Republicans have won Wyoming’s lone U.S. House seat for the past 50 years. That’s not deterring Lisa Kinney, the Democratic nominee. Kinney’s energy, along with the same urge for Republicans to run in deep blue states, intrigued NPR congressional reporter Barbara Sprunt. Sprung recently spent a few days trailing Kinney’s campaign. She chatted with Wyoming Public Radio’s Kamila Kudelska about what she saw.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Barbara Sprunt: I found myself thinking about how many competitive House districts, Senate races that I've covered and the toss-up nature and what will happen and which party can eke it out, and it made me think about the flip side of that experience.
Campaigning for Congress, in my own view, seems to be sometimes a hellish experience, because you lose your privacy. It's a huge devotion of time, money, energy. Often, it can be quite unfulfilling, and people can be quite mean to you on the road. So I thought, "What is it like to do all of that when you're in the very opposite of a toss-up district?"
You're actually in a place where there's deep political entrenchment on one side, and you have an uphill battle. I was curious about what that might be like and what motivates someone to do that type of thing.
Kamila Kudelska: So why come to Wyoming?
BS: In this Congress, there are 12 all-Republican state delegations, and then there are seven, I think, that are represented only by Democrats.
When you look at political entrenchment in a state, Wyoming is a great example of that. It's perhaps the clearest case of long, uninterrupted congressional dominance on the Republican side, certainly on the House and Senate side, since the '70s. So this is a place where the political entrenchment is felt perhaps the most.
KK: You followed Democratic [U.S. House] candidate Lisa Kinney for a day in Casper. What stood out or surprised you about the day you spent with her?
BS: It started very early with coffee and meeting folks as they got their early morning coffee at 6:00 AM. Throughout the day, all the different stops that she made. Interacting with voters at the Family Dollar. She went to the Rotary Club, really just trying to connect with people.
The thing that stood out to me was when you are running in a place where it is such an uphill battle, it is hard to get beyond the first initial words of, ‘What are you running as?’ [if your answer is] ‘I'm a Democrat,’ and have people stay and listen.
It shows the type of candidate that can run in a race like this is one that can't shy away from those difficult conversations. I think that's not just here in Wyoming. That would be in any race where you're running counter-cultural, politically.
I saw Lisa often try to engage with people, ask them what they're interested in, and try to move the conversation beyond parties, which is hard to do because we are, of course, a pretty divided country politically. The two parties are quite entrenched, and even though there's a lot of frustration with the parties, party loyalty, I think, still remains quite high for folks. Watching her try to navigate those challenges was interesting.
KK: How did people react to her? Did they want to talk to her more, or did they kind of push her away?
BS: It ran the gamut. There were people who physically took flight and moved along quickly. And there were other people who stayed. It was interesting for me to be able to be a fly on the wall and listen to the conversation that she had with some of these voters.
Some had already voted early. Some had said, ‘I voted for you.’ Then there were other conversations that she had with people who eventually got to a ‘yes’ after talking to her, which is obviously every candidate's dream, to be able to talk to an undecided voter and convince them to come on board.
Hearing those conversations and how she's making the case that she is someone who is anti-establishment in a way, not beholden to either party, even though she's running as a Democrat, and I think trying to harness some of the frustration that voters have against Washington.
KK: What did she tell you was her reasoning to run with such low chances of winning?
BS: She knows it's an uphill battle, but she also thinks that she can win. I think in talking to other candidates in similar positions across the country, there is a recognition that you're swimming upstream and that the odds are perhaps not in your favor. But I do think that a commonality among candidates in these types of races is that they do actually think that they can make a difference and that they can win.
If they thought that there was absolutely no chance of winning, as Lisa said, she wouldn't have run. So I think perhaps you have to have that level of optimism as a candidate, and she certainly has that.
KK: How does she hope to potentially make a difference even if she doesn't win?
BS: I think a big part of this is about party-building in the state, because certainly candidates in uphill battles would like to win, but the gradual wins that come outside of a campaign victory outright are things like representation in the state, party infrastructure.
It's tough for state parties, in places where they are the minority, to fundraise. It's tough to have high levels of staff. There are campaigns across the country where you go into an office and there are interns running around and there's a lot of staff and there's a lot of hustle and bustle.
For Lisa, she was describing the hustle and bustle coming from her. It's coming from a very small group of people.
And every time that there's a Democrat or a Republican running upstream in a race, it does provide more visibility for the state. I talked to her and her husband about this. [They] are both clear-eyed that yes, they would like to win come Wednesday morning. But they also think that a win for them is to show people that running as a Democrat in the state is possible, and more people should do it.
KK: What was your main takeaway after you came back from Wyoming?
NO: The issues that are dominant nationally really do trickle down. There were some interactions that I witnessed where a voter would bring up concerns about the Democrats, and it felt very attuned to the national messaging, which is not surprising. But it is, I think, important to mark that a lot of the national messaging really does work its way down into the smallest of diners at 6:00 a.m. for coffee. There's a lot of discontent. Voters that I watched speak with her across the political spectrum felt very dissatisfied.
Even people who said that they weren't going to vote for her and they were going to vote for the Republican in the race, they still seemed dissatisfied about the nature of politics these days. Obviously, that's something that one race can't really address, and it is something that very much reflects what I hear across the country.
