Good morning, Wyoming, and happy Election Day.
The polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and our live election video commentary runs from 7-9 on Cowboystatedaily.com.
We'll have election results as well, and I'll be mashing popcorn into my face as fast as I can while also writing up news stories about who won - and who didn't.
The “prediction” – ahem, betting – market Kalshi forecasts a Republican sweep of Wyoming’s open U.S. Senate and House seats and governorship.
But the pollsters’ heraldry of a blue wave nationally has buoyed Democratic candidates; and third-party contenders have made headlines all season.
That’s especially true for Constitution Party gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Bextel and Libertarian House candidate Shawn Johnson.
A lot of this year’s fervor is Sen. Cynthia Lummis’s doing.
She launched a political avalanche in December by announcing she’s not running for another term.
Rep. Harriet Hageman, the two-term U.S. House incumbent who clinched national fame by demolishing predecessor Liz Cheney in the 2022 primary, jumped for the seat. So did a slew of challengers who walked away from the primary with collectively fewer votes than Hageman.
The former legislator James Byrd, whose mother Harriett Byrd punched all kinds of glass ceilings as the first African American woman elected to the state Legislature, won the Democratic nomination.
Of course, Hageman’s hoped-for ascent to the upper chamber of our Congress leaves a void in the lower chamber, which sparked a nine-person, multi-million-dollar war for the coveted GOP nomination.
Secretary of State Chuck Gray won that, and now faces Johnson, Democrat Lisa Kinney and Constitution Party nominee Jeff Haggit.
In the ballot initiative world, it's a mystery whether Wyomingites will vote to exempt 50% of property taxation on qualifying home structures.
On the one hand, passing Proposition 1 will gouge many local services’ budgets. On the other hand, property taxes are a sore spot for the Wyomingites who lived through the tax spikes of the great California in-migration.
OK, they weren’t all Californians. We got Coloradans during COVID too.
Kalshi has theories about Prop. 1 also. The players predict a 40% chance of it passing, a 65% chance of it failing.
(I don’t know how that maths either.)
The Legislature is 93% Republican, but a few races remain interesting. Especially GOP nominee Justin Morgan vs. Democrat Ivan Posey, here in my home county of Fremont. And Democratic incumbent Trey Sherwood vs. Republican nominee Emily Study down in Laramie.
Beautifully, our Founding Fathers envisioned a diffuse government, one where concentrations of power are as spangled as our flag, not squeezed into an almighty Capitol.
Leave that centralized-government crap in “The Hunger Games,” OK?
So we love, we aspire, we cherish the notion that down-ballot races are the most important.
School board, town council, mayor, sheriff.
Speaking of Sheriff, all eyes are on Albany County, which is not lame at all during the general election.
The state’s lone “purple” county now considers 38-year law enforcement veteran and Republican Daron Wyatt against the Democratic sheriff of one-and-a-half terms, Aaron Appelhans.
They’ve both got public scars, and they’ve had no issue calling each other out for them.
We know elections have consequences. We know engaging with government is important.
But no matter how tonight ends, don’t offload your fate, happiness, or duties onto political office-holders.
Be too Wyoming for that.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
