Make Liberty Win targeted former House Speaker Albert Sommers hard this year, with $5,824 and mailers featuring crying children.
The political action committee (PAC) that has spent $549,144 on Wyoming’s Republican primary election since Jan. 1 also attacked Republican Sens. Cale Case and Evie Brennan, Reps. Lloyd Larsen, Bob Nicholas, Elissa Campbell and Jr Riggins, and the former senator and now candidate RJ Kost.
It backs candidates who are members of or aligned with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, as well as U.S. House candidate Chuck Gray and governor candidate Brent Bien.
Make Liberty Win spent more money attacking Case than any other Wyoming candidate, at $14,177.
The group leveled $13,220 against Larsen, $10,932 against Kost, $7,415 against Nicholas, $6,592 against Campbell, $1,472 against Riggins and $38.14 against Brennan, Wyoming campaign finance records show.
It spent far more money, a collective $489,474, backing its favored candidates.
Make Liberty Win is among Wyoming’s top-spending state-level PACS and traces all this year's contributions for Wyoming races to Virginia, its campaign report says.
It made headlines in 2024 for printing inaccurate information on mailers.
The One With The Crying Child
Sommers is running to win back the Pinedale-based House seat he forsook to run unsuccessfully for the state Senate in 2024. He faces Republicans Bill Winney and Matt McGinness in the Tuesday primary election.
Sommers reviewed multiple attack fliers featuring him, in an interview last week.
“That one on child abuse was nasty,” said Sommers. “That was just beyond the pale.”
The flyer shows a girl, roughly kindergarten age, apparently crying and covering her eyes with her overlapping hands.
“When the Wyoming Legislature voted to stop the violation of children’s innocence, Albert Sommers voted to abuse our kids,” the flyer claims. “Don’t rehire Albert Sommers on August 18th!”
The QR code on the flyer leads to a site referencing Senate File 117 of 2023, which sought to forbid public school teachers from teaching sexual-orientation and gender-identity themes to children from kindergarten through third grade. It also sought to compel school district to tell parents of changes in students’ mental, emotional or physical health.
Sommers was House Speaker that year, and told Cowboy State Daily at the time that he kept the bill in his drawer because he believed releasing it would violate his oath to follow the state Constitution.
The Wyoming Constitution bans multi-topic bills.
The 2023 bill died. At the time, both Sommers and the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Dan Dockstader, R-Afton, said the issues it covered weren’t unfolding in Wyoming’s K-3 grades.
The parental-rights topic exploded into controversy later that year, via an incident that unfolded at the high school level.
A Rock Springs couple filed a federal lawsuit alleging school district personnel hid their daughter’s transgender identity from them.
In 2024, Sommers voted in favor of a tighter version of the 2023 bill, which passed. It requires health notifications to parents and written permission from each parent before schools can give any sexual-orientation or gender-identity teaching. He voted in favor of another parental rights bill that year, expanding the parental right already in Wyoming law to the education sphere.
‘Because It Works’
Larsen and Case told Cowboy State Daily in a past interview that the group skews its records, and casts as leftist maneuvers some nay votes that stemmed from structural or procedural issues with bills.
Make Liberty Win Director Barrett Young told Cowboy State Daily he doesn’t buy those arguments.
“Procedural votes still count,” said Young. “This is the biggest lie, the biggest sham these incumbent politicians love to pull.”
“A vote to kill a bill is a vote to kill a bill,” said Young. “I can promise you, when Albert Sommers was speaker of the House, if he wanted a bill to pass, he pulled procedural levels to pass it.”
Young called candidates’ protests of textual or procedural issues “political doublespeak.”
“This isn’t just Wyoming, by the way. We engage state legislative races all across the country,” he said.
Young said he doesn’t believe the negative, edgy mailers are backfiring.
“The truth of the matter is, the reason you see negative mail in every single race – you look at (gubernatorial candidates Megan Degenfelder and Eric Barlow) outside groups beating the crap out of each other,” he said. “The reason you go negative, is because it works.”
Degenfelder weathered an ad characterizing her as dirty for her past lobbying work.
Barlow has weathered multiple false claims alleging he pushed for fuel tax hikes when in fact he fought against them.
Make Liberty Win ventured money to support Rep. Joel Guggenmos, R-Riverton, who didn’t file to run after he was found to be living outside his district.
It also endorsed Rep. Scott Smith, R-Lingle, in his run for state treasurer before Smith had publicly declared.
Smith’s run wasn’t a well-kept secret, said Young.
“It’s a really interesting election,” he continued. “I think the voters in Wyoming, they have a pretty important decision to make.”
Young pointed to the Wyoming Freedom Caucus’ backing of the 25% property tax cut and bills on social issues, which he called “every conservative’s dream agenda item.”
Feeling It
For Case, the pressure is real.
“(The flyers) are really character assassinations,” he said.
Case said he’s counted at least three times a Make Liberty Win staffer has canvassed Lander and dispatched door hangers.
Typically the canvassers are young adults from other states, he added.
“They’re like, here in Lander, saving my people from themselves,” said Case. “It’s kinda sad.”
Case said he’s also fighting Lander-based WCFL PAC, which counts a $5,000 donation out of Jackson among its contributions.
Anticipating the target on his back, Case spent more than ever – he estimates $20,000 by the election’s end – and took PAC money for the first time in his 34 years of legislative campaigning, he said.
Case said he doesn’t believe the PAC money will affect his character at this “senior” phase of his life.
“I mean, the mold of Cale Case is kinda locked in,” he said with a laugh.
More About Sommers
Other MLW flyers this cycle have accused Sommers of welcoming illegal immigrants into the state “with open arms!” and voting against preventing terrorist states from owning land in Wyoming.
He calls them misrepresentations of more nuanced votes on bills that were unconstitutional, problematic, or already ill-fated in the rushed budget sessions of even-numbered years.
“And a lot of people are just getting really tired of the negative ads,” said Sommers. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect on people. But I’ve heard more this cycle that people are just tired of the negative politics than I ever have before.”
The charge that he supported terrorists’ buyout of Wyoming stems from the 2023 House Bill 116, which Rep. Bill Allemand, R-Midwest, sponsored.
More Republicans voted against that bill than for it, and it died on a House roll call vote after its first full-chamber debate.
“The bill was very broad and in my opinion it violated the Wyoming Constitution,” said Sommers, referencing Article 1 Section 29:
“No distinction shall ever be made by law between resident aliens and citizens as to the possession, taxation, enjoyment and descent of property.”
That clause is in Wyoming’s Bill of Rights because of the European farmers and ranchers who bought land in the Cowboy State during its territorial days, said Sommers.
The bill would have banned anyone from Russia or China, or any designated sponsor of terrorism, from buying land in Wyoming except less than one acre and for a personal residence.
Had it passed, the bill would have forced any person from one of those countries to “divest” of the land within two years unless that person completed certain registration requirements.
“I don’t want to see China and Russia and other bad actors, you know, or their corporations or their surrogates, come and buy up land in Wyoming,” said Sommers.
But, he added, “That bill I think, was unconstitutional, and that wasn’t the route to get it done.”
In 2024, with Sommers’ aye vote, the Legislature passed a law authorizing more scrutiny and investigation of land transfers around critical infrastructures.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
