Anthony Bouchard gave a quick tour of Wyoming’s recently restored Capitol building. The still-original stair banisters carved by Amish carpenters, he pointed out, have a spindle installed upside-down.

“They did that because man’s not perfect,” he said.

Leaning back in his desk chair at the front of the state Senate floor, Bouchard described his reputation as a principle-focused legislator used to taking heat from establishment Republicans.

“I’m usually swimming upstream while the herd’s all swimming in the same school,” the state senator said.

Bouchard first got involved in politics by advocating for pro-gun positions, founding Wyoming Gun Owners in 2010. He said he became frustrated with the state Republican establishment on that issue and on others, like healthcare.

“There were three Democrats in the Senate chamber” when Bouchard first got involved in politics, he said. “They weren’t the problem — it was the majority of RINOs in this chamber.”

(Emily Brooks/Washington Examiner)

He ran unsuccessful campaigns for a Senate seat in 2012 and a House seat in 2014 before winning an open primary for his current seat in 2016, beating state Rep. David Zwonitzer by just five votes. When Zwonitzer’s wife ran against Bouchard as an independent in the general election, he beat her with 52% of the vote.

Now in his second term, Bouchard is taking the same go-it-alone, trailblazing approach to his campaign against Cheney. He was the first to announce his candidacy, which frustrated other potential candidates and a number of Republican operatives in the state looking to ensure the anti-Cheney vote doesn’t split and hand her a primary win.

But Bouchard has raised more than $500,000, more than any other Cheney challenger so far. He also isn’t waiting around for Trump to choose his preferred candidate to kick his campaign into high gear.

“We didn’t do this by accident. It was a deliberate plan to attempt to enter this race,” he said. “And it’s paying off.”

Nationally, Bouchard is best-known for getting ahead of a negative news story by revealing his “Romeo and Juliet” story with his ex-wife, whom he impregnated at 14 when he was 18 and then married before they divorced. She died by suicide a few years later.

He declines to elaborate on the topic and brushes off the possibility the story could sink his campaign against Cheney.

“It’s almost 40 years ago,” he said, and Wyoming voters have “their mind [on] issues that are happening today.”

Leaving the Senate chamber, Bouchard ran into two tourist couples from Ohio and California, starting a conversation that turned into a 15-minute debate over gun rights and policing.

“It’s my individual — not only my liberty, but my duty to defend myself,” Bouchard told one man who balked at Wyoming’s open-carry policy. “The courts have said repeatedly, the police have no duty to protect you.”

The Mr. Smith trying to go to Washington

At the other end of the personality spectrum of candidates is attorney Darin Smith: a smiley and chipper former Christian Broadcasting Network and Family Research Council executive. The father of five sat down for an interview at tropical drink company Beach Please in Cheyenne, which he has made a point to frequent since it opened during the pandemic.

He ordered his usual: a large tapioca boba original black sugar latte with light ice and coconut jellies. To this reporter’s palette, it was off the charts on the sweetness scale.

He described a humanitarian outreach trip he once took to the Amazon, where he saw a village with women washing clothes in a river right next to outhouses.

The pastor he was with commented, “Either you shape your environment, or it shapes you, eh?”

(Emily Brooks/Washington Examiner)

“That’s exactly what’s happening right now,” Smith said. “D.C. is dumping its sewage out on the heartland, especially places like Wyoming, with this gender dysphoria, all this stuff — this bathroom stuff, are you kidding me? School is for reading, writing, and arithmetic. We’ll do social engineering somewhere else, please.”

He previously ran against Cheney for the Republican congressional nomination in a crowded field in 2016, receiving 15% of the vote.

Back then, he thought the best message would win a campaign. Now, he said he knows the system is corrupt.

Smith rallied at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — though he did not go inside the building during the riot and said he started a “back the blue” chant as “rabble-rousers” started to give Capitol Police a hard time. He thought Vice President Mike Pence should have denied certification of the results until an audit of election results could be completed.

“I could put a murder on death row with less circumstantial evidence than I have to prove that there was fraud in the election,” he said.

Cheney, he says, “violated the constitutional rights of every Wyoming citizen” when “she went after a man without due process over charges that were not true.” But his frustration with her started before that, beginning when she spread the now-walked back story last summer that Russians put bounties on American troops.

Smith’s “political father” is Foster Friess, a Republican megadonor and chairman of Smith’s campaign before he died at 81 last month.

Friess “knew that the only way to overcome is with love,” Smith said. “That’s the only thing that’s more powerful than hate. Hate is a powerful force. I can prove it — it’s called Islam … At the end of the day, they’re commanded to kill their enemies.”

Running on ambition and the Freedom Caucus

Chuck Gray stands out from the rest of the primary field, partly because he’s the youngest candidate in the race. But the 31-year-old state representative in his third term is quick to point out his legislative tactics and accomplishments, such as a bill to set aside money to fund lawsuits against neighboring states that limits Wyoming’s ability to export coal and a bill requiring doctors to offer an ultrasound to women seeking abortions.

After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (like Trump), Gray started a conservative talk radio station with his family’s radio business in 2013. He was the host (like Pence), making him intimately familiar with core issues for conservative voters and organizations care about.

He boasts awards from the Club for Growth and American Conservative Union for his voting record. He’s part of the Wyoming state legislature’s version of the Freedom Caucus and has racked up endorsements from some of his colleagues.

Stirring several packets of stevia into his iced tea in a Casper, Wyoming, diner — he’s trying to cut back on sugar — a focused Gray talked about some of the House Republicans he sees himself getting along with: Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. He’s unconcerned about their controversial personas.

“That comes along with being a conservative fighter,” he said.

“The group that Liz Cheney is a part of, they got their way with Bush one, they got Bush two, McCain, Romney, Dole,” Gray said — with only former President Ronald Reagan and Trump upsetting the status quo. “She was the first one in line for this Nancy Pelosi narrative that could have been constructed at her house with the $24,000 freezer stacked with the gourmet ice cream.”

Gray asserts Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election. Earlier this month, he visited the Republican Maricopa County Audit site in Arizona, which he said is uncovering “unconscionable things.”