A WyoFile Q&A with Gov. Mark Gordon

Wyoming’s 2024 primary election legislative races did not, on balance, go the way Gov. Mark Gordon had hoped.

The hard-line Republican Wyoming Freedom Caucus  — which has sharpened its attacks of the governor in the last year — gained critical ground in the House and is well positioned to take the reins in the Legislature after November’s general election.

Gordon personally poured more than $166,000 into statehouse contests, backing non-Freedom Caucus Republicans who generally aligned with his positions on energy, economic diversification, mental health services and education.

However the chips fall in November, the new make-up in the statehouse will almost certainly make it more difficult for Gordon to accomplish the vision he first brought to the governor’s office in 2019.

The governor, nonetheless, remains optimistic. He spoke with WyoFile about the election, how he expects to work with the incoming 68th Wyoming Legislature and what he envisions for the remaining two years of his term. The following Q&A has been edited for clarity.

WyoFile: What does this past election tell you about Wyoming politics? Are there lessons we can glean from it?

Gov. Mark Gordon: My biggest concern is the fact that only 27% of the electorate participated. So I think that should tell all of us something about how valuable people saw that process. And I do think that there may be some confusion. My wife was at an appointment the other day, and the fellow she was meeting with said, “I’m all ready for the election,” and you know, indicated he hadn’t participated in the primary. More than anything, I think that’s what it says. I feel very strongly … [that] for the last several years, that most people in Wyoming are worried about their kids. They want to make sure that they can make a living. They’ve got working day things that they’re working on, and I’m not sure that’s changed. When people show up at a football game or a volleyball game on a Friday night or Saturday, they still want the same things that they wanted before. They still want to have an economy. They still want to make sure they have jobs. They’d love to have their kids stay [in Wyoming].

You know, these things haven’t changed, I don’t believe, and I don’t think this election was about that.

WF: You bring up voter turnout, what do you think is to be done about that?

MG: Well, my hope is that people saw through — it’s a sad fact that negative campaigning works. It makes people not want to turn out, or they don’t see the reason to turn out. And I hope they see through that, and that they see value in what the state government does in terms of, you know, Wyoming has got a great reputation of working with industry, working with people, not being overly bureaucratic, and as nimble and small as we can be to solve problems. And that comes because people feel they can engage with government and they have expectations — I mean, every time I walk through this Capitol, people come up to me and say, “You’re the governor. Oh, my God. I mean, I can see you, I can talk to you,” and I think that’s something that Wyoming is unique in being able to do. And it’s an expectation that people have: “I can access government.” I think if people begin to make the connection that it’s important to participate in politics, Plato said something like, “The penalty for not participating in politics is that you’re going to be governed by people lesser than yourself.” So Wyoming is really a state that people have an expectation of working with their legislators where, at least through my life, we’ve been a majority Republican state, and we’ve always felt the government’s best when it’s closest to the people.

WF: Another question related to the election — the Freedom Caucus has openly attacked you, and you used your own money to campaign against the group’s candidates this primary. There’s a realistic chance that the caucus and its allies in the Senate will control the Legislature in 2025. Can you work with them, and do you get a sense that they’re willing to work with you when it comes to tackling the issues facing the state right now?

MG : Look, I’ve worked with a lot of those people over time. And as I’ve said over and over again, I’ll always work with whoever the leadership is. It’s changed periodically over the last few years, and I think at the end of the day, they have the same issues, that people are expecting things to work. They want to have all the things that we talked about. So I think there’s lots of common ground for us to work on. About a year and a half ago, I can’t remember who the member of the Freedom Caucus or non-member of the Freedom Caucus — sometimes they want to be, sometimes they don’t — mentioned to me that they were going to, “start trying to pick holes in things.” OK. And that’s OK because that’s politics, right? And, you know, I think they have tried to be very aggressive that way, to say, “there’s that, here’s this.”

But at the end of the day, we should all care, not about our personal aggrandizement, but about what we’re doing for the state of Wyoming. What we’re doing to make sure that our coal stays a consistent source of electric generation, not only in Wyoming, but for the markets. Because when they buy our coal that helps fund our schools.

And not only with oil and gas, I mean, we’ve been fighting tooth and nail to make sure that we can develop our own oil and gas, and then we want to be able to diversify the economy and make it so that more industries’ jobs are available. And that’s not just attracting new businesses, that’s also being able to grow the business. We have the biggest group of entrepreneurs in the country, you know, single-owned businesses and stuff. Let’s figure out how to get them, so that our main streets are vital, so that the communities that we live in feel like they’re growing and expanding.

I think those [are the] things we’ve all got to focus on.

WF: So you’ve offered a vision for Wyoming’s economic future that includes things like economic diversification and investments in carbon capture projects. I’m wondering what you feel like you can accomplish from that agenda, given that you’re likely to face this majority in the House that has indicated in some regard that it doesn’t necessarily see a need for those things?

MG: Well, we hit the ground running [in 2018]. I had hoped that the first two years would be a little more productive, but we had a thing called COVID that sort of slowed everything down — at least on what I was hoping to get accomplished.

