It’s not the 10-candidate rumble Wyoming is fielding for the U.S. House Republican primary, but the U.S. Senate race to succeed Sen. Cynthia Lummis is multiplying.
Sam Mead, a Republican rancher who told Cowboy State Daily he has too many guns to pick a favorite but has been partial lately to the Glock 43, declared his candidacy statewide Thursday.
And Jimmy Skovgard, who marvels that Wyoming’s bare-knuckles political now calls his old-style conservative stance “moderate,” also vies for the GOP nomination.
He and Mead are taking on U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, an incumbent in the lower chamber who’s leaving her seat to vie for the Senate after Lummis announced last year she won’t run for a second term.
Hageman has the endorsements of President Donald Trump, Wyoming senior U.S. Sen. John Barrasso and Lummis.
The winner of the Republican primary election Aug. 18 will battle whoever wins its Democratic counterpart. So far the only known hopeful in the blue race is former state Rep. Jim Byrd, son of former Wyoming legislator Liz Byrd.
Rancher, Whiskey Maker, Mead
Raised on a ranch in Teton County, Mead, 36, descends from a family of Wyoming political heavyweights.
His uncle is former Gov. Matt Mead, his great-grandfather is the late U.S. Sen. and Gov. Cliff Hansen. His mother Kate Mead now serves on the Teton County School Board, and as an attorney she’s taken on a high-profile political case asserting that the Wyoming Republican Party has to follow state laws after all.
As for Sam Mead, he served less than a decade ago as the mayor of Kirby, Wyoming, which he told Cowboy State Daily was an exercise in intense accountability.
He also ran a distillery in town.
“It wasn’t uncommon for people to stop by the distillery and just come find me throughout the day — and tell me the problems they were having and the things they thought I should do better,” he said.
He added such face-to-face accountability isn't "something you would get at higher levels of government,” but it showed him how much a person could accomplish to help others.
More recently he was a software engineer. Now he’s focused full-time on his campaign, said Mead.
A highly unpopular congressional push last year to sell Wyoming and other Western states’ federal public lands gave Mead the urge to run, he said.
“That to me just said our representation doesn’t seem to really reflect what I believe to be Wyoming values, and things that people in Wyoming care about,” said Mead. “I feel that pattern has continued.”
When Hageman announced her Senate bid and President Donald Trump and the state’s two sitting U.S. senators endorsed her, Mead felt her election was treated as a given, short-circuiting the people on the ground.
Mead said he agrees with the attorney who won a prominent legal case in defense of public lands access, that it felt like a “coronation.”
Hageman had not voted in favor of the public lands selloff provision, since it was a creature of the Senate that also died in the Senate. She had called critiques of it overblown.
Granted, Mead said Monday, existing federal lands transfer provisions in federal law could use some reform. He said he’d like to see local communities have significant sway in public lands decisions so they could address their own needs.
Keep It Local
Local control was a consistent theme of Mead’s Monday interview.
When it comes to social issues, he’d like to leave those in the hands of local governments as well and not dictate them from Washington D.C., he said.
Mead said federal spending is out of control and congressional delegates have a duty to curb it.
Different outlets ventured different figures, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.
Elon Musk partnered with the president early in the latter’s second term to “DOGE” cut federal agencies, Mead noted. He agrees with that idea, he said, but he’d like to see it done with more forethought and precision.
“Honestly it seemed willy-nilly,” said Mead, adding that veterans seemed to bear some of the consequences.
He spoke of housing shortages in Wyoming and the nation. That’s one of the problems the Senate’s proposed land sale claimed it would address.
Mead steered more toward deregulation and tax reduction methods for unlocking the housing market. For example, he said, tariffs on Canadian lumber and other government interventions are “ultimately unhelpful to affordability.”
Mead said he’s a Republican because he believes in small government, personal liberty, the Second Amendment – and that Wyoming has opportunities furnish leaders and innovators in the national energy market.
Mead hunts, he shoots. When he’s not shooting his Glock 43 he’s partial to his AR-15, and when he’s bow hunting he brings the Smith and Wesson .460 for bear defense, though it’s admittedly not the most practical firearm, he said.
The fifth-generation Wyoming rancher no longer lives in Kirby, having moved back to Jackson Hole. But the family’s cattle winters in Kirby to avoid elk, grizzlies and other hazards, he said.
Mead is married and has two children. He worked as an engineer at the space firm Blue Origin and has worked across the ranching, manufacturing, and advanced technology sectors, including helping build his family’s Wyoming Whiskey distillery.
Golden Rule
For Mills resident and lifelong Wyomingite Skovgard, 60, his political realization moment came in the 2024 election, when he concluded that many in the Republican persuasion in Wyoming would rather slap labels on their political adversaries than help people.
“I follow the golden rule. My dad took me to Sunday school when I was a child — 7, 8 years old,” he said.
He recalled the story of the good Samaritan, which is about successful people who avoid helping a robbed and injured man; and a man from an outcast culture who took the time and expense to help the victim.
“We’ve got a lot of division in the Republican Party,” said Skovgard. “Not just division. Some of it is a little toxic.”
Skovgard pointed to recurring statements by Sen. John Barrasso, that the Democrats are hindering progress in the Senate.
Skovgard said it seems to him that the nation’s political leaders would rather fight and divide the country than accomplish things. And it’s crippling the legislative branch, he added.
He said that political division and broad-brush labeling has crept into his own family, between himself and his siblings – and it’s time to “slow down the rhetoric. Slow down the wind. Let the truth come back into focus.”
Skovgard grew up in the Big Horn Basin, attended college in Laramie and remained there until about 1999. He met his wife there. They now have four kids, all grown.
Skovgard joined the Army National Guard in 1989 and served until his honorable discharge in 2001. He and his wife spent a few years in Iowa and Nebraska, before moving back to Wyoming, to settle in Casper in 2009, he said.
He ran an oil service business until 2016.
Skovgard’s great-grandfather, Simon Skovgard, settled on a homestead in Basin, Wyoming, in 1909 and later served in the state Senate. He was the president of the Senate in 1923, but died three years later at the age of 46.
Way More
Skovgard’s political philosophy insists “the regular citizen should have way more input.”
And he’d put that input to the test with an aggregate data model by which Wyomingites could vote in real time on issues their congressional delegates are fielding in Washington D.C., he said.
He’d like to see a model with open source framework, but private aggregated data. And he’d like to see a Wyoming agency run it on the people’s behalf to give it an objective and protective third-party management, Skovgard added.
He pointed to a proof of concept he’s built for this idea at grassrootsmvt.org.
The survey results wouldn’t bind delegates to certain votes necessarily, he said, but they may produce surprises about just where Wyomingites stand.
“If (former Rep.) Liz Cheney would have had something like this, she could have asked the state of Wyoming, should she be sitting on the January 6 (investigative) committee,” he said. “She would have been able to make a better, informed decision on how she was representing her constituency.”
Skovgard said his approach to Congress would be to remain firmly within the U.S. Constitution’s confines, and beyond that, to consult the people of Wyoming. That means all of them – from the political left to the “Freedom Caucus” right, he said.
“I’ve been called a Liz Cheney Republican. I’ve gotten all the labels from RINO (Republican in name only) to Trump Derangement Syndrome. And I’m like, 'Lay those labels on me,'” he said. “Because I will represent every citizen of Wyoming.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
