A Republican stronghold where primaries decide

With the midterm elections approaching, reporters James André and Sylvain Rousseau travelled across Wyoming and found President Trump's Republican Party deeply divided there.

Famous for its cowboy culture, Wyoming is the least populated, most rural and most conservative of all the US states. Donald Trump carried 70 percent of the vote in the state in each of his three presidential runs.

Yet the vote that really mattered was not the midterm itself. In Wyoming, the decisive contests were the Republican primaries held on August 18 ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Freedom Caucus majority ends in rebuke

In 2024, Wyoming voters gave an outright majority to the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus, a national MAGA-linked movement - and Wyoming was the first and only state to offer it a majority.

For two years its lawmakers cut budgets and passed bills aligned with their hardline views, seeking to reform education, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. They also attacked the state's rare Democrats and the so-called RINOs - Republicans in Name Only, traditional Republicans accused of betraying the party's values.

In the August 2026 primaries the caucus aimed for a supermajority in both chambers of the Wyoming Congress. Instead, voters delivered what the reporters describe as a spectacular rebuke: the movement lost its majority in the state House of Representatives and official posts across the board.

The establishment fights back

The more traditional Republican establishment organised to retake the party, and political action committees spent millions during the campaign trying to sway Wyoming's roughly 580,000 residents. The state was, in the reporters' words, a perfect target: a small, already conservative population and two US Senate seats - the same number as California or Texas.

Turning on Trump, staying Republican

The report's central paradox is that Wyoming conservatives are turning on Trump, but will carry on voting Republican - no matter what. That is the state of play as the midterms arrive, with the Freedom Caucus stripped of its House majority and the party it challenged still dominant.