Eric Barlow would have won the GOP nomination for governor without potential “Republicans in Name Only,” ideological Democrats voting in his favor, Wyoming political analysts say.
The numbers say that too.
“I don’t think Democratic crossover voters influence election outcomes in Wyoming,” Jim King, retired University of Wyoming political professor, told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday phone interview.
“If you look at the percentage of people in surveys who identify as Democrats, and the percentage of people who register to vote as Democrats, they track very closely,” he said.
Wyoming’s registered Democrat percentage is just over 11%. King said the surveys show about 17-18%.
Independents also bring play to the Republican primary election, however, King noted.
That’s because in deep-red Wyoming, Republican primary ballots have more options and the GOP primary tends to be more decisive, especially in statewide races.
“If independents want to have a real say, it's in the Republican primary, where they can have an influence over the outcome,” said King.
Rob Wallace, longtime politico and former assistant Interior secretary during the first Trump administration, said the question is bigger than party purity.
“The fact is, these are Wyoming people that were voting for governor,” said Wallace. “They weren’t people from Colorado or Idaho or Maine. Why are you milking mice about a question like that anyway?”
Too Moderate?
Barlow has been the target of consistent critique from some Republican voices in Wyoming for being too moderate.
His opponent Brent Bien’s campaign aide Rich Weber took it a step further and called Barlow a “Democrat” in multiple Facebook posts.
Constitution Party nominee Rebecca Bextel, whom Barlow faces in the general election alongside Democratic nominee Kenneth Casner, said when declaring for office that the GOP gubernatorial primary “tends to favor the Democrat among the candidates.”
Joey Correnti, a Wyoming political analyst and former political podcaster of “Just Blame Joey,” said the Republican-in-Name-Only vote probably had some impact, but didn’t give Barlow his win.
The crossover voting fad became controversial starting in about 2016, said Correnti. And some people have been switching to Republican from other designations since then.
“But I still don’t believe that’s what benefitted Eric Barlow,” said Correnti. “He ran a largely positive campaign based on ideas for Wyoming, that benefit Wyoming.”
Correnti said with so much play among political ideals, even “crossover voting” is difficult to define.
Rodger McDaniel, a former Democratic lawmaker and political observer, told Cowboy State Daily last month that he's now registered as a Republican so he can have options in the primary election.
Many Republicans in 2022 feared that Rep. Liz Cheney — who garnered discontent for working to impeach President Donald Trump — would win on Democratic crossover votes, but now-Rep. Harriet Hageman demolished Cheney in the primary with 66% of the vote to Cheney's 29%, rendering those worries dubious.
Lock In, Time For Numbers
King discouraged trying to break Wyoming’s voter registration numbers into statistics that would give an answer, because of the possibility of different ideological ratios in Wyoming’s registered voter figures, its general election figures, and its primary election figures.
Cowboy State Daily ran numerical analyses, but also worked in margins of error based on King’s concerns.
The numbers support what King and Correnti both said.
Barlow won his nomination over four Republican challengers Tuesday with 45% of the vote.
Wyoming’s registered Republican voter percentage, averaged from the dates of the three most recent elections, is about 78% percent, and Democrats range from 11% and %11.8%.
In the past two general elections, taking an average of all statewide races to account for different character types and dynamics, Republican candidates won 72.4% of the vote and Democratic candidates 22.69%.
The Republican figures give a better picture of outer-party play in the GOP primary: Republican statewide candidates of the past two cycles won about 6% less in numerical weight than the Republican voter rolls contained across that same timeframe average.
Subtracting that 6%, Republican punch down from Barlow’s total percentage and redistributing his lost ratio, in proportion, across his opponents’ percentage of the vote would leave Barlow with a solid win still.
He’d have 39% of the vote, compared to 31.4% for his opponent Megan Degenfelder and 25% for Bien.
King said it’s not reliable to transpose general election partisan voter statistics onto the primary election, because the primary election has less than half the turnout generally and it’s unclear which direction that less-than-half turnout veers ideologically.
To address that, Cowboy State Daily added a margin of error based on the difference between the Republican proportion of the primary (91.9%) and Republican statewide election voting ratios in the two most recent statewide general elections (around 72.4%). The former is 126% of the latter.
Using that figure to calculate a right-ward enthusiasm margin of error while also deducting from Barlow the Republican average punch-down, Barlow would have taken 37.3% of the vote — still enough to win, given the fourth Republican candidate Curt Blake’s low impact (0.14%) on what was essentially a three-person race.
Using that percentage's inverse figure as a leftward margin of error (assuming greater left-leaning enthusiasm in the primary, and crediting it to Barlow), and again deducting from Barlow the average GOP punch-down, Barlow wins again with 40.2% of the vote.
Barlow was unsurprised by the figures.
Posed with this story’s question of, “Did RINOs nominate Eric Barlow?” he laughed and said, “Republican voters nominated Eric Barlow.”
Barlow Still 'The Opposition' To Democrats
Joe Barbuto, former chair of the Wyoming Democratic Party, discouraged closet-Democrat style GOP voting soon after Barlow declared his run last year.
He also called Barlow part of "the opposition" to Democrats.
"Before anyone rushes to change their registration to vote in the Republican primary, let’s take a step back," said Barbuto. "Democrats aren’t going to decide this race any more than we did in 2010 for Matt Mead or 2018 for Mark Gordon.
"Those Republicans won because the far-right couldn’t unify behind one candidate."
Barbuto predicted that a "fractured field" would help Barlow win.
That analysis may be correct, since the more Freedom-Caucus faction favored Degenfelder and Bien together won 53.2% of the vote.
However, there's no real way of calculating whether a Degenfelder drop-out would have led some of her voters to vote for Barlow; or a Bien dropout similarly.
"Instead of boosting Republican hopefuls, we should be focused on our own bench," said Barbuto. "Recruiting good Democratic candidates is hard work — I know that firsthand. It’s even harder when we’re online praising the opposition."
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
