Western lament
Red-leaning states are abandoning pragmatic conservatism

This summer, the Biden administration offered Wyoming $35 million to help the state plug and clean up abandoned oil and gas wells. When Wyoming turned down the cash, it seemed hard to believe.

It could cost the state more than twice that amount to reclaim its 1,000 or so defunct wells that remain unplugged. Economists have also warned that market forces will continue to diminish the state’s main revenue source – severance taxes on fossil fuels. 

That’s not all. Last year, Wyoming turned down federal money for electric vehicle charging stations. Then, when Gov. Mark Gordon refused to take part in the EPA’s pollution-reduction program, the state lost tens of millions of dollars in federal funding. 

Meanwhile, the state is spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars on lawsuits seeking to eviscerate Biden administration rules aimed at protecting the environment and human health and mitigating harmful effects of climate change.

It’s all part of a disturbing shift among Western Republicans and the states they dominate. They are veering away from the more pragmatic conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt or even Ronald Reagan, and into the hard right, anti-government quagmire. 

Gov. Gordon has been swept up in this shift. Gordon was born in New York City and grew up on the family ranch in Kaycee, Wyo. He registered as a Republican at age 18, attended Vermont’s Middlebury College, then came back to Wyoming to continue ranching. At the same time, he pushed back on the coalbed-methane drilling boom that was ravaging his state, a fact missing from his official biographies. 

Gordon’s activism included serving on environmental groups’ boards, and he went on record attacking the energy industry for turning Buffalo into “the place that stinks on the way to Casper.” Nevertheless, he later worked for an oil company as its conservation director. 

He still straddled the fence politically, donating to both Republican and Democratic candidates and committees on a state and national level during the 1990s and early 2000s. But he was not an anomaly; this sort of ideological flexibility was once common in Western states.

When Gordon ran for Congress as a moderate in 2008, he said both the Republican Party and the Sierra Club had “gotten off track,” with the GOP moving too far to the right and abandoning Roosevelt-style conservationism. He said environmentalists also became less willing to compromise, particularly on public-land grazing issues. 

Gordon ended up losing the primary to hardliner Cynthia Lummis – now a U.S. senator – after she attacked Gordon for his environmental ties and bipartisan tendencies. But Gordon stuck to his relatively moderate stance when he ran for governor in 2018 and defeated hardliner Harriet Hageman – who would later unseat Liz Cheney.

As governor, Gordon has acknowledged human-caused climate change and supported clean-energy development, while also looking to keep the fossil fuel industry afloat by pushing carbon capture rather than closing coal plants or regulating drilling. 

He was forceful and eloquent in condemning the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, tweeting: “Interfering with the peaceful transfer of power is an affront to the very Constitution that has made our country what it is. I believe America will not – cannot – stand for this assault on our democracy.”

This centrism has played well with voters. Gordon easily won a second term in 2022. But the radical right-wing, climate-denying branch of Wyoming’s Legislature, the Freedom Caucus, has relentlessly blasted him for it.

In purple states, such as Arizona, the radicalization of the GOP has been met with backlash from moderates, who can seek refuge in a growing Democratic Party. But in Wyoming, newcomers fleeing more liberal states are turning the Legislature a deeper shade of red, lending power and members to the Freedom Caucus. 

The Wyoming governor has struggled to hold his ground. His rhetoric on Biden’s purported “war on fossil fuels” – and the state’s legal challenges to common-sense environmental protections – have grown more strident, even though Gordon knows full well that market forces, not regulations, are behind the industries’ decline. 

The intent here is not to heap criticism on Gordon; he gets enough of that from his party members. Rather it is to lament the imminent extinction of the moderate, conservation-leaning, pragmatic Western Republican. 

Think of all those missed opportunities. In today’s political climate, Gordon either must adapt or be thrown out of office, and that’s not good for Wyoming or the West. 

Jonathon Thompson is a contributor to writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the editor of The Land Desk and an author and journalist.