The final days of Wyoming’s primary election season have gotten so negative, Sen. Eric Barlow is wearing a vet sleeve to check his mailbox.
The Republican gubernatorial candidate is one of the state’s most targeted political candidates, as multiple groups have launched negative mailers and TV commercials against him this summer.
He also has a handy stock of vet gloves from his two decades working as a veterinarian; when he performed pregnancy tests on cattle.
That’s a rectal procedure.
Barlow joked in a Saturday Facebook video that checking his mailbox during election season is also a rectal procedure.
In the video Barlow approaches a row of mailboxes and announces that he and his wife have been on the road for four or five days, and, “well, when you get home, you gotta check the mail.”
He references he numerous TV, text, and mail ads flooding the dog days of the primary election season, which ends Aug. 18.
“It just doesn’t make any sense, folks, that’s not how we treat people in Wyoming,” says Barlow.
“So here’s what I suggest,” he continues in the video, donning a vet glove way up to his shoulder. “You glove up.”
He adds: “You open carefully. Step back. Yep, there’s some in there, I can see it right from here.”
Barlow tells the viewers to reach into the mailbox, “pull it out carefully, turn that sleeve inside out.”
The gloved Barlow in the video extricates a fecal-looking lump from the mailbox.
“There. You’ve got it contained,” says Barlow on the video, inverting the glove and confining the lump inside it by tying a knot.
Technically, Yak Poop
Barlow, a yak rancher, told Cowboy State Daily later that he shot the video using his own mailbox - and real dung.
“If you want to be really technical, it was yak crap,” said Barlow in a Saturday-evening phone interview.
The vivid demonstration echoes his veterinary practice, during which his “bread and butter” was pregnancy checks of ranch animals, including cattle.
A cow’s abdomen isn’t suited for a vet to detect early pregnancy in an abdominal examination, so the vet dons a long-sleeve polyethylene glove up to his shoulder and checks the cow through her rectum, Barlow said.
“It’s generally pretty dirty,” he said. Shifting back to the metaphor he added, “I don’t think it needs to be that way, but others do. So when you approach your mailbox you gotta be careful.”
Barlow said from watching Federal Election Commission numbers, his team anticipates he’ll weather as much as another $325,000 worth of negative advertising in the next 10 days.
One group, Women for Responsible Government Action, derided Barlow for voting against a bill that sought to ban child sex-change treatments in 2023. That same year however, Barlow voted in favor of a different bill with the same goal.
A similar paradox unfolded when the Wyoming’s Turn PAC launched ads attacking Barlow for voting against a sanctuary cities ban in 2025 - when Barlow had voted in favor of a different sanctuary cities ban that same year.
The one he voted against was widely opposed by Wyoming sheriffs, and died with around two-thirds of Senate Republicans voting against it.
Wyoming’s Turn PAC invoked multiple other Barlow votes. The group asserted that Barlow’s record shows him supporting illegal immigrants. He called that a mischaracterization and discussed each vote in an Aug. 3 interview.
He said in his Saturday interview that some people he encounters at events have said they find his humorous take on the negativity refreshing. The preg-check video is the latest in a series.
The governor's race isn’t the only one that has gone negative.
U.S. House candidates Steve Friess and Chuck Gray have both been targeted. So have numerous legislative candidates.
Barlow said after being on the road for about five days, he found 15 campaign mailers in his mailbox. At least one posed an attack on him, he added.
It’s Almost Over
Barlow faces Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, retired Marine Corps Col. Brent Bien, and Centennial man Curt Blake in the Republican primary election Aug. 18.
Barlow, Degenfelder and Bien all had partial victories in recent weeks.
Barlow released results of a poll - which Cowboy State Daily has reviewed - showing him leading the race.
Bien won the endorsement of the Wyoming Republican Party's state central committee.
Trump-endorsed Degenfelder garnered more statements of support, and a Thursday virtual phone rally, from the president.
The winner of that contest will face Democrat Kenneth Casner and Constitution Party nominee Rebecca Bextel, though Bextel has indicated on Facebook that she will “happily stay home” if Bien or Degenfelder wins the primary election.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
