'Thanks a lot, Trump': Wyoming conservatives divided ahead of US midterms

Famous for its cowboy culture, Wyoming is the least populated, the most rural and the most conservative of all the US states. With two weeks to go until the midterm elections, our reporters James André and Sylvain Rousseau travelled across this Republican stronghold and found that the party of US President Donald Trump is deeply divided in the Cowboy State. 

Come election season in the United States, news networks tend to flock to the swing states, the battlegrounds that shape the outcome of the vote. Two weeks ahead of the US midterm elections, FRANCE 24 decided to go in the opposite direction and visit the reddest of the red states: Wyoming.

US President Donald Trump carried 70 percent of the vote in Wyoming in his three presidential runs. The state is so overwhelmingly Republican that the decisive vote is not the midterm election there, but rather the Republican primaries that took place on August 18. The results are very clear.

In 2024, Wyoming voters had given an outright majority to the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus, a hard-right organisation that emerged in the wake of Trump's MAGA movement. Wyoming was the first and only state to offer this national movement a majority. In the 2026 primaries, the Freedom Caucus was aiming for a supermajority in both chambers of the Wyoming Congress. But it got a spectacular rebuke from voters, losing its majority in the state House of Representatives and official posts across the board.

This electoral defeat is significant because the Freedom Caucus is the local incarnation of a form of "ultra-Trumpism". For two years, its lawmakers imported a hardline version of Trump's methods and agenda to Wyoming. They cut budgets and passed bills aligned with their conservative views. They sought to reform education, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. They also constantly attacked the state's rare Democrats, and what they call RINOs (Republicans in Name Only): traditional, old-school Republicans whom they accuse of betraying the party's values.

In the meantime, the more traditional forces within the Republican establishment got organised to take their party back. During the campaign, political action committees spent millions trying to sway Wyoming's 580,000 residents. The state is a perfect target with a very small, already conservative population and two US Senate seats in Washington – just as many as California or Texas.

This report goes inside the battle within the Republican Party between the ultra-conservative bloc and the more moderate traditionalists. It also explores a paradox: Wyomingites are turning on Trump, but will carry on voting Republican – no matter what.