Ahead of the 2026 general election, Wyoming Public Radio and KHOL Jackson offered all candidates in competitive races for statewide and federal offices 20-minute interviews to introduce themselves to voters and discuss their positions. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
James Byrd is the Democratic Party’s nominee running for U.S. Senate. His campaign website is www.byrdforsenate.com. He spoke with WPR’s Hanna Merzbach.
Click here to listen to a special episode of Open Spaces previewing the races for statewide and federal offices.
Hanna Merzbach: Would you first start by introducing yourself to Wyoming voters? Who are you?
James Byrd: My name is James Byrd. I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming. My mother is from Cheyenne, Wyoming. My father came to Cheyenne in the military back in the '40s. That's where he met my mom. My mom's family actually goes all the way back to pre-Wyoming statehood in the territory.
We homesteaded here about 1862 just north of Laramie between there and Bosler.They were originally dirt farmers, and everybody knows how successful and how hard that is. They eventually moved into – well, they lost the ranch and the farm, and they moved into Laramie. Then that's where my grandfather met my grandmother, as her family was working for Dr. [Samuel] Knight at the time. He got some good advice from Dr. Knight about continuing an education, so he moved over to Cheyenne and enrolled in the brand-new high school that was just being finished, and graduated out of the first graduating class of Cheyenne High School. Then my mother graduated out of Cheyenne High School. My brother and sister and I graduated out of Central High School, which was the same high school that was renamed later.
So when I tell you that, and I tell people that I am from Wyoming, my roots go pretty deep. The family plot is still over in the old part of the cemetery in Laramie. So I've been around here. I went to the University of Wyoming, studied geology, geophysics, computer science and things like that. [I] got poached out of college by an oil exploration company, and spent the next few years working in the oil business, helping find oil and gas in Wyoming, North America and other places. That was a cool job. Then, when the oil business turned down, like they always do, there's lots of swings in the energy business, I transitioned into the computer business and became a network and server engineer specializing in security and long-haul digital lines. I guess that's the thumbnail sketch.
[I] forgot the pictures behind me. That's 10 years in the Wyoming State Legislature, in the House of Representatives. I guess that would pretty much cover the thumbnail sketch of my background.
HM: Thank you. What do you see as the two most pressing issues facing the U.S. Senate, and how do you want to address them? Two most pressing issues.
JB: The two most pressing issues are getting our government back together and getting our government functioning again.The current resident of the White House has employed individuals to just wholesale destroy agencies and functionality of the federal government. The federal government needs to be functional. It needs to be working and firing on all cylinders. Right now, it's not, and you can see that in all facets of our economy, or you can see that in our foreign policy. You can actually see that in our Defense Department, which is really kind of scary at this moment. So, the most important thing to do is start working on the government and getting it functional.
The second most important thing to do is to get the economy back to where it was two years ago, and that's by ending all of those needless tariffs that the American people pay, not to foreign people, but the people like you and me pay those tariffs every day, and that's driving up the cost of everything that we buy. So getting the economic factors, those things that the Congress should be in charge of, but for some reason has decided to neglect their responsibility there.
The other thing is treaties and tariffs, not irritating our neighbors, patching up things with Canada and Mexico, our number one and two trading partners, and our number one and two allies for security of North America. Fixing those relationships, because our two economies are – we're literally connected at the hip. So if you try to destroy the Canadian or the Mexican economy or do bad things, you're really doing bad things to our economy, too.
And finally, just reestablish those things that are written in our Constitution about who's in control. The Congress is in control of the finances and the legislation, the laws in this country, not the executive. He's writing executive orders freely and uninhibited because the Congress has totally abdicated its responsibility, the Senate being part of that abdication of responsibility. The Constitution clearly states the division and the separation of powers and how they shall interact with each other. The Congress, especially the Senate, which I am wanting to go to, is not doing its job at all. That would be the first thing that I would do when I get there.
HM: That gets to one of my questions. You've touched on this during a forum this summer put on by Wyoming Public Media, Wyofile and the League of Women Voters. You talked about how the executive branch has taken too much power. The judicial and legislative branches have abdicated their roles. You said you will put the constitutional roles back in place. How would you do this?
JB: It's a simple thing that I learned when I was in the Wyoming Legislature. Being in the superminority, whether you're in the majority or the minority, you don't get things done by being siloed on one side by party. You have to reach across the aisle. You have to get bipartisan buy-in. So, to get these ideas out there, I have to get other senators to work with me to take control of the things that are constitutionally mandated so that we can get this country back moving in the right direction.
