Senate 10: The ultimate guide [Part 1]
Senate 10: The ultimate guide [Part 1]
Meet the candidates. Republican nominee Gary Crum outspent and defeated his primary challenger last month but must now face Democrat Mike Selmer in the general.
Voters in Senate District 10 will decide their representation for the next four years when they cast ballots this General Election Day, Nov. 5.
Republican Gary Crum and Democrat Mike Selmer have radically different visions for the future of Albany County and the state of Wyoming, according to their forum appearances, public statements, completed questionnaires and interviews with the Laramie Reporter.
Below is the story of the race so far, from Crum’s primary win to Selmer’s “reluctant” candidacy.
Part 2 of this guide analyzes the candidates’ platforms and their competing visions for Wyoming.
Part 3 of this guide, to be published separately, will present the Reporter’s questionnaire with answers on 10 key issues from both Crum and Selmer, in their own words.
Crum defeats Kennedy in Republican primary
A lifelong Wyomingite born in Rawlins, Crum was a finance major and football star at the University of Wyoming.
In 2006, he co-founded Wyoming State Bank, which grew into Western States Bank, and remains headquartered in Laramie. Now retired, he does bank consulting, serves as chairman of the Ivinson Memorial Hospital Board of Directors and is a national executive board member for the Boy Scouts of America.
The incumbent in Senate District 10 — Dan Furphy — served one term and announced his retirement in May, clearing the way for an open race in the more rural of Albany County’s two senate districts.
Crum filed to run and received Furphy’s endorsement. But he faced a primary opponent in Keith Kennedy, an ag lobbyist who positioned himself to the right of Crum. Ultimately, Crum won 60% of the Republican vote and clinched the nomination.
The victor’s campaign was funded in part by a $19,000 personal loan.
“We had to fund our campaign to offset all these out-of-state PAC monies,” Crum said. “There was a tremendous amount of out-of-state PAC money supporting my opponent.”
Crum’s opponent, Kennedy, received one donation of $500 from an out-of-state political action committee. Most of Kennedy’s money came from individual donations; he raised a total of $9,200 from all sources.
While Crum took no money from out-of-state PACs, he did receive $3,000 from Wyoming-based PACs. Between that money, his personal loan, several large individual contributions and other donations, Crum raised $37,000 and spent nearly $30,000 during the primary — including $530 on postage alone. Crum also spent about $15,000 on yard signs.
In the end, he raised and spent more than Kennedy and Selmer combined.
Crum said he is proud to have run a “civil and common sense campaign” — an approach that mirrors his post-election plans.
“I’m running to bring civility back to the legislature in Cheyenne,” Crum said. “We need to have robust debate, but at the end of the day, it needs to be truthful and honest.”
Crum would not provide examples of the incivility he had seen.
“I’m not going to point at any individual or any person, because that doesn’t do any good,” he said. “What we need to focus on is focusing on the future and working together for the betterment of Wyoming.”
Perhaps underscoring Crum’s focus on the lack of civility in Wyoming politics, many of Crum’s yard signs across Laramie were recently vandalized — the vandals painting over the “R”s in the candidate’s first and last names.
There is, as of yet, no evidence tying the defacing of these signs to any political faction, and the Republican and Democratic county parties have released a joint statement denouncing the act of vandalism.
“During the last few election cycles, this egregious behavior has become more commonplace and will not be encouraged or tolerated by either party,” the statement reads. “Both parties agree on this topic and encourage civil discourse going forward. The disrespect shown to candidates who have had signs vandalized and stolen is not how we show the Wyoming way and the Code of the West. We are all Wyomingites first and foremost and we are neighbors and friends always.”
Selmer gets involved
Selmer was not born in Wyoming, but he’s made the Equality State his home.
Originally a master electrician in Maryland, Selmer and his wife were pushed west by the 2008 financial crisis and pulled to Wyoming by Selmer’s daughter, Carrie Murthy, who lived in Laramie, and who currently serves as an Albany County School Board trustee.
Selmer dabbled in writing and ran a short-lived business through which he coached homeowners during DIY projects. But he really got to know the community of Laramie through running — not for office, but for sport.
Selmer has run the Boston Marathon twice and shortly after moving to Laramie, took part in the Leadville 100 — a 100-mile ultramarathon through the Rocky Mountains.
“Carrie, who had lived here a couple years and had started to get a little involved with the running community, had recruited a crew for me, and it really helped to get close to and know other people in the community,” Selmer said. “So even though we had literally just moved, it helped to really introduce us to the community and feel like it was our community.”
In 2014, Selmer tried the other kind of running — throwing his hat in the ring for House District 46. He lost that race to Glenn Moniz, receiving about 45% of the vote to Moniz’ 52%. (Moniz would later go on to represent Senate District 10, holding that seat for one term.)
“It was really lucky that I lost — because that winter I started feeling ill and weakened and was diagnosed with lymphoma in July of 2015,” Selmer said. “And then spent the next 18 months going through a whole lot of really difficult physical challenges, health challenges.”
Hanging onto hope and staying alive both took significant work. But on both fronts, he had help.
