The Budget Wyoming Actually Got: Conservative Discernment vs. a Progressive Rubber Stamp

As always, full disclosure before we start: I’m a conservative. I live in Gillette. I built Evidence Based Wyoming because Wyoming voters deserve data, not narrative, when they try to figure out what their legislators are actually doing in Cheyenne. The analysis in this article is built on real votes, documented methodology, and numbers you can check yourself. That’s the whole point.

Better Wyoming just published its 2026 Post-Session Accountability Report. It’s well-written, cleanly laid out, and if you don’t look too hard, it sounds like serious analysis.

It isn’t. And what the actual voting data shows is almost the exact opposite of what they’re telling you.

Who Is Better Wyoming?

Better Wyoming is a progressive advocacy organization based in Laramie. Their mission, their organizers, and their donor base are aligned with advancing a progressive policy agenda in Wyoming. That is their right. But when you call something an “Accountability Report,” readers have a reasonable expectation that the author is neutral.

Better Wyoming is not neutral. They never tell you that. I’m telling you mine upfront — conservative bias, disclosed, documented, verifiable — so you can evaluate what follows on its merits.

Their methodology for this report: pick the bills they care about, report whether those bills passed or failed, frame the outcomes to match their preferred narrative. No vote counts. No statistical analysis. No disclosure of how they selected which bills to feature. No baseline for comparison.

That’s not accountability. That’s advocacy dressed in the language of journalism.

Here is the math they didn’t do.

A New Tool: What This Analysis Is Actually Based On

This analysis uses a new capability in the EBW system called bloc scoring. I want to be explicit about what this is and is not, because transparency about methodology is what separates EBW from everyone else doing this work in Wyoming.

This is not a re-scoring of the old system. EBW’s original party alignment scoring (OPA) measures how far each legislator’s voting record sits from the average Republican versus the average Democrat. That system still exists and still works. Bloc scoring is a separate, new tool that asks a different question: not “how conservative is this legislator?” but “does this legislator vote with their faction?”

Here is exactly how it works:

Step 1 — Build a similarity matrix. We take all 688 recorded House roll calls from the 2026 session and calculate, for every pair of legislators, the percentage of shared votes where they voted identically. No human judgment about who should be grouped with whom. Just math on the raw vote record.

Step 2 — Run cluster analysis. The algorithm finds groups of legislators who vote together consistently. In 2026, the Wyoming House produced three distinct clusters. The algorithm found them. We labeled them based on their average ideological position: Conservative Core, Moderate Coalition, and Progressive Caucus.

Step 3 — Score every legislator against both poles. Once the blocs are identified, every member of the chamber — including bloc members themselves — gets scored on how often they voted with the majority of the Conservative Core versus the majority of the Progressive Caucus. This is calculated on 271 contested votes — the roll calls where the two poles actually split. Uncontested votes don’t tell you anything about factional alignment and are excluded.

Step 4 — Calculate a net position score. The score runs 0 to 100. A 100 means you voted with the conservative bloc on every contested vote. A 0 means you voted with the progressive bloc on every contested vote. This number is purely behavioral — derived from voting patterns on contested roll calls, not from surveys, donor lists, or ideology questionnaires.

Step 5 — Layer in fiscal scoring. Separately, EBW’s AI system reads bill text, fiscal notes, and amendments for every roll call with a dollar amount attached. It assesses the direction of each vote — does a yes vote increase or decrease state spending? — and scores legislators on what percentage of fiscal-consequential votes they cast in the fiscally conservative direction. In 2026 the House produced 183 fiscal roll calls, the highest count in any budget session in EBW’s history going back to 2009.

That five-step process is the foundation of everything that follows. Every number in this article comes out of that system, applied to the official Wyoming Legislature roll call database. You can verify it at evidencebasedwyoming.com.

The Three Blocs: What the Chamber Actually Looks Like

The 2026 Wyoming House was sorted into three voting clusters:

• Conservative Core — 25 members, average net position score 93.3
• Moderate Coalition — 13 members, average net position score 69.7
• Progressive Caucus — 24 members, average net position score 16.0

Here are all 62 House members ranked by net position score. The ★ marks the Speaker of the House.

The gap between the poles — 93.3 versus 16.0 — represents more than 20 standard deviations of separation. These are not two wings of the same party having a family disagreement. They are structurally distinct factions with fundamentally different visions for Wyoming government. Everything else in this analysis flows from that fact.

Better Wyoming’s Claim: The Responsible Legislators Won

Better Wyoming’s narrative is that the 2026 session was a win for responsible governance. The Freedom Caucus’s “smash-and-slash tactics” failed, the moderates held the line, and Wyoming got a sensible budget.

