The Strong Wyoming Communities Campaign launched in April with an effort to educate residents about election law changes that would prevent them from voting in the primary of their choice this August.
The campaign will continue to mobilize voters through the 2024 election season and to organize grassroots power on behalf of policy change during the Wyoming Legislature’s 2025 general session.
Campaign Goals
The Strong Wyoming Communities campaign engages people in the civic processes that shape our lives and the future of our state.
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- Educate and mobilize members of Better Wyoming’s community to vote in BOTH elections in 2024, all the way “down the ballot” in state and local races
- Build our statewide grassroots base of support
- Train and empower volunteers to become community leaders
- Convince Wyoming lawmakers to pass policies that benefit our lives in 2025
CAMPAIGN PHASES:
Crossover cutoff (April - May 2024)
Better Wyoming staff and volunteers called thousands of Wyoming voters to inform them
about the “crossover voting” ban that could prevent them from voting in the primary of their choice in 2024.
Meet your candidates + Voter empowerment (June - Nov. 2024)
Volunteers host “friend-banks” to ask people they know to commit to vote for a Better Wyoming, which builds our base of support and increases voter turnout.
Meanwhile, Better Wyoming organizes sit-downs between legislative candidates and voters in the districts they hope to represent to talk about findings from our 2024 healthcare campaign.
What’s the issue? + Building our base (July - Oct. 2024)
We will use digital surveys, door-to-door canvassing, and in-person “community conversation” events to engage new volunteers and learn which issues are most important to them.
Listen up, legislators! (Oct. 2024 - Jan. 2025)
Once we have grown our base of support and identified which issues we want to address, our Better Wyoming movement will use in-person meetings with legislators, public events, media, and other tactics to leverage our grassroots power and convince lawmakers to pass policies that help our communities.
To the capitol! (Jan. - March 2025)
Volunteers and organizers will coordinate with partners and lobbyists at the Wyoming Capitol to talk to lawmakers during the 2025 session, host public events, and convince the Legislature to pass our policy demands.
Campaign Updates
Statewide Accountability Report 4: Feb. 24 – Mar. 7
The final two weeks of a legislative session usually involves intense negotiations between the House and Senate over the budget. But this year, in an unprecedented event, the two chambers simply decided to not pass a budget, leaving millions of dollars of state programs unfunded.
Meanwhile, a handful of bills proceeded to the capitol toward the governor’s desk, while many others—including most election-related bills—died. The Freedom Caucus plugged through more anti-abortion bills, some bad education bills passed while others perished, and some common sense bills helping workers and seniors survived (barely).
At last, the session ended, and after overturning several of the governor’s vetoes, the legislators went home.
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Statewide Accountability Report #3: Feb. 10 – 21
The fourth and fifth weeks of the 2025 legislative session included debate over the state budget. Lawmakers voted for or against funding for programs related to healthcare, public education, wildfire relief, and more.
In the final weeks of the session, the House and Senate will need to negotiate to find a compromise between their two separate plans to fund the state.
Meanwhile, several bills to decrease public school funding and divert funding to private schools advanced, along with proposals to politicize education and tax cuts for homeowners and coal companies that will defund local services in our communities.
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Statewide Accountability Report #2: Jan. 27 – Feb. 7
In the second two weeks of the 2025 legislative session, the Freedom Caucus kept pounding away at its highest priorities in the House, including abortion restrictions, voter restrictions, and multiple bills to tear down public education.
Both chambers advanced even more property tax cut proposals, and in the Senate a resolution advanced in support of Wyoming seizing and selling federal public lands.
The House and Senate each worked on their own versions of the supplemental budget, but debates were still raging at our deadline. We will focus on the budget in Report 3.
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