The Wyoming Republican Party's new move to endorse primary candidates, demand loyalty oaths, and favor certain campaigns is a violation of Wyoming law, short-sighted, and self-destructive.
Their actions will lead to the party's eventual collapse, and the party is doing it to itself.
The central committees exist to recruit electable candidates and serve the Republican electorate.
Somewhere along the way, the Republican governance lost the plot.
The Republican central committee is the group that spends weekends playing model legislature where they debate resolutions, censure members, and expel anyone who had the audacity to go to the lake instead of attending a Saturday meeting.
Between meetings, they bloviate, posture, and pontificate on matters that affect no one outside the room.
Then they wonder why nobody pays attention.
So, in a bid for relevance, they've decided to pick winners in primary elections as if the voters can't be trusted to do it themselves.
Here's the problem. Assume ten candidates are running for U.S. Representative. Each has donors, volunteers, and true believers. The moment the party anoints one of them, it makes enemies of the other nine camps. Those people worked hard, donated money, and believed in their candidate.
That anger doesn't evaporate after Election Day. Betrayal has a long memory.
As my old friend Al Simpson once told me when I was doing something misguided: "In politics, friends come and go, but enemies accumulate."
The central committees don't seem to understand that principle or they don't care. Either way, the invoices eventually come due.
Consider a governor's race. Assume 4 candidates are running.
If the party endorses a candidate who loses, does anyone think the winner owes them anything?
Gratitude? Loyalty? Cooperation? Not a chance. They backed the other guy.
Remember, the Wyoming Republican Central Committee is the same party organization that once favored Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in a straw poll.
Now, they demand fealty to the platform and question other Republicans' conservative credentials. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
The resentment compounds in other ways, too. I've heard — anecdotally, but credibly — that at the state convention, certain candidates for the same office were charged to put up signs while their opponents were not. If true, that isn't party leadership. That's a thumb on the scale dressed up as administration.
The party's credibility has eroded to the point where serious candidates simply skip party-sponsored debates.
And why wouldn't they? When your forums are widely perceived as auditions for predetermined favorites, participating only legitimizes the charade. Skipping the debate costs a candidate nothing.
Showing up and getting sandbagged costs plenty. So, the debates become theater for the already-converted, meaningful to no one else.
Then there are the loyalty oaths. Wyoming's constitutional oath of office requires officeholders to uphold the United States and Wyoming Constitutions. That's it.
Nothing in Wyoming law demands a pledge of ideological purity to a party platform — and certainly not to a platform drafted by 23 people huddled in a back room the day before the state convention, whose product was then presented to the full convention delegation without opportunity for debate, amendment, or even a question from the floor.
The delegates, by their silence, ratified whatever the back-room kids wanted. That's not grassroots democracy. That's a coronation with extra steps.
Now candidates are asked to swear allegiance to an internally inconsistent document most delegates never had a chance to examine critically. For perspective, demanding loyalty oaths as a condition of participation has historically been the province of feudal monarchies, authoritarian regimes, and the occasional communist party. It is an odd model for a party that claims to champion individual liberty.
The only legitimate measure of a Republican candidate's strength is the ballot box. Republican voters are the test.
Our elections should not be altered by validation seeking central committee members, back-room kids drafting a platform or self-aggrandizing party leadership.
Voters are the rightful judges of who represent our values and interests.
It takes a particular brand of arrogance to conclude otherwise.
The central committees are supposed to represent all Republicans. Instead, they have appointed themselves gatekeepers, convinced that their weekend deliberations produce insights superior to the collective judgment of tens of thousands of voters. They have confused arrogance with authority.
The remedy is straightforward. Ignore the endorsements. Skip the loyalty oath theater. Learn about the candidates on your own terms, about their records, their character, their positions. Then vote.
The back-room kids have had their turn. Take your election back.
Tom Lubnau served in the Wyoming Legislature from 2004 to 2015 and is a former Speaker of the House. He can be reached at: YourInputAppreciated@gmail.com