Right now, we have a guy sitting in the White House who thinks that the Treasury is his own private cookie jar to reach in and spend money willy-nilly with no – and that's true, actually, to an extent, because the Congress, who is supposed to provide oversight, all fiscal expenditures are supposed to start in the House of Representatives, [but] none of those are starting there. The only thing they're doing is being rubber-stamped when the executive says, ‘Do this for me.’ That is not how the original Founding Fathers envisioned this country. Three co-equal separate branches of government working in unison, with one with no more power than the other, except for the legislative having a few cards up their sleeves to help rectify things when the executive and the judicial get out of hand.
But without going into those remedies, we need to fix and balance out the power. To do that, you have to reach across the aisle. You have to form coalitions, not just your one-party system. You have to reach across and get people from the other party who are like-minded, who understand what the constitutional rules are about, and get them to put those pressures back on the system and get us on the track going the right direction. It's important to the survival of our democracy
HM: Now we're going to move to some more rapid fire questions. I'm going to throw out a couple topics, and I'm gonna ask you to respond in just a few words, one sentence at most. If you go beyond that, I'm going to signal and try and cut you off, okay?
JB: Yes. Okay, go.
HM: Your political heroes.
JB: My political heroes are Bill Clinton, because he balanced the budget.
HM: Selling public land for housing.
JB: Never. Never. Not one inch, not one square foot of public lands ever should change hands. It should stay as it is being managed right now. Now, the federal government could manage it better and so could the state government. We'll work on that down the road, but never.
HM: Flock cameras or license plate readers used by law enforcement.
JB: License plate readers, Flock cameras to be a general company who does this. They work, they're good, but right now they're being misused. Just one of the things that we need to get our arms around, get legislation in place, get rules in place, and then we can come back and readdress this, because it is a tool that law enforcement can and should be using.
HM: Age limits for members of the Senate.
JB: Absolutely. Term limits for everybody, not just the Senate. Term limits for the House, and especially term limits for the Supreme Court. They have outlived their usefulness of lifetime appointments.
HM: The war in Iran.
JB: The war in Iran has to stop immediately. We cannot win that war based on the way we went into it. We need to remove our Department of Defense, the head of that agency, and we need to go in and pull back our troops and just basically call it a day. And then we need to go back in and start negotiating. We had a treaty. We had peace. The Strait of Hormuz was open until somebody got their feelings hurt at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and decided they needed to go bomb the place, and this is the mess we're in. This is why we have close to $6.50 a gallon diesel fuel and regular fuel right behind it.
HM: Your negotiation style.
JB: My negotiation style is for the people of Wyoming first, the United States people, citizens of the United States second, and then our position and our allies third. My style is to bring everything to the table and to negotiate from a position of strength, because that's what we have so far, and not to move backwards.
HM: All right. We are done with our rapid response. Let's move to more longer form questions. For these, I'll just ask you to keep your responses no longer than a minute, and I can signal when you're getting about there.
JB: Okay.
HM: At that summer forum I talked about, you said that Wyoming needs to figure out how to lead the way in nuclear energy rather than continuing to rely on coal. Many people are concerned that nuclear reactor development is moving too fast right now, and that the Trump administration is deregulating it too much so [that] it's not safe. Plus, there's the whole question of where we're gonna store all this nuclear waste. What makes you confident in the growing nuclear industry?
JB: I'm very confident in the growing nuclear industry. But it's not just the nuclear industry. It is the entire industry portfolio that Wyoming brings to the table. At one time, we were producing 35 to 38% of the nation's energy and doing it very well, hitting on all cylinders, all the way back to even reclamation. After we were done with these areas, they were so pristine you couldn't even tell where we had been mining or drilling. That's what I'm looking for.
But what we failed to do properly in that phase, was take the revenues from that and reinvest part of those revenues back in new technologies. Those new technologies would be finding out what to do with nuclear waste, finding out what to do with more efficient nuclear power plants, finding out [what] to do with more efficient solar farms, wind farms, geothermal and all the other things. Getting these things into the academic realm, where we could actually develop technologies, we could own the technologies.
And then here's a concept for you, because I'm a capitalist: We could license these technologies to the rest of the world and make more money on the licensing than we would actually make on the energy production. That is what I'm looking for, the future of Wyoming's economy to be in the driver's seat for pretty much owning the technologies all the way top to bottom.
HM: On to healthcare. Congress created the Rural Health Transformation Program last summer, but also has been slashing funding and making changes to safety net programs like Medicaid that thousands of Wyomingites rely on. One, what do you think of these changes? And two, what, if any, would you like to see instead?
JB: My opponent, every time she comes out, she likes to stand on this as something really big and important that they've done for Wyoming. I've yet to see any of these dollars hit the ground, and this was over a year ago. To be frank with you, I think by the time these dollars roll into Wyoming, it'll be too late, and it won't be significant to make any difference. We have rural hospitals that are on the bubble. They're about 10 patients away from having to close their doors, [patients] who come in and have to do angel care, which means they have no ability to pay for the services rendered. The state should be stepping in here, not the federal government.