“The really wonderful thing that kind of came out of this is people [who] rallied and helped us out,” Selmer said. “And Obamacare. If it hadn’t been for Obamacare, I’d probably be dead now because I wouldn’t have been able to afford the treatments.”
It took a year and a half of those treatments but Selmer recovered.
“Once I got past the chemo, and the bone marrow transplant, and everything that arose out of that, I started recovering my health pretty quick,” he said. “And by the winter of 2017, I had already started working on a design for a house that would be for my daughter and son-in-law and my wife and I, and our grandkids.”
Designing and eventually building that house restored his optimism.
“I think that building that house had a tremendous impact on my health,”
A decade after that diagnosis, Selmer is an active member of the Albany County Democratic Party. He served as the central committee’s chair — taking over from Murthy, his daughter, who had served in the same role — until resigning last month to focus on his campaign for the open seat in Senate 10.
Selmer steps up
Selmer wasn’t meant to be his party’s nominee.
As the party chair, Selmer was part of the effort to recruit candidates for a variety of open seats — from city council to county commission to Senate District 10 itself. But it was a tough year for the partisans tasked with finding Democratic candidates.
“There’s a really strong feeling among progressive folks of uncertainty, and [they’re] really nervous about what the political landscape is going to look like in Wyoming, based on what happens with national politics.”
Democratic recruiters kept hearing the same thing: People were put off by the divisive, angry rhetoric that has come to characterize so much of the national political discourse. And more than that, they were afraid about the potential for political violence.
“They said, ‘Yeah, I’ve always wanted to do this, I like the idea of running — but not this year,’” Selmer recalled. “I bet we had a list of 60 names that we contacted, people who just said: ‘Not this cycle.’”
On the last day of candidate filing — without a name for Democratic ballots in Senate 10 and with the clock literally ticking — the local party leader had a choice to make.
He decided to run.
“I filed at 4:30 p.m. on the very last day without even being sure at four o’clock that I was going to do it,” Selmer said. “I was a reluctant candidate at that point … But then within a week, I started thinking about it more and I was more positive about doing it and feeling better about doing it. And eventually, I’ve reached the point where I’m glad I did it and I think I have a real shot.”
“Extreme” views
Selmer is betting that many Republicans have been put off by the extremist turn Wyoming’s Republican Party has taken in recent years.
“I think Gary Crum is a nice guy,” Selmer said. “I think he’s very similar to Dan Furphy, the outgoing senator. But I also think some of his views are extreme for people in Albany County.”
The Freedom Caucus — the far-right wing of the Wyoming Republican Party — has been gaining seats and power in the State Legislature. Its members have been instrumental in passing an abortion ban, while its allies in the state senate have defunded diversity programs at the University of Wyoming.
This year’s statewide primary results show the Freedom Caucus could gain a majority in the state house ahead of the 2025 General Session.
Crum is not affiliated with the Freedom Caucus. Nor is he affiliated with the Wyoming Caucus (the party’s more moderate wing). Crum’s own stances on abortion and energy policy are softer than the Freedom Caucus’ but he has not said he will block or vote against Freedom Caucus measures in those or other arenas.
“I’m not going to be a part of any caucus other than the Republican Caucus, working for the betterment of the State of Wyoming and Albany County,” Crum told the Reporter.
But Selmer said he believes Senate 10 voters will object to the “extreme” views becoming more dominant in the Wyoming GOP. He said people don’t like to be told they can’t get abortions or that they can’t enroll in gender studies courses at UW.
“People are people and you can’t take how you feel about the way a person should live and put that on everybody else,” Selmer said. “That’s what I feel that the Republican Party has done, [they’ve said] that this is the way you should behave, and this is the way everybody should behave and live their lives. And I just don’t agree with that.”
On climate change specifically, Selmer said, “We have to start working on making our community resilient.” He said he knows, in Wyoming, “you’re not supposed to talk about climate change.”
“But it’s happening,” Selmer said. “It’s going to keep getting worse. It’s very clear from the historical record that things are getting worse and at an increasing rate — as far as temperature and extreme weather, all that — all the facts point to it.”
Crum, like Gov. Mark Gordon, supports an “all of the above” energy approach. But he is also less worried about climate change than his Democratic opponent.
“I’m for all energy, but I’m not against any energy either,” he said. “If you look back over history, I think the United States, including Wyoming, have done a great job in making energy cleaner and cleaner and cleaner … However, I think we need to remember global warming started 10,000 years ago when man didn’t have a problem. We were in an ice age, and the Earth has been warming for 10,000 years.”
While climate change has always been a factor of life on earth, the rate of change brought on by human activity since the Industrial Revolution is unprecedented — and it is having unprecedented effects on the global average temperature, sea levels, ice sheet coverage and both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
Wyoming will witness many of these effects, even as it remains one of the safer places to live amid a changing climate.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Crum as the current CEO and chairman of Western States Bank. He is retired and no longer serves in that role.
Gary does not own, run or have anything to do with Western States Bank as he sold it to FNBO. I guess Gary can sit around all day studying the Bible as he wrongly believes that makes him a better person. OY.
Dan Furphy and Gary Crum believe they have the right to manage their neighbor's womb indicating they are poor citizens and are not fit for office.