Registration Closed Friday. The Lies Showed Up Saturday.

The deadline to file for the 2026 primary closed on a Friday. By Saturday, I had two pieces of mail from a group called BWAR on my desk. Two were the same glossy attack card. Two were handwritten postcards that looked like a couple of concerned neighbors had just happened to write me the same week. They did not wait. The ink on the candidate list was barely dry, and the smear was already in my mailbox. That is not how confident people behave. That is how you behave when you need to poison the well before anybody gets a look at the actual record.

So let us look at the record. Start with the smallest thing on the card, because it tells you everything.

Nobody Calls Me Douglas

My wife calls me Douglas. Usually, when she is mad, which lately is more often than I would like. Everybody else in this town has called me Doug for as long as I have lived here. I chaired the Campbell County Republican Party. In a town of 32,000 people, anybody active enough to be writing campaign postcards is somebody who knows who Doug Gerard is.

Both cards open with “Dear Douglas” and “Hi Douglas.” Two different “neighbors”, different pens, both reaching for the legal name that shows up on a voter file. Not the name a single real neighbor has ever used. That is because the name did not come from a neighbor. It came off a list.

Two Notes. One Script.

Look at what these notes are. Two strangers, mailed the same week, hit the same five talking points, pointing me to the same website with the same QR code. Maybe Heidi and Sheri sat down on their own and came up with the exact same complaints in the exact same order. Or maybe somebody handed them a script and a stack of cards and asked them to copy it out by hand so it would feel personal.

Here is the tell. The only thing on those notes that is not handwritten is the one thing a real neighbor would actually know. My address is a printed stick-on label with a postal barcode, run off a bulk mailing list. My note from “your Gillette neighbor” got processed 280 miles away in a tray full of identical cards.

So they wrote the feelings by hand and let a machine print the facts. That is the opposite of how a real note works, and it is the clearest proof you will get that this is a targeted mail operation wearing a neighbor’s costume. I do not doubt Sheri England is a real person. The shame here is not hers. It belongs to whoever at BWAR decided that lying to her neighbors was a job worth recruiting her for.

Now the Lie Itself

Every vote on that card is real. I will give them that. They did not invent roll calls. What they did is worse, because you have to do it on purpose. The trick is the same for all five bullets. Take a budget vote, a vote against spending cast during a budget session by a member of the Appropriations Committee, and reprint it as a vote against whoever the money was supposed to go to. Vote no on a funding scheme, and suddenly you are against grandmothers and hungry kids. They show you one hand and pray you never look at the other.

Take Highway 59.

They told you Abby voted against making Highway 59 safer. Here is what they made very sure you would never find out. The Highway 59 widening passed. It is in the budget right now.

What Abby voted against was one amendment. A $100 million loan out of the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund that bundled Highway 59 in with five other road projects scattered across the state. Passing lanes by Casper. Four-laning down by the Colorado line. A Rock Springs bypass. She voted no on that borrowing scheme. A few days later, the legislature took the Highway 59 language, put it in a cleaner amendment, and adopted it. The road project lived.

BWAR knows this. The votes are public. They printed “she is against safe roads for your family” anyway, because the truth does not fit on a postcard and a lie does. You do not accidentally leave out that the project passed. That is a choice.

The State Employee Raise Is the Worst One

If Highway 59 is the clearest lie, the state employee line is the most cynical, because it leans hardest on you not knowing how Wyoming works.

First, the part that is just false. Abby did not deny anybody a paycheck. State employees got their raise. The compensation amendment passed the House 31 to 29, the money stayed in the bill, and Abby voted yes on final passage of the whole budget, which passed 47 to 14. Her no vote was about the size and the structure of one amendment. It was not a vote to send anybody home empty-handed. The card needs you to think she slammed a door that is standing wide open.

Now, the part they really do not want you chewing on. What she voted against was $111.8 million in salary money written permanently into every agency’s budget baseline. Permanently. That word is the whole game. This was not a one-time cost-of-living bump, no matter what the postcard says. It was a market-based pay package baked into every future budget the state will ever write. A fiscal conservative is supposed to look harder at a quarter-billion-dollar forever obligation than at a one-time expense. That is the job.

