A new hunting and fishing group in Wyoming released report cards Wednesday detailing where state lawmakers stand on public lands, wildlife, and scientific management. Many failed to make the grade, including 54 of 93 state representatives and senators, or 60 percent.
Some Wyoming legislators, in fact, ranked solidly against both public lands and wildlife based on bills they either sponsored or voted on, including more recent efforts to sell off public lands completely.
“If I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t want to be labeled as anti-public lands,” says Zach Lentsch, chairman of the new political action committee Protect Wyoming. “But this is an accountability campