Dem
47
GOP
53
The sudden retirement of Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) last week caught everyone by surprise, such that no aspiring replacement candidate immediately announced a run. That will happen when a vacancy occurs around 7:00 p.m. on a Friday.
It was really only a matter of time, however, until Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) announced a run, and yesterday, she jumped in. If you would like to watch her announcement video, it is here. Our three takeaways: (1) Hageman is pretty terrible on camera, with a cadence almost as unnatural as that of Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) or former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal; (2) However, her cross is bigger than YOUR cross and (3) A lot of people in Wyoming own very large belt buckles—they could probably give Texas a run for its money, on a square-inches-of-belt-buckle-per-capita basis.
We are hardly dialed into Wyoming politics, but reader R.L.D. in Sundance, WY, is, and assures us that Reid Rasner, who ran for the other Wyoming U.S. Senate seat in 2024, is going to mount a bid. Rasner is a billionaire, though we can't find anyone willing to estimate how many billions he actually has. According to Forbes, he is NOT the richest person in Wyoming—that's John Mars, at $39 billion. And so, we have a range of somewhere between $1 billion and $38.9999 billion for Rasner. Wherever he is on that spectrum, he's certainly got enough to buy every commercial slot in Wyoming from now until the election, and to hire half the population of the state to knock on the doors of the other half.
In other words, Hageman is going to lose the money race, bigly. On the other hand, she has won elections, including statewide elections, in Wyoming before, and Rasner has not. Further, Wyomingites do not have a history of sending inexperienced politicians to represent them in the Senate; every newly-minted U.S. Senator in the past half-century-plus either served as representative, as a member of the state legislature, or as governor (and sometimes more than one of these).
Hageman also has Donald Trump's endorsement, which could help. That said, he's developed a habit of endorsing EVERY candidate who is MAGA enough, so we'll see if he's able to control himself in Wyoming. Also, Wyoming is more populist than MAGA, and Hageman had a high-profile incident back in March where she was booed off the stage during a town hall, after she listened to complaints about DOGE, tariffs, etc., and decreed: "It's so bizarre to me how obsessed you are with federal government... I'm sorry, your hysteria is just really over the top." Yes, what could these people who showed up to a town hall WITH A UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE be thinking? That is not the time and place to be discussing what the federal government is doing, right? They really should have limited themselves to questions about Fourth of July desserts and what is going to happen in the final season of Stranger Things.
The point here is that the mood in Wyoming might be ripe for a Washington outsider. That, plus his money, might make Rasner competitive. However, we would guess that the person who would really be a problem for Hageman is Gov. Mark Gordon (R). He doesn't have boatloads of money, but he has also won statewide, while being a Washington outsider. That combination of experience and distance might be what Cowboy State voters are looking for. He is considering a bid, but hasn't made a decision yet. There's been no polling of the race, in part because Lummis just jumped ship, and in part because Wyoming is rarely polled because nobody wants to pay for it, so we might have to wait a while before we have anything more than guesses about what's going to happen in that race (other than that a Republican will win, which is not a guess, but a certainty). (Z)