For the first time in the current leadership’s memory, the Wyoming Democratic Party has county parties all 23 counties.
Party leaders revived the Democratic parties of Campbell, Goshen, Sublette and Weston counties in the past three years.
Only Niobrara and Lincoln County remained “dark” this past year.
That changed this month.
“I think people are just really paying a lot more attention to what’s going on around them and wanting to get involved,” Wyoming Democratic Party spokeswoman Mandy Weaver said during a Tuesday phone interview. “A lot of people are concerned with the leadership of the Freedom Caucus.”
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus is a controversial wing of the Republican Party’s state House delegates, comprising about 25 members. People blame or credit it for big changes to the state’s K-12 school system; and it made headlines this year for pushing unsuccessfully to cut the University of Wyoming’s budget by up to $40 million.
Conversely, the Freedom Caucus often casts its out-group GOP colleagues as milquetoast Republicans.
“Most voters don’t pay a lot of attention, and most people don’t get involved,” said Weaver. “But this stuff has been egregious enough, and really opened some eyes and motivated people to get involved.”
She said "there aren't records that go back" far enough to tell when the party last had this many county iterations, and that through talking to past leadership, it's been decades at least.
Weaver credited the state party’s deputy director Greg Haas with mobilizing the new movements across the state.
Niobrara County is one of the reddest counties in the nation, and sits within the reddest state in the nation.
It contains 35 registered Democrats, out of 1,233 registered voters as of May 1.
Niobrara Democratic Party Chair Becky Blackburn wants to change that.
“My vision for the party is to grow, recruit young people, and become an active and vibrant party that people want to be a part of,” she told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
She hopes to focus the party on local campaigns, mostly, but will also support Democratic candidates around the state.
“We definitely have an uphill battle here,” said Blackburn. “But my personal vision is to give Dems a voice regardless of how outnumbered we are.”
Hats Off
This is exactly what some Republicans want.
“All of us are better off with a functioning opposition party. Single party states are breeding grounds for corruption and waste, regardless of the platform of the party in power,” said Rep. Tom Kelly, R-Sheridan, in a Facebook post earlier this month.
He urged against letting Wyoming become a one-party state, but said it’s “dangerously close” to that.
“My hat is off to those stepping up to run as Democrats this year,” he wrote. “Even though we disagree on policy choices, I recognize how much Wyoming needs you.”
Rep. Nina Webber, R-Cody, raised a similar concern multiple times at a Friday meeting of the Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee.
“Are you hearing the same thing I’m hearing,” Webber asked of get-out-the-vote activist Gail Symons. “Wyoming would be better if we had an active – more active party of Democrats?”
Webber also asked about more active and sincere Republicans, Libertarians, and Constitution Party adherents.
“If all of those people that believe that way would register in those parties and promote those values so that everybody does not jump into the Republican Party,” added Webber, “Do you promote that when you’re doing your sessions?”
Symons countered that she believes in people being able to be independent and associate how they wish.
Lincoln County
Lincoln County contains 559 registered Democrats. That’s 5% of the 10,920 registered voter total, and 6% of the Republican base of 9,072.
The Lincoln County Democratic Party held its convention May 2 and elected Donald Shelton chair, Shelton told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday phone interview.
“A lot of people inside our county are hurting financially and otherwise,” said Shelton. “We give them another option to change how things are going – not just in the county but also as a state and country as well.”
Shelton’s vision is a two-fold grassroots approach.
He said he wants to galvanize the party behind working people, and focus on raising up precinct committee people who can relay concerns directly from their neighbors to the party.
“(Precinct committee people are) how the party actually gets in touch with the voters,” he said. “We want to hear from communities, not from the Party.”
Who Cares If That’s Retro
Shelton said it’s the party’s duty to center on working people, as “the backbone of our country.”
The Democratic Party touted a bond with the working class at least as early as the 1930s and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies.
New York Times political columnist Jonathan Weisman opined in a Jan. 4, 2025, column that the party’s estrangement from working-class voters became clear when President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 – “powered by broad shifts in the preferences of white voters without college degrees.”
Trump displayed gains there again when he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in November 2024, in what Weisman called “a reckoning for a party that thought it had fixed its problems with blue-collar voters by heavily revisiting in domestic manufacturing.”
But to Shelton, who is an AV technician, those historical arcs and impressions don’t matter as much as the work at hand: mobilizing workers around the Democratic Party’s offerings and goals.
“I’m not so concerned with whether or not it seems retro,” said Shelton. “I’m more concerned with what is right and what is wrong.”
The Transparency Check
Though their blue gains on the state’s district map are rare and few, Democrats in Wyoming have ventured transparency checks on Republicans multiple times this year.
Rep. Karlee Provenza, D-Laramie, shot a photograph of then-Teton County GOP leader Rebecca Bextel handing out checks on the floor of the House of Representatives – two days before the introduction hearing for a bill Bextel championed.
Provenza sent the photograph to media outlets. She’s since said that she did so out of a wish for transparency, but also because she believed the media would investigate the matter and may corroborate what she believed she’d witnessed.
A House committee cleared the checks’ recipients of wrongdoing and bribery.
But the controversy sparked a massive public response, and new rules from the Senate, House and governor about handing out campaign donations in the Capitol and amid legislative processes.
In more recent weeks, Wyoming Democratic Party data director Erin O’Doherty was combing through the party’s canvass list, and puzzling over why Rep. Joel Guggenmos’s listed address fell outside his House district.
She has a system by which she pulls sitting representatives from the canvass list so activists don't knock on their doors, O'Doherty told Cowboy State Daily.
She relayed her concern to Fremont County Democratic Party Chair Julie Twist, who gathered more evidence and handed their findings to the Fremont County Clerk.
Clerk Julie Freese, in turn, called for a sheriff’s investigation to sort the issue before the May 14-29 candidate filing period.
She opined last Friday that Guggenmos, a Riverton-based Republican, is unable to run for his current seat this year.
The Wyoming Constitution calls for one year of residency as of the general election.
“I think we all feel it’s important for our elected officials to be following the rules, so it was important to bring that to light,” reflected Weaver.
She said Democrats are “definitely” a transparency check on their Republican counterparts.
“We’ve seen what happens when there’s not a balance on one party, and they have complete control… It’s really important to have people willing to look at something and shine a light on it that others might not.”
But neither Shelton nor Blackburn want to go around policing Republicans, they both told Cowboy State Daily in their separate interviews.
“I think, again, the primary goal is to be centering working people in Lincoln County, rather than policing the Republicans so much,” said Shelton. “Presenting an alternate vision.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
