’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Degenfelder has emphasized throughout that work that she’d like to see states and school districts retain the federal grants now channeled through the department, but without the “red tape.”
Regarding wind-lease approvals on state lands, over which the state’s five elected, executive-branch officials act as gatekeepers, Degenfelder has been complex, casting wind as a subsidy-driven competitor to Wyoming’s traditional energy sector, but emphasizing the state’s free-market approach to governance.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
