After an expensive primary campaign, the hotly contested race between Cynthia Lummis and Mark Gordon turned out not to be as tight as many had predicted. | 
Cynthia Lummis, Courtesy Image
| Lummis, a former two-term state treasurer, easily defeated Johnson County rancher Mark Gordon in Tuesday's GOP House primary by a comfortable margin of 6,319 votes, garnering 46 percent of the 71,657 ballots cast to Gordon's 38 percent. The other two candidates seeking the party's nomination – retired navy officer Bill Winney and Green River doctor Michael Holland – pulled in 12 and four percent respectively. Lummis will now face Gary Trauner, who ran unopposed in Tuesday's Democratic primary. Turnout was relatively light across the state on Tuesday, with 52 percent of Wyoming's 138,234 registered Republicans stopping off at the polls and only 40 percent of the state's 60,736 Democrats opting to vote in the primary. | That low Democratic turnout may have been the reason that the tightest race of the day was in the Democratic Party contest to face John Barrasso in November.
As of Wednesday morning, unofficial results tallied by the Secretary of State's office gave Gillette attorney Nick Carter a 304-vote lead over Casper City Councilman Keith Goodenough. Wyoming election laws call for an automatic recount in any contest in which the difference is less than one percent of the votes cast for the apparent winner. Unofficially, Carter earned 12,310 votes, so a difference of fewer than 123 votes would trip the automatic recount requirement.
| "We're just waiting," said Carter campaign manager Eric Hevenor. "Right now we're waiting for the official results. Some places may be counting absentee ballots as late as today, so we just have to wait. We always knew it was going to be close. Keith was a tough opponent no matter how you look at it. At this point, we just need to look ahead to November and focus on John Barrasso." Contacted on Wednesday, Goodenough said he was satisfied with the accuracy of the results and wouldn't file a request for a recount if he ends up losing in the final tally. | 
Nick Carter, Courtesy Image.
| "Oh no ... recounts don't change things," Goodenough said. "All they do is send the same ballots through the same machines. I am not the sort to claim that machines are rigged. I lost this one fair and square."
Goodenough said he planned to help Carter’s campaign in any way that he could.
"I tried to give him a $100 last night," added Goodenough, "but the numbers weren't in, so I figured I would at least wait until today, but yes I plan to support Nick … it's especially important when you consider his opponent."
Laramie's Chris Rothfuss had an easier time dispatching perennial candidate Al Hamburg, scoring 62 percent of the vote and earning the nomination to challenge incumbent Mike Enzi for his seat in the U.S. Senate.
While Republicans are confident they'll hold onto to both of Wyoming's U.S. Senate seats, there may less certainty about the race for the House.
Lummis faces a formidable opponent in Gary Trauner, who lost the 2006 U.S. House race to Republican Barbara Cubin by less than 1000 votes. Lummis' big advantages, of course, are that she is a Republican in a state where her party holds a more than two-to-one margin in registration and she isn't saddled with the disadvantage of being Barbara Cubin. Lummis, however, used considerable resources fighting off Gordon’s primary challenge. The Buffalo-area rancher spent more than $1.1 million in his campaign – much of it from his own pocket – while Lummis used more than two-thirds of the $700,000 she's raised since her campaign started. Lummis enters the general election season with $171,000 on hand, while Trauner has already raised more than $1 million and starts the general election with nearly $700,000 remaining in his war chest.
But Lummis' victory on Tuesday underscores that Wyoming campaigns aren't entirely dependent upon expenditures. While Gordon out-spent her by a nearly three-to-one margin, Lummis credits much of her success to a "grassroots" effort around the state. "The volunteers really made a difference," she told WyoFile Tuesday evening.
One question that remains is whether the GOP can come together following a sometimes-bitter primary contest. Lummis said she doesn’t expect to lose and disappointed Gordon supporters in November.
'I hope the answer is no," she said. "I believe that when we start talking about conservative versus liberal, urban versus rural and the manner in which Wyoming will be represented in the U.S. House, Wyomingites will choose conservative and rural representation. Mark Gordon is going to support me in the general cycle and it will go a long way to helping unify the Republican Party."
Despite being portrayed as "RINO" (Republican in name only) for his past campaign contributions to Trauner and his support of the Sierra Club, Gordon is expected to weigh in on behalf of Lummis in the fall campaign. Gordon's campaign manager Bill Novotny promised support, but added something of a caveat.
"Absolutely, Mark Gordon signed the unity pledge and will thus stand behind Cynthia Lummis in her congressional campaign," said Novotny. "But there are about thirty plus thousand voters who were not impressed by Cynthia Lummis. This coming campaign is not going to be about Rs or Ds behind names, it is going to be about who is the best candidate.
"The race will come down to the same places it did in the 2006 election," he continued. "It would be useful to see where Cubin stumbled in 2006. It would be necessary for her [Lummis] to differentiate herself from Cubin in the coming months.
"It will all be on how Lummis conducts herself in the election. They will not check her name because she is a Republican and it will be up to the Republicans who have a strong independent streak to support her," he said.
Unopposed in his primary, Trauner has long been focusing on November and now knows who his opponent will be.
"It doesn't make much difference to me," Trauner told WyoFile. "I will do the same thing today that I did two days ago and will continue to do all the way through to November, and that's to run a positive campaign and to continue getting the message out that if we keep sending the same kind of people to Washington as we have been, nothing is going to change."
Trauner said that while he currently has a significant advantage over Lummis in cash-on-hand, that will probably change in the months to come, adding that "money isn't what this is about, though."
"It's a simple rule in Wyoming politics, all of electoral politics for that matter: You raise money to get your message out," he noted. "If you have a good team, solid organization and, above all, something important to say, then money helps you do that, but it isn't – and shouldn't be – determinative."
| 
Gary Trauner, courtesy image.
| Executive director of the Wyoming Democratic Party Bill Luckett said Trauner heads into the fall season with solid name recognition and an established reputation as an honorable campaigner, one who rejected calls to run a negative campaign against Cubin in 2006. "The winner (of the GOP primary) doesn't matter at this point," he said. "Democratic voters had no control over this primary. | "Gary just needs to keep doing what he's been doing, meet as many voters as he can and tell them about a different way of doing business in Washington," Luckett added. "Get it through to people that the last thing we need is same old party-line politics. We're really glad to see that people will now be able to see the difference between Cynthia Lummis and Gary Trauner."
Of course, his Republican counterpart, GOP chair Diana Vaughn, sees the outcome a little differently.
"Due to Republican principles and the fact that it is a Republican state, people will vote with their principles and with the winning ticket we have produced," she said. "It's a winning team starting at the top with John McCain and coming on down to our candidates for Congress."
| 