This is really important. The state should be stepping in here to help the counties and the local municipalities design these programs so these rural hospitals and these rural clinics are functional, and they're sustainable. And when the state can't do that, then the state needs to be backfilled and supported from the federal government. Not a federal program, a state program.
A very good example of a new state program that they're working with is in Fremont County, what they're doing with their EMS and combined hybrid services for emergency response. They've got a new one that they're trying to figure out the details in, and it seems to be working very well. We need to look at this. We could probably roll this out as a blueprint for the state. It should help our financial situation for some of our hospitals that are on the bubble. But again, the emphasis is, this is something that should be controlled by the municipalities and the state. The only time the federal government needs to come in here is [to] backfill for extra cash to make sure that these programs are viable and can get off the blocks, so they reach some level of sustainability. That's really important, that the state and the municipalities run these projects with a backfill from the government, a guaranteed backfill from the government.
HM: Your opponent, Wyoming's current U.S. House Rep. Harriet Hageman, she's hosted in-person town halls throughout Wyoming. Is that something that you're going to be looking at doing?
JB: I actually have started doing in-person town halls, and I've said before, I will meet with any group of people in any coffee shop or hall in the state of Wyoming that wants to sit down and have a meaningful discussion on where we wanna go with the way our Legislature, our Congress and our economy, and the business climate in Wyoming wanna go. I will sit down and talk with them anywhere, any place.
The difference between myself and my opponent is when those questions get difficult and maybe a little testy, I will stay there to work out the problems. I will not get up and exit off to the side or just end a town hall in the middle of it because I didn't like a question or the crowd is not liking my answer. I've been in enough situations as a minority in the political arena that there's a lot of things that I probably say that rub people the wrong way. What we do is we sit down and we work it out. Because if you don't talk, the conversation and the progress ends there. I found out, usually, we can talk it out, and we can come to some sort of compromise, which is not a dirty word in politics.
Compromise is how we make the best decisions, the best legislation, and if you're not working with your opponents, those people who actually have other views, then you are bringing a substandard product to the table, and that's not what we need in a representative that we're gonna send to Washington and the Senate.
HM: That gets me to my last question. To win, you will need Republicans to cross the aisle to vote for you. Why should they do that?
JB: Why should they do that? It's very simple. The price of gas. Look where the price of gas is. Look where the price of food is. Look where the price of healthcare is. The current administration has allowed these things to just run rampant. In fact, the guy in the White House says he does not care about affordability. That is a quote from the guy sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Editor’s Note: Trump said “The word 'affordability' is a con job by the Democrats."
The remedy for that is in the Congress. The Congress has decided to let that comment stand, let those actions stand, let us be ruled and run by a person who wants to do nothing but executive orders. This country was not designed to run on executive orders. This mimics a dictatorship. We are a democracy. The democracy and our Constitution demand that the Congress, that is the House of Representatives, which my opponent was a member of, and the Senate, be involved in those decisions, make directives and run this country. Both of them are bankrupt in their responsibility, and they've abdicated that responsibility.
It's time that we have somebody that wants to represent the people of Wyoming in Washington, rather than these elitist oligarchs that have lots and lots of money, who they're catering to right now. Representing the people of Wyoming in Washington, D.C., rather than representing the people behind the Beltway, and in the boardrooms on Wall Street, and the Silicon Bros. That's what our current federal delegation is all about. That's where they're getting their money. That's who they take their orders from. They only show up in Wyoming when it's an election, and then they bring these things and tell you that we've done so many great things for Wyoming. If that's the truth, then go fill up your gas tank this week and tell me how much that has really been working down for you.
It has not. Go to the store. Buy yourself some food. You can see exactly. Oh, and be careful, because they've approved mystery meat. Not only have we kicked the consumers while they're down, we've taken our farmers and ranchers and thrown them under the bus, and those are the people that are essential to the cultural being of Wyoming. These are the people that we need to support. This is our food supply. We've thrown them under the bus by fertilizer costs, by fuel costs and importing 300,000 metric tons of mystery meat to put inside the food supply that hasn't been inspected for antibiotics, it hasn't been inspected for all sorts of insecticides that these things have been growing on.
This is what our administration is doing, and they expect you to just sit there and go, ‘Oh yeah, this is a good thing.’ No. No reasonable American, no reasonable Republican or Democrat should stand for any of this. In Wyoming, our culture is agriculture and energy, and we should stand on those values and push forward, and own those markets, not just be part of them, and not let a bunch of rich people push us around and tell us what they're gonna have us do, and tell us, ‘Yeah, we should like it, and it's supposed to be better for us.’
It's not being better for us. Truly, if you believe it's okay, then go ahead and vote your conscience. But I believe that there is no button at the gas pump that says Democrat or Republican to give you a discount.
You can find more conversations with Wyoming’s candidates on our How Do I Vote? page.