Let’s start with the structural reality they omit. A budget session requires a two-thirds supermajority to introduce non-budget bills. The conservative bloc did not have a two-thirds majority. So many Freedom Caucus priorities failed introduction not because a principled coalition of reasonable legislators stopped them, but because of a vote threshold written into Wyoming’s constitution. That’s arithmetic, not statesmanship.

But the deeper problem with Better Wyoming’s story is the implicit claim that the conservative bloc is a rigid machine following orders while the progressive and moderate legislators are independent thinkers exercising principled judgment. The voting data dismantles this so thoroughly that it’s worth taking each piece in turn.

The “Marching Orders” Problem: Both Blocs Vote Equally Together

The Conservative Core votes with their bloc 93.6% of the time on contested votes. Standard deviation: 4.1.

The Progressive Caucus votes with their bloc 91.9% of the time on contested votes. Standard deviation: 5.1.

That is not a meaningful difference. A standard deviation of 4.1 versus 5.1 on a 100-point scale is noise, not signal. Both groups are tightly organized. Both groups have outliers — Chip Neiman sits 2.0 standard deviations below his caucus mean on the conservative side, Art Washut sits 2.7 standard deviations below his caucus mean on the progressive side — but neither is defecting. They are the loosest members of a very tight group.

If voting discipline is evidence of marching orders and ideological robotics, that evidence points equally at both caucuses. You do not get to apply that standard to one side and call the other principled. The numbers don’t allow it.

The Progressive Caucus Is 79% Republican

Better Wyoming’s story requires a principled bloc of responsible legislators resisting extremist conservatives. They don’t mention that the 24-member bloc that consistently votes against the conservative position is 19 Republicans and 5 Democrats.

The five Democrats — Yin, Provenza, Sherwood, Chestek, Storer — are actually the most loyal members of the progressive bloc. Remove them and the Republican-only progressive caucus has a standard deviation of 5.4, wider than the full group, because the Democrats are the ones anchoring the left edge of the distribution.

So Better Wyoming is crediting a “responsible” bloc that is three-quarters Republican for saving Wyoming from a “reckless” bloc that is one hundred percent Republican. The difference between these groups is not party registration — it is ideology, factional alignment, and, as the fiscal data shows, their posture toward state spending.

The Middle Isn’t the Middle

Better Wyoming implies a principled moderate center that tempered both extremes. Here is what the cluster analysis actually shows.

The Moderate Coalition’s standard deviation is 19.7 — nearly five times larger than either pole. It is not a coherent bloc. And it is not politically neutral. There is a 28-point gap between J.R. Riggins (57.6) and Rob Geringer (29.1) with nobody in between. The coalition splits cleanly into two sub-groups:

Conservative-leaning moderates (11 of 13 members, scores 58–86): Wasserburger, Campbell, Andrew, Styvar, Wharff, Schmid, Kelly, Singh, Tarver, Banks, Riggins. These legislators vote with the conservative bloc more often than not.

Progressive-adjacent members (2 of 13 members, scores 27–29): Geringer and Lawley. These two vote nearly identically to the progressive caucus.

The principled moderate center Better Wyoming is pointing to as the session’s conscience is, in reality, 11 conservative-leaning legislators and 2 progressive-adjacent ones. The middle leans right. That’s not a criticism — it’s what the voters of those districts elected.

The Speaker Governs — He Doesn’t Just Signal

One more data point before we get to the core argument.

Chip Neiman — Speaker of the House, the most powerful member of the chamber — is the least conservative member of the Conservative Core. He sits 2.0 standard deviations below his caucus mean, with a red alignment score of 85.5% against a caucus average of 93.6%. He recorded 31 party defections in 2026, including 2 critical defections.

His breaks from the conservative bloc cluster around a consistent pattern: skepticism of cryptocurrency banking legislation, support for agricultural investment and education funding, opposition to some of the session’s hardest-edge social legislation. His fiscal conservatism score is 71.9% — solidly BudgetGuardian. He is not a closet moderate. He is a Speaker managing a complex institution where governing responsibility sometimes looks different from ideological signaling.

This is important for Better Wyoming’s narrative in one specific way. If the conservative core is a monolithic machine following orders, who is giving Neiman his orders? He is the one with the gavel. He sets the agenda. He appoints the committee chairs. The statistical outlier of the conservative bloc is the man running it, which tells you how little “marching orders” actually means in this chamber.

The Real Story: Conservative Discernment Versus a Progressive Rubber Stamp

Here is the core finding — the one that Better Wyoming’s accountability report is designed to obscure.

