Republican primary voters in the nation’s reddest state appear to have had enough of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus after they “annihilated” its candidates in the recent primaries.
That’s according to conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who argued Wednesday that Wyoming’s results crushed the conservative narrative that establishment Republicans are out-of-touch “RINOs.”
While the state’s Freedom Caucus pushed voters to hand it a House supermajority, “the conservative Republican establishment, meanwhile, pushed back,” Olsen told readers.
“Establishment Republicans annihilated Freedom Caucus candidates last Tuesday,” he added in a column for the Post titled, “Wyoming Republicans just proved the ‘RINO’ narrative wrong.”
Freedom Caucus candidates lost every statewide primary they entered, while 13 caucus-aligned state House incumbents were defeated, according to Olsen. The losses came after the Freedom Caucus took hold of the Wyoming House in 2025 and pursued an aggressive movement-conservative agenda.
The primary results suggest Republican voters support “spending cuts on the margins, especially if the cuts don’t touch public education or university spending,” Olsen argued.
Republicans, he concluded, can acknowledge those preferences or continue pursuing what he called “their cuts-only fever dream.”
“There’s an old saying in politics: The voters have spoken, damn them,” he wrote. “Maybe Republicans will finally listen?”