What I think, ultimately, Wyoming did very well during COVID, and a lot of those efforts were able to advance. We’ve wanted to make sure that our education system isn’t so much about “let’s tell our kids what they have to learn,” as it is making it vital that our education system is responsive to the needs of the community, the needs of industry, especially the wants of parents for what they want to see their kids learn and to give them an excellent education. I think that there was a time when people started saying, “We can make the world what we want it to be, if we can start to program our kids.” I’ve always been about educating our kids, and so we’ve made huge strides there. I think those will proceed.

You’ve asked about, you know, carbon capture, diversifying the economy, and other things. So much of that work was really to get us to a point where I could talk on a national level about, “Hey, coal still represents an incredibly important part of our generation package for reliable, dependable, dispatchable electricity. And guess what? If you’re trying to curtail it by saying it’s terrible for the environment, we can solve that, too.” I don’t think that anyone in this state is going to say we don’t want  — well, there may be a few — let me put it this way, there may be a few who say, “We don’t want coal jobs.” I don’t think the Freedom Caucus or this administration would say that “we want to see coal jobs disappear.” We want to see coal jobs get better. When I see kids that graduated with my kids, they can go get a good paying job that is in a community that has been built over time by coal. I want to see that stay. I think we can come to some agreements on that.

There’s a dispute about whether climate change is real or not — in Wyoming, that’s a conversation. Outside of Wyoming, in many of the markets that we’re talking about, that we’re trying to maintain the marketplace for our coal, that isn’t the conversation. We want to make sure that the rest of the world sees that we have to power our nation, and coal is a vital part of that, and we can do it very well.

The other thing I want to say is there’s been a tremendous amount of wind development, right? The worry about some of that is, what has this done to our landscape, and I share those concerns. But for a property owner to have something in his field that is generating income, whether it be an oil well or whether it be a windmill, good on that property owner.

But I’m also very excited by the fact, and this is something I fought for even when I was treasurer, we need our domestic uranium industry to recover, because nuclear will be part of our energy portfolio going forward. It’s a huge resource for Wyoming. I grew up with people who used to work in mines, and then when that market collapsed because it went to Russia, they lost their jobs. And now we know that Russia isn’t our friend, and so it’s nice to sort of say, “Hey, maybe we can build back.” And Wyoming is the leader in this effort, and it’s not been because we put state money or taxpayer dollars into it. What we did is we provided the opportunity for private industry to come in and say, “We want to build.”

WF: I’m also wondering, what else do you want Wyomingites to know about this particular moment in your administration, or this particular moment in the Legislature, or more generally speaking, about the political landscape in Wyoming right now?

MG: Maybe three, four years ago, I was talking to a friend in Cody, somewhat right after an election, and I was saying, one of the coolest things about politics in Wyoming was the fact that everybody knew everybody. Somehow somebody knew your dad, somebody knew your neighbor, somebody had an interaction with somebody that knew you somehow from rodeo or whatever it was, there was that connection. And a lot of times you would hear people that would run and they would say, you know, “I’m a third generation, I’m a fourth generation, I’m a whatever generation rancher, I’ve been here for a number of years.” And I was talking to this friend philosophically, and I said, “It just doesn’t seem like that’s as big a deal.” And she said, “not so much.” And so I think there’s a piece of that that we’ve lost. And if there’s something to be taken from this election, it is the fact that we had so much more outside activity. And I saw this, you know, a good friend and a wonderful man, a guy that I had a spirited election with, Foster Friess. Foster Freiss took counties that were really surprising to me — Big Horn County, that is a county that is rock solid, Wyoming, Sweetwater County, you know, same, same sort of deal. And Foster had a great appeal. He was a wonderful guy, very thoughtful, you know, and just a tremendous, tremendous person. But he also had a bunch of people that were knocking doors — and that happened, I think this year, you know, too — not from Wyoming, and they didn’t necessarily go to any high school here, but they cared about promoting a particular candidate or another. And if there’s a lesson to be taken from that is that the politics that have happened to the rest of the country have come to Wyoming finally. I used to love to look at what was going on in Colorado and say, “Oh, thank God. It’s not happening here,” but it [now] is.

WF: What about the rest of your term are you really excited about?

MG: I’m excited about being able to finish off some of the stuff we started. It’s already got great momentum. Yeah, there’s maybe going to be some chatter about that. But this is an amazing state. We, as a state, are in one of the most enviable moments in our history. We can provide all kinds of solutions, not just in energy, but we’ve already done great stuff with our stable token. We’ve done great stuff with digital assets that’s brought a lot of attention to Wyoming, a lot more potential to help diversify our economy. The fact that we have manufacturers … from the small manufacturer that that moved out of Los Angeles because they wanted to be in Worland to make components that help build the stents that go in hearts to L&H [Industrial], really looking at a whole new generation of electric, to what we’ve done with my wife’s effort with the Hunger Initiative that helped revitalize local processing. We now have all these processors that are doing great work.

And the fact that we can talk about land management now, not in these shallow concepts of leaving it alone is going to make it fine, but understanding that we have a role to manage them. And we’ve looked at forests that are dead and dying and fire hazards, to be able to start talking about the true engagement of people in managing those forests, maybe revitalizing some of those industries. I’m really excited about what the opportunities are.

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