The 2026 Wyoming House produced 183 fiscal roll calls — votes where dollar amounts could be attached to the spending direction of the vote. That is the highest count in any budget session in EBW’s history. This was a budget fight. A serious, high-volume, high-stakes argument about how much Wyoming state government should spend, conducted vote by vote across the entire session.

Here is how the two poles voted in that fight.

The Progressive Caucus voted to spend on 85% of fiscal roll calls. Steve Harshman: 15.6% fiscal conservatism score. Elissa Campbell: 15.4%. Marilyn Connolly: 17.6%. JT Larson: 18.3%. Bob Davis: 15.3%. These legislators voted yes on spending nine times out of ten. Every Medicaid expansion, every university line item, every state employee pay increase, every appropriation that came before them — yes, yes, yes. That is not judgment. That is a posture. The BlankCheck label in the EBW fiscal scoring system exists for a reason.

The Conservative Core voted the fiscally conservative position on 73–75% of fiscal roll calls. Scott Smith: 73.4%. Marlene Brady: 75.2%. Christopher Knapp: 74.4%. Jeremy Haroldson: 74.2%. Scott Heiner: 74.9%. They did not vote no on everything. They voted yes on spending they considered worthwhile — wildfire recovery, EMS Medicaid rates, legitimate capital construction — and no on spending they considered wasteful. That is exactly what discernment looks like when you apply it to 183 separate votes.

Now here is the math Better Wyoming hopes you don’t do.

The Progressive Caucus has 24 members in a 62-member chamber. They cannot pass a single spending item on their own. Not one. Every line in that budget that survived did so because enough conservative legislators looked at it, evaluated it, and decided it was worth funding. The budget is not a progressive victory — it is a record of conservative judgment about what Wyoming actually needs.

The conservatives who voted yes on university funding, on maternal healthcare, on EMS Medicaid rates, on wildfire recovery did not do so because the progressive caucus dragged them there. They did so because they read the bills and decided those were legitimate uses of Wyoming taxpayers’ money. Meanwhile, the spending items they voted down — the ones that died because the conservative bloc said no — represent millions, perhaps billions in constrained spending that the 85%-yes caucus would have approved without a second look.

Every conservative yes vote was a deliberate choice to fund something. Every conservative no vote was a deliberate choice to protect the taxpayer. That is not smash-and-slash dysfunction. That is not marching orders. That is 25 legislators doing exactly what their constituents sent them to Cheyenne to do — paying attention, making judgment calls, and holding the line on spending they believed Wyoming couldn’t afford or didn’t need.

Better Wyoming calls the budget that passed “responsible governance.” What the fiscal data shows is that the budget reflects conservative judgment at every line. The progressives provided the rubber stamp. The conservatives provided the discernment.

The Methodology Difference, Stated Plainly

Better Wyoming: Selected bills, reported outcomes, framed narrative. No vote counts. No statistical baseline. No selection criteria. No disclosed bias.

EBW: 688 House roll calls from the official Wyoming Legislature database. 271 contested votes identified by objective cluster analysis. Pairwise similarity matrix across all 62 members. Net position scores per legislator. Standard deviations calculated on alignment distributions. 183 AI-assessed fiscal roll calls weighted by dollar amount. Every number reproducible at evidencebasedwyoming.com. Bias disclosed upfront.

One of these is analysis. The other is advocacy. Readers of both deserve to know the difference.

What the 2026 Session Actually Was

Two equally disciplined factions. A moderate coalition that leans conservative 11-to-2. A speaker who governs rather than signals. And 183 fiscal votes that show, with precision, which caucus was thinking about Wyoming’s budget and which one was just saying yes.

The Freedom Caucus did not lose the 2026 session. They lost some bills — mostly on a supermajority threshold designed to filter out non-budget legislation in budget years. On the question that actually defines a budget session — how much does Wyoming spend and on what — the conservative legislators were the ones making the hard calls, vote by vote, while the progressive caucus approved everything in sight.

That’s the session Better Wyoming didn’t cover.

Now you’ve seen the math.

All voting data sourced from the Wyoming Legislature’s official roll call database. Bloc scores derived from a pairwise similarity matrix and cluster analysis across 271 contested House votes in the 2026 Budget Session (68th Legislature). Fiscal scores based on 183 AI-assessed dollar-weighted roll calls using EBW’s fiscal scoring system. Standard deviations calculated on per-legislator alignment scores within each bloc. Dollar weights are cumulative across roll calls and used for scoring weight only — not presented as direct budget totals. Full methodology at evidencebasedwyoming.com.