Wyoming belongs to the people who live here. The people who fix the fences, plow their neighbor’s driveways, and sit next to whoever shows up at the potluck.
The people who ask a pretty simple question during election season: who is going to do the best job for my community?
That question used to be most of what an election was about. You knew the candidate, or you knew someone who did. You'd seen them at the fair, the school board meeting, a funeral.
You decided whether you trusted them with a piece of your community's future, and you voted accordingly. The party label was on the ballot, but it wasn't doing most of the work. The person was.
Lately, a small group of people has decided they should do that work for you.
There are social media pages run by a handful of Wyoming Freedom Caucus legislators and their allies whose entire purpose is to tell you which of your neighbors don't measure up.
Last week, one of them pointed to a congressional primary in another state to make the case that some of your sitting Republican officials don't really count as Republicans.
Another has built a scoreboard tracking how often each Republican legislator voted the same way as a Democrat, as if a Republican and a Democrat who voted together to fix a road in Wyoming had failed some kind of test.
A third has appointed itself the judge of who does and does not get to call themselves a member of a specific party at all.
None of this has anything to do with whether the person on your ballot is going to do a good job for your community.
It does, however, have everything to do with putting Wyoming candidates into a box that was built somewhere else. The vocabulary is national. The fights are national. The scorecards are national.
The people writing the rules about who gets to be a Wyoming Republican are taking their cues from what is happening outside the state and online, not from Lander or Sheridan or Pinedale.
Wyoming has always done things differently. We are a live-and-let-live state.
We have a long tradition of electing people because we know them and trust them, not because they passed a faceless page's checklist.
A rancher who served on the school board for twenty years did not need a national page to tell their neighbors they were the right person for the job. Their neighbors already knew.
So when you fill out your ballot this year, in the primary and in the general, decide for yourself.
Decide based on what the person in front of you actually did with the last vote you gave them.
Decide based on whether they will keep our public lands public and make sure every Wyoming kid gets a solid education.
Decide based on whether they will protect your personal freedoms from government overreach.
And decide based on whether they show up when it matters, and if they sound like someone who will work for your community instead of against it.
Don't let anyone else decide for you. Not an anonymous Facebook page. Not a national scorecard. Not someone who depends on you being angry at your neighbor two pews over.
One small thing about me. When I first registered to vote at 18, I registered as a Libertarian.
I have done a lot of thinking since then about what that label meant and what it did not. What I learned is that the thinking mattered more than the label. It still does.
Wyoming belongs to the people who live here. That includes the right to decide for ourselves who gets to represent us. Let's exercise it.
Mike Yin represents House District 16 in Jackson
