Wyoming Isn’t Turning Blue – It’s Having a GOP Civil War

JACKSON, WY — Thirteen Wyoming Freedom Caucus incumbents lost their House seats in August. Four more caucus-aligned candidates lost Senate primaries. And Eric Barlow, a state senator with a voting record friendly enough to Democrats that the caucus calls him a plant, beat Trump-endorsed Megan Degenfelder for the Republican nomination for governor.

The Daily Caller’s take on all this: liberal donors just Trojan-horsed Wyoming, and the state is quietly becoming the next Colorado.

That’s a hell of a headline. It’s also mostly wrong.

What Actually Happened in August

Here’s the part of the story that’s true, because it’s documented. A group called the Wyoming Donor Alliance put together an $839,500 plan to recruit candidates, target voters and run independent expenditures aimed squarely at the Freedom Caucus. Americans for Prosperity — a libertarian, pro-business group, not a progressive one — spent about $286,000 opposing caucus members it considered too populist and too anti-business. A PAC called Common Sense Republicans for Wyoming spent nearly $95,000 and won 29 of the 34 races it played in. Cowboy State Daily owner Wayne Hughes put money into a PAC backing Barlow and Secretary of State candidate Robert Short.

Democratic state Rep. Liz Storer also wrote $5,500 in checks to Republicans running against Freedom Caucus incumbents.

Add it up and you get an organized, well-funded coalition that wanted the Freedom Caucus gone, and got most of what it wanted. If you’ve followed the Freedom Caucus’s fights with Governor Gordon on the Land Board, this won’t shock you. That fight has been ugly and public for a while now.

What’s not in the source material, despite the framing, is any evidence that Wyoming voters chose Democratic policy. They chose a different flavor of Republican.

The Colorado Comparison – And Its Big Asterisk

The Daily Caller piece leans hard on the Colorado parallel: Rich donors quietly bought a legislature, and twenty years later the state’s unrecognizable. Tim Gill, Pat Stryker, Jared Polis, and Rutt Bridges, the so-called Gang of Four, built exactly that kind of machine starting in the early 2000s, and Democrats swept both chambers of the Colorado legislature in 2004.

Here’s the asterisk nobody in that story wants to sit with….Colorado was already close.

Factor	Colorado in 2004	Wyoming in 2026
Presidential margin	Bush won by 4.67 points	Trump won by 45.76 points
Donor money	Built durable infrastructure over years	One primary cycle, one caucus target
Candidate bench	Democrats developed one over a decade	No comparable Democratic bench exists
Voter base	Front Range growth was expanding the electorate	Wyoming’s population isn’t shifting that way

Colorado’s donor money worked alongside a state that was gaining a million-plus new, younger, more urban residents along the Front Range- people who, as one Denver transplant told the LA Times, moved for the mountains and voted Democratic almost by default. Money accelerated a shift that demographics were already driving.

Wyoming isn’t gaining a Denver suburb. It’s losing Freedom Caucus seats.

The Math Nobody’s Doing

Let’s actually run the numbers, because Wyoming’s small population cuts both ways. Small states are easy to organize in. They are not automatically easy to flip.

Trump beat Kamala Harris in Wyoming by 45.76 points in 2024 — 192,633 votes to 69,527. That’s a gap of 123,106 votes.

To close that, holding everything else equal, you’d need more than 61,553 Trump voters to switch sides, or more than 123,106 new Democratic votes to show up from nowhere. Compare that to Colorado’s 2004 starting point — a 4.67-point gap that a strong turnout shift and a few flipped congressional seats could plausibly close.

Wyoming Freedom Caucus chairman Chip Neiman, who lost his own state Senate bid in August, told the Daily Caller the donor coalition’s goal was explicit:

“Their whole focus was to undo and to do away with the Freedom Caucus and the conservatives… It’s been over time. They really created an incredible machine to do away with the Freedom Caucus.”

Notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say the machine was trying to elect Democrats. He said it was trying to beat a specific faction of Republicans. Those are different projects, and conflating them is where this whole narrative goes sideways.

What’s Really Happening Here

Dig into who actually spent money against the Freedom Caucus and the “Wyoming is turning blue” story gets shakier. Americans for Prosperity isn’t a progressive outfit — it’s the Koch-network libertarian group that wants lower taxes and less regulation, and it went after Neiman for being too anti-business, not too conservative. State Sen. Ogden Driskill, who beat Neiman, called himself a “Reagan conservative” and ran on bringing rodeo and rare-earth mining to his district.

Meanwhile, a pro-Freedom Caucus PAC called Make Liberty Win spent nearly $550,000 trying to defend the caucus and still lost 87% of its races. This wasn’t outside money overwhelming a defenseless movement. Both sides spent real money. One side just built a better coalition.

Barlow’s own record is the clearest evidence of what actually shifted. Reporting cited in the piece shows he voted with a majority of Democrats 90% of the time in 2013, sponsored an amendment to accept Obamacare funding, and voted against a heartbeat abortion bill — a bill Wyoming ultimately passed and is now defending in court. That’s a real ideological gap between Barlow and the caucus he beat. It’s not evidence that Wyoming Republicans want to become Wyoming Democrats. If anything, the Wyoming governor’s race that prediction markets already consider settled tells you the state expects a Republican governor either way, the argument was over which Republican.

The Bottom Line

Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus won its House majority for the first time in 2024. It lost most of it in 2026. That’s not a partisan realignment. That’s a faction rising and falling inside one party, in one cycle, the way factions do.

Is there a version of the Jackson Hole economic contradiction playing out statewide — Republicans who like low taxes and hate the culture-war stuff the caucus ran on? Probably. That’s worth watching.

But turning Wyoming blue requires more than beating one faction in a primary. It requires the kind of demographic and generational shift Colorado had already started by 2004, long before the donor money showed up to finish the job. Wyoming doesn’t have that shift underway. It has a legislature that might spend, tax and regulate a little differently than it did two years ago.

That’s a real story. It’s just not the one being sold.