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Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, speaks on a bill on the Senate floor on Feb. 15 at the Wyoming Capitol. The state GOP voted Saturday to censure Case.
The state GOP voted Saturday to censure Sen. Cale Case and threw its support behind Republican nominee for secretary of state Rep. Chuck Gray, R-Casper, amid attempts to challenge his likely ascent to the position.
The votes follow efforts by a group of lawmakers, including Case, R-Lander, and other traditional and more moderate Republicans as well as some Democrats, to find an independent challenger to face Gray in the November elections.
"Chuck Gray got less than half the votes, just barely less than half, but almost half the votes in a partisan primary, and I don't feel that that's necessarily entitling someone to win the general," Case told the Star-Tribune on Monday. (Gray won 49.5% of Republican votes.)
The effort to find an independent candidate ultimately failed, making it all but assured that Gray will ascend to the position following the general elections.
State GOP aims to censure Sen. Case, request party affiliation change
Gray beat out his closest Republican challenger, Sen. Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, by roughly 13,000 votes in the August primary. He's a 2020 presidential election denier who focused his primary campaign on voter fraud and banning ballot boxes. There aren’t any candidates from other parties to face him in the general election, which means that it’s all but assured he will replace the last secretary of state Ed Buchanan.
Case, a lawmaker since 1993 who's known for his Libertarian leanings and willingness to break from party lines, has already been censured once in May by the Fremont County GOP. That censure cited his support for Medicaid expansion, calling it government overreach, and accused him of spreading "misinformation in the media," the Star-Tribune previously reported. The state GOP's resolution to censure Case also mentions his April column in the Cowboy State Daily, in which he said that the party is increasingly characterized by "hate, threats, and even violence." The resolution to censure Case says that his recent efforts to buffer Gray's ascent to secretary of state were the "proverbial straw which breaks the camel's back."
"We have a pattern of behavior," Vince Vanata, Park County GOP committeeman, said Saturday.
The resolution to censure Case also says that the party will deny him financial or other support in any future political endeavors and asks that he change his party affiliation.
Case didn’t attend the meeting. He told the Star-Tribune on Monday that he would be away at an energy council meeting in Texas. He said then that he’s unlikely to do anything in response to the resolution.
Case is one of a group of more moderate-leaning Republicans who have become the subject of the GOP's ire as it has pulled farther to the right in recent years.
GOP resolution backs Gray, denounces attempt to strip secretary of state duties
Some at the meeting called for taking similar action against other members of the party, like Rep. Dan Zwonitzer, R-Cheyenne, who proposed at a Joint Corporations Committee meeting last month to draft a bill that would strip elections administration duties from the secretary of state position, a move that Vanata called "egregious and unconscionable." Those duties would instead be overseen by a separate agency. The committee will review the drafted bill in October.
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Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, speaks on a bill on the Senate floor on Feb. 15 at the Wyoming Capitol. The state GOP voted Saturday to censure Case.
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