The primary election victory for Wyoming’s Mark Gordon on August 21 was widely interpreted as a defeat for Donald Trump. And it was—just not in the sense the pundits thought.
The victor in the GOP gubernatorial primary was Wyoming rancher and state treasurer Mark Gordon. His chief opponent in the six-man race was the 78-year-old multimillionaire investor and Republican megadonor Foster Friess. “Go VOTE TODAY for Foster Friess,” the president tweeted on Election Day. “He will be a fantastic Governor! Strong on Crime, Borders & 2nd Amendment. Loves our Military & our Vets. He has my complete and total Endorsement!”
It wasn’t enough. Gordon took 33 percent to Friess’s 26 percent.
Our guess is that Wyoming Republicans didn’t plump for Gordon over Friess as any sign of their displeasure with Trump—in 2016, he won the state by a massive 46 points. We suspect, rather, that they simply considered the presidential endorsement irrelevant.
Wyoming’s gubernatorial candidates spent the campaign debating questions of primary importance to residents—the budget, the use of public land, the education system, and state regulation. Little was said about federal immigration laws or kneeling NFL players. The fact that Friess is known mainly as a national political funder—his super-PAC financed Rick Santorum’s 2012 presidential run, for instance—didn’t seem to help his candidacy. Voters backed a Johnson County native over the Wisconsin-born and only part-time Wyomingite Friess.
Asked why he thought the president’s endorsement seemed to make so little difference, Gordon remarked, “This is a governor’s race. This is about the state of Wyoming.” Precisely. If only more regional races were about things other than Donald Trump and the culture wars.
Wyoming’s gubernatorial primary encourages us for another reason. It’s proof—if indeed proof is still needed—that money doesn’t buy elections in this country. We’re not suggesting that Friess wanted to spend his way into the governor’s mansion, but that’s how many of our left-liberal friends would have explained his victory if he had won. Friess’s campaign account took in $2.5 million, as against Gordon’s $2 million—but $2.2 million of Friess’s money was his own. Gordon had to borrow $1.5 million and spent virtually nothing of his own.
For years, a chorus of political scientists, left-wing commentators, and Democratic officeholders have alleged that the uber-wealthy are buying elections. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which defined spending on political causes as a form of protected speech and so allowed private individuals to spend as much as they liked to promote their favored candidates, many American liberals have adopted what can fairly be termed a conspiratorial outlook on U.S. elections. Harry Reid relentlessly accused Charles and David Koch of using their billions to corrupt our democracy. Jane Mayer alleged the same about the Kochs, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Coors family, and many others in her 2016 book Dark Money. And yet the evidence never seems to cooperate: The Kochs’ candidate lost in 2012, and Donald Trump spent far less in 2016 than Hillary Clinton.
And this week we learned that one of the nation’s best-known megadonors couldn’t get himself elected governor of America’s least populous state. We mean no disrespect to Friess when we say: Well done, Wyoming.
