We’re just over two weeks out from Harriet Hageman’s landslide defeat of Liz Cheney in the Wyoming primary. I wrote about Hageman for The American Conservative, arguing that, important as Trump’s endorsement was, she is an interesting candidate in her own right, especially when viewed through the lenses of elites and empire. Hageman is an example of a deeply-rooted local elite, whose political identity is centered on using the law (and, now, political office) to protect her own community from the domestic manifestation of empire that is the regulatory state. By contrast, Cheney is an example of a more deracinated elite, whose political identity is centered not so much on the state she represents but on Washington itself as the capital of a global empire. Hageman claims that her signature issue will be fighting the administrative state. Cheney has always understood her signature issue as projecting American power abroad in a crusade for liberal democracy—and, more recently, projecting American power domestically in a crusade for “our democracy.”
The domestic conflict between republican self-government and “our democracy” continues apace, as we can see when we look at a few other races in Wyoming.
In addition to Hageman, Trump endorsed Chuck Gray, candidate for Secretary of State, and Brian Schroeder, candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction. This was highly unusual: downticket races have rarely attracted The Don’s attention in other states. Gray, a state legislator with a strong record on gun rights, protection of the unborn, and (before it was cool) election integrity, ran on a platform of, well, election integrity. Schroeder, for his part, is a former classical charter school head who was appointed in early 2022 to finish the term of Jillian Ballow (who was hired away by Glenn Youngkin to supervise Virginia schools). In his campaign, Schroeder spoke passionately—with tears in his eyes, in fact—about the evils of gender ideology, critical race theory, and other anti-Americanisms, and committed himself to excellence in existing public schools as well as loosening Wyoming’s very tight restrictions on charter schools.
The headline a few weeks ago was that Trump was 2 for 3 in Wyoming: Hageman and Gray won, Schroeder lost. But it’s more complicated than that.
How did Schroeder lose? In a four-way race, Megan Degenfelder, a candidate with prior experience within the Wyoming Department of Education, beat him by just 2,329 votes. But the fourth-place candidate wasn’t even a candidate anymore: Thomas Kelly had withdrawn and endorsed Schroeder, but only after the ballots had already been printed with his name on them. Some 10,318 voters chose Kelly, despite the little notices in every voting booth telling them that Kelly had withdrawn. If just 25% of those miscast ballots had followed Kelly’s endorsement rather than the withdrawn candidate, Schroeder would have won.
In the weeks before the election, I had heard a rumor from a well-placed source that a number of senior Department of Education staffers would resign if Schroeder won the election; that they could tolerate working for this disrupter for a few months, but not for a full term. That’s part of what is happening over at the Secretary of State’s office, now that Chuck Gray—a Trumpist! an election denier! who sponsored showings of the deplorable Dinesh D’Souza’s deplorable 2000 Mules across the state during his candidacy!—won his primary by more than 12,000 votes. Several prominent members of the Secretary of State’s office have resigned rather than work with Gray. There was even a brief, desperate attempt (which has failed) to find a candidate to challenge Gray in the general election.
All that is entirely above-board and proper. If you don’t want to work for the new guy, you can find another job. But last week, the establishment figures embittered by Gray’s election took a further, and truly scandalous step. A committee in the legislature that includes Gray’s primary opponent, Tara Nethercott—“the pick of the state’s political establishment,” though not of Wyoming voters—moved to dilute the Secretary of State’s power to supervise elections. True, the general election is still months out, and Gray is not yet the incumbent. But in Wyoming, the GOP primary is the de facto general election for statewide offices. Secretary of State officials wouldn’t be resigning due to Gray’s primary victory unless they treated it as a guarantee of his victory in November.
Everyone who voted for Gray knew that he had made election integrity—for an audit of the 2020 election, against crossover voting and drop boxes—the central issue of his campaign, and the issue that distinguished him from his opponent. On that basis, Gray beat Nethercott by over 12,000 votes (roughly 8%). Now, Nethercott and her allies in the state legislature are moving to dilute what will soon be Gray’s office of the power to oversee elections. Talk about moving the goalposts. In fact, changing the nature of the office that someone has just (all but) been elected to comes pretty close to overturning the election itself. “Don’t like how the people voted? Simply change what they voted for!”
In this fight, the partisans of “our democracy” are arrayed against the constitutionally-expressed will of republican—in this case, big-R as well as small-r—citizens. That’s increasingly what the national scene is looking like as well.
My view, again, is that "democracy is OUR word;" the ballyhooed distinction too many Americans buy into b/t a "republic" and a "democracy," on the basis of a few Madison over-doings of rhetoric in The Federalist Papers, at the end of the day amounts to little.
So I like the attack on "our democracy" talk, here, as opposed to one on "democracy-talk" simply. Heavy usage of "our" and "we" these days often betrays despotical oligarchic intentions.
Love the local detail, too. To my shame, I could not give as detailed report of Utah politics next door.