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2025-01-14 16:00
On 7 January, Republican Wyoming state representative Jeremy Haroldson stood on checkerboard tiles at the heart of the state capitol rotunda and outlined the ascendant Freedom caucus’s vision for a new Wyoming.
“This nation was founded on godly principles,” said Haroldson, who is also a pastor. “And those are the principles that we will continue to govern upon.”
Wyoming’s 2025 legislative session, which starts on Tuesday, will be the first time a Freedom caucus, known for its hardline conservative stances in Washington, has taken control of any US state house, although the National Freedom Caucus Network has a growing footprint in a dozen state capitols.
The future unveiled by Haroldson and other members elaborated on the Freedom caucus’s “Five and Dime” plan, a culture-war heavy legislative package designed to show that a group of self-branded conservative outsiders can handle being in the driver’s seat.
The package aims to “stop the Woke agenda” at the University of Wyoming by prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, cutting residential property taxes, invalidating drivers’ licenses issued to undocumented immigrants by other states, enacting stricter proof of residency and citizenship for prospective voters, and prohibiting “woke investment strategies” with state funds.
The power shift has brought national attention to Wyoming, where over a third of house members will be freshman lawmakers. Speaker of the House and Freedom caucus member Chip Neiman views the package as the will of Wyoming voters – and reflective of a changing, more conservative America.
“The people have clearly given us a mandate.” Neiman said. “This is where Wyoming’s headed. We’ve seen it nationally very, very clearly, and we’ve seen it very clearly in Wyoming.”
Politics in Wyoming, the nation’s least populated state, are historically dominated by its legacy industries, namely coal and minerals, oil and gas, and ranching and shepherding. Members of the legislature work in the communities they serve as small business owners, lawyers and ranchers. The “code of the west”, derived from the book Cowboy Ethics, is written into the Wyoming constitution.
The down-home reputation can make division in Wyoming politics seem puzzling from the outside. The state voted for Donald Trump by the widest margin in the nation – three times in a row. Republicans make up the entirety of the state’s congressional delegation, hold all five top statewide positions and claim 85 of the state legislature’s 93 seats.
But in the Cowboy state, uniformity doesn’t mean unity.
The split between a new generation of further-right conservatives and old guard Republicans is playing out across the country, and its divisions are laid bare in Wyoming. A costly August primary and smooth general election tipped the scales further to the right, laying the groundwork for the Freedom caucus to assume power.
The fractures notably show in the yawning divide between Governor Mark Gordon and the secretary of state, Chuck Gray, who campaigned heavily on claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election. In April, Gordon blocked Gray’s efforts to change Wyoming’s election laws.
“Governor Gordon is now enabling Biden and the most radical leftists in America who are trying to help illegal immigrants vote in our elections,” Gray wrote in a post on X at the time.
Gordon also vetoed many of the 2024 legislature’s culture war bills and faced censure from his own party as a result. Gordon’s Pac spent over $260,000 in the August primary supporting establishment, more moderate Republicans – with largely unsuccessful results.
The primary election had the lowest voter turnout since 2016, and was largely a dismantling of the establishment and incumbent Republican network that had so long held the final say in the state house. The speaker of the house and speaker pro tempore both fell to Freedom caucus-endorsed newcomers.
The primary election featured allegations of misinformation and an avalanche of spending from out-of-state groups. The two largest spenders were Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity, which shelled out more than $343,000 on establishment and Freedom caucus-aligned candidates, and Make Liberty Win, a Young Americans for Liberty subsidiary that dropped more than $370,000 on largely Freedom caucus-aligned candidates.
State representative JT Larson knows this divisiveness well, and filed a defamation lawsuit against the Freedom caucus Pac for mailers circulated against him. Larson is entering the coming session with a sense of cautious optimism.
“We know it’s time to govern. I think there’s going to be a different mindset from them,” Larson said. “That’s where my hope that we can work together to serve our constituents comes from.”
Former majority whip Cyrus Western said that he sees a contrast between the current approach from the Freedom caucus and its past “adversarial” and “combative” language he says brought it to power.
“They were engaging in what I’d say were pretty low-brow campaign tactics,” Western said. “And now all of a sudden, you’re hearing what they say: ‘We want to bring people together. We want to we want to have a functional body, and we want to have unity in the chamber.’”
Neiman says that past claims of divisiveness are water under the bridge. He’s hoping that those not aligned with the Freedom caucus will get on board and help push conservative policies through the legislature.
“Nobody here wants to throw bombs. Nobody here is about creating hate and discontent among the legislature,” Neiman said.
Representative and Freedom caucus chair Rachel Rodriguez Williams said that the concerns of Wyomingites had long fallen on deaf ears.
“For far too long, the people in charge of this building have ignored the everyday man and woman throughout the state. They’ve laughed at our very real concerns. They’ve grown government into an unrecognizable monster,” Rodriguez Williams said. “I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that those days are over.”
Flanking Rodriguez Williams were the people the Freedom caucus deemed integral to a populist-branded future for Wyoming – Secretary of State Gray, anti-environmental and social financing advocate Will Hild, and members and alumni of the University of Wyoming’s Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority chapter.
That sorority was embroiled in national controversy after some members sued over a transgender woman being accepted into their private organization.
That lawsuit is currently in limbo after a judge dismissed the original lawsuit in 2023, and another rejected their appeal in 2024. In the legislature, five separate bills related to gender identity have been filed ahead of the 2025 session, including reintroduction of the failed What Is a Woman Act. Last year, the legislature banned gender-affirming care for minors.
Sara Burlingame, director of the LGBTQ+-focused non-profit Wyoming Equality, contrasts the attention given to transgender issues with the state’s small population of transgender youth.
“It affects so few people in the country’s least populated state, and yet they will use the bulk of their legislative time attacking a handful of these students,” Burlingame said.
Election integrity was another issue the Freedom caucus deemed crucial. According to the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, Wyoming has seen four documented cases of voter fraud since 1982.
“I want to be clear that Wyomingites, and only Wyomingites, should be voting in Wyoming elections,” said Gray, a founding member of the Wyoming Freedom caucus.
To Haroldson, the guiding principle of the coming session is a desire to redefine the role of government.
“As we’ve sat and listened to our constituents and gone across this great state, one of the things they keep hearing is we really want the government just to leave us alone,” Haroldson said. “Quit messing with our lives.”
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