Cole: Perhaps It’s Time to Think WAY Outside the Box

So, what can be done? Here comes a completely outside the box idea. Hold onto your hats! What if a statewide effort were to convince conservative Republicans to vote for the Democrat candidate for governor, Mr. Casner? Before you stop reading, just take a moment to think this through.

COLUMN

“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.” --Ayn Rand

Time for us Wyoming conservatives to face some very tough reality. Our candidates across the state got bushwhacked and totally gobsmacked in the GOP primary election. This is a fact we’re going to have to deal with.

So, folks are naturally thinking, “Well, what do we do now?” There seems to be no shortage of thoughts as to this matter moving forward. As to the legislative and local races, perhaps we should just vote for our candidates who survived the primary cut and, where necessary, write in the names of those for whom we had tried to vote on August 18^th. That may not make much of a difference, but it would be a statement that we don’t intend to go quietly into the night.

But the race for Wyoming Governor may be a bit different. Kylie Wall, a young recent high school graduate, correctly noted in a recent issue of the ORR, that the gubernatorial race was a clear instance of pure math. She rightly pointed out that the conservative votes were split between Brent Bien and Megan Degenfelder, leaving the crossover Democrat-Republicans and the Redcoats to vote en masse for Eric Barlow. This resulted, as it has in the past, in a “liberal Republican” winning the Republican nomination with less than a majority of the votes cast.

As Ms. Wall points out, the total vote for Bien and Degenfelder was 69,582, whereas Barlow gleaned only 58,820. She notes that this means that conservative Republicans are “politically homeless” in November’s general election as far as the governor’s race is concerned. These voters appear on the surface to be limited to three options: 1) write in their favorite candidate; 2) perhaps vote for whomever the Constitutional Party nominates; or 3) stay home and pout by skipping the November vote.

None of the aforementioned options seem likely to achieve what most genuine conservatives most probably want, i.e. to somehow keep Barlow from becoming Wyoming’s next governor. With precious few exceptions, there are basically no high-level offices anywhere in the country which ever having been won by a write-in or a third-party candidate. Ross Perot, anybody? And staying home should never be an option.

First, there is no doubt that the numbers foretell the possibility for success of such an effort. Of the 58,820 votes Barlow got in the primary, it’s a virtual certainty that all the Democrats who re-registered as “Republicans” (quotation marks intentional), will go home to the Democrat candidate in November. So, some 1,500 votes can be subtracted from Barlow’s primary totals.

Second, if all those conservatives who voted for either Bien or Degenfelder would vote in November for the Democrat candidate, this would add some 68,000 votes to Casner’s primary total of almost 11,000. With these realities, there is absolutely no way that Barlow could muster enough RINO and stubborn crossover holdovers to match the over 75,000 votes Mr. Casner could receive thanks to this effort.

So, you might ask, why vote for a Democrat? We know what they stand for. Yes, and we also know what Mr. Barlow stands for and there’s precious little difference between their real positions on issues such as the size of government, taxes to be confiscated from the citizenry, growing the government programs of “healthcare for all” (read: Medicare for all or Medicaid expansion), abortion, “green energy,” and a host of others. So, what we’d be doing is selecting a real Democrat for governor rather than a covert one!

Furthermore, now that a host of “moderate” Republicans (Redcoats) will make up the Wyoming state legislature, wouldn’t it be interesting to see how they would vote on the various Democrat proposals and policies emanating from a Democrat governor? All their talk about being “conservative” would either come true (should they vote against such proposals) and thereby block the most outrageous policies/legislation sponsored by the Democrats, OR they would acquiesce and support those ideas and programs, thus exposing themselves publically once and for all as to who and what they really are. Either way, the truth should come out.

And what would conservatives rather do now? If you don’t take some type of extraordinary approach such as described above (as distasteful as it may be), you’ll likely face a Governor Barlow for eight years since an incumbent is very difficult to beat in that office (e.g. Mead and Gordon). This option would buy the conservatives some time to regroup their forces with a goal of coming up with one, and only one conservative Republican challenger for governor in 2030.

The other benefit from having done this would be that in 2030 the Democrat Governor would face a genuinely conservative opponent. And that just might result in something we haven’t seen in Wyoming for a long, long time – an honest debate between two radically different approaches to governance without all the subterfuge which now characterizes our elections.

Your choice, folks. One thing’s for sure – what we’ve been doing as to the most crucially important governmental position in Wyoming for many years just hasn’t been working. And eight years of what’s otherwise headed our way is indeed a frightening perspective.

It ain’t a pretty picture, friends. But it’s reality – one we can’t run away from.

Charles Cole,

Sheridan

Originally published by The Open Range Record, Wyoming's Independent News Source. Cite as: “Cole: Perhaps It’s Time to Think WAY Outside the Box,” The Open Range Record, August 28, 2026.