The anti-Trump resistance won’t get very far unless it brings the fight to the red states, and states don’t come any redder than Wyoming. Fully 77 percent of Wyoming’s voters are registered Republicans, and in 2024 Donald Trump beat Democrat Kamala Harris there by 46 percentage points. No Democrat has held statewide office in Wyoming since 2010; no Democrat has represented Wyoming in Congress since 1978; and no Democratic presidential candidate has carried Wyoming since 1964, when Tom Harrington was 12 years old.
Harrington, now 73, is a leader of Wyoming’s anti-Trump resistance. “I’ve always been a registered Republican,” Harrington told me. In the 1990s, Harrington was twice elected—as a Republican—prosecuting attorney for Washakie County. He voted for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, but in 2016, Harrington couldn’t stomach Trump, so instead he voted for the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson.
Harrington has little experience in politics. For 11 years it wasn’t an option, because he was a state judge on Wyoming’s circuit court, which handles misdemeanors, small civil disputes, and the initial filing of felony charges, and he had to remain above politics. Still, he looked askance at the GOP’s capture by the Tea Party during the Obama administration, and by MAGA after that. “I don’t consider them conservatives,” he said. “They’re more radical than that.” But he kept his mouth shut until he retired from the bench in 2019 at age 66, and even for a few years afterward.
In 2020, Harrington pulled the lever for Joe Biden, and in 2022 he put up a sign on his lawn for Representative Liz Cheney, who’d doomed her Republican primary fight against Harriet Hageman with her principled leadership as vice chair of the House’s January 6 committee. “You’ve got a lot of nerve putting that up around here,” a friend told Harrington half in jest. Two years later, “I just got despondent” watching Joe Biden lose his debate against Trump. So Harrington went online and ordered 500 postcards to get out the vote in swing states. Pretty soon, Harrington was de facto co-chair of an anti-MAGA group called Concerned Citizens of Big Horn County. About 50 people showed up at the first meeting in March 2025, and about as many have come every month since. The group has no officers, and its other de facto co-chair does not wish to be identified (“she has good reason”), so Harrington is the group’s public face.
Such reticence is not uncommon. Mary Whalen, 70, is a retired schoolteacher and leads the Cheyenne chapter of Indivisible, a national anti-Trump resistance network. A registered Republican for most of her adult life, Whalen told me many in her family are pro-Trump, and that’s created tension. In one instance, a family member vandalized some protest signs in her garage. Whalen has participated in five anti-Trump rallies, but she said she is protesting policies, not individuals, because “I don’t want to go there by name.”
Harrington’s group has participated in numerous anti-Trump rallies and flooded a Hageman town hall in Greybull (“some of them were a little rude to her, but it was well-deserved”). Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee’s brief attempt to insert a sell-off of public lands into the budget reconciliation bill was perhaps the biggest flashpoint, prompting “a big protest in Cheyenne with several hundred people.” Lee withdrew the amendment, but Wyoming’s congressional delegation “didn’t do squat” to oppose it. Harrington thinks that will be an issue in the 2026 midterms, because in Wyoming, “Everybody uses the public lands.”
Another major issue is Trump’s immigration crackdown, because most of the people who dig irrigation ditches on the big ranches to grow cattle feed are Latino. “The ranchers know these guys,” Harrington said. “They depend on them.” Meanwhile, the budget reconciliation’s Medicaid cuts will hit hard in Wyoming, where 12 percent of the population is on Medicaid.
The Concerned Citizens of Big Horn County will likely exert its greatest impact on Wyoming’s MAGA-dominated state legislature, which in recent years has cut funding for mental health (Wyoming has the third-highest suicide rate in the country) and shifted scarce funds from public schools to homeschooling and private education. “We’re actively looking for some candidates” to represent Bighorn County, Harrington said. Because this is Wyoming, “It has to be a Republican,” but “a less crazy Republican.”
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