And here is the part that the card counts on you not knowing. In Wyoming, the government already makes up about 23 percent of the workforce. The national number is around 15. Almost one in four working people in this state already draws a government check of some kind, way out of line with the rest of the country. We pay for all of it on mineral money that swings up and down with the price of coal and gas. Permanently growing the government payroll in a state like this is exactly the kind of call a representative is sent to Cheyenne to weigh hard, not rubber-stamp, because a postcard might call her mean. BWAR took the most responsible reading of that vote and flipped it upside down. That takes nerve.

Why You Heard This From a Blog and Not From Them

Go look at that attack card again and notice what is not on it. No bill numbers. No vote dates. No amendment names. Not one thing you could look up. Five accusations and zero way to check any of them, on a full-color mailer with a QR code. They had room for a QR code but not a single roll-call number. The citations are missing because the citations clear her.

I know, because I am the one who had to dig them out. And I built the database.

Running down the Highway 59 claim meant pulling the whole budget bill, reading through 129 separate amendments to find the one that mentioned the highway, working out that it was a $100 million bundled loan, then finding the second amendment where the road actually passed, then checking Abby’s vote on each one. Hours of work with tools that do not exist anywhere else in this state. The skilled nursing smear is a procedural introduction vote that died on a two-thirds rule most people have never heard of. The hungry kids line is a statewide school food grant handed out by enrollment, not a Campbell County program at all. You would have to read the amendment text to know that. They are counting on you never reading the amendment text.

That is the whole con. BWAR knows the truth takes hours of work to dig up, and they know you have a job and a family and a life. They put the lie on a postcard and buried the truth in a 141-page budget bill. They understand the math better than they understand decency. The smear lands in thousands of mailboxes in ten seconds. The truth sits locked in a database nobody handed you the key to. They are not betting you are stupid. They are betting you are busy.

That is worse, because it means they knew better and did it anyway.

What the Votes Actually Show

On the four budget votes that card is built on, Abby Angelos voted the same way as the entire conservative core of the Wyoming House, including the Speaker. Not as an outlier. Not on marching orders. As one of two dozen conservatives who looked at each spending item and made the same call. And before anybody trots out the lockstep line, the members who voted for all that spending vote together every bit as tightly as the conservatives do. The math does not care which jersey you wear.

Across 183 fiscal votes in the 2026 session, the conservative Abby voted with the fiscally conservative side about three times out of four. Not every time. Three out of four. They funded wildfire recovery. They funded EMS Medicaid rates. They funded real construction projects. And they said no to what they judged wasteful or to what we cannot afford to carry forever. That is not a machine. That is judgment, one bill at a time. Abby cast hundreds of yes votes on spending she believed Wyoming needed.

The card does not mention those, because careful judgment does not sell, and outrage does.

So Here Is Where It Stands

I am not going to pretend a blog out-muscles a mass mailing. It does not. They have the reach, the budget, the voter file, the mail house, and the willingness to lie. I have a database and a refusal to let it slide. How many people read this? A few hundred, maybe. How many pull up the tools and check my work? Fewer. BWAR mailed thousands of those cards knowing that for every one of you who finds the truth, a hundred neighbors already swallowed the lie and moved on. That gap is their whole business model.

But I have the one thing they cannot buy. It is all true, it is all checkable, and it holds up when you look at it. Their cards do not need you to look. Mine dares you to. Every vote, every amendment, every roll call, 2009 to today, free to anybody willing to spend the time they are betting you will not.

They mailed me a note that called me Douglas off a list, because they figure that is all it takes. If this reached you, do the one thing they fear. Check it yourself. Then tell your neighbor. The only thing that beats their reach is people who know the truth and will not keep it quiet.

Check It Yourself: The Five Claims, Sourced

Every claim on the card, the vote behind it, and the honest read. All votes are from the 2026 session. Budget items are amendments to HB0001, the general appropriations bill, unless noted.

See every source roll call for yourself: scoring.evidencebasedwyoming.com/scorecard/share?id=HAym8JY1

All figures come from the official Wyoming Legislature roll-call record for the 2026 Budget Session. Vote counts and bill text are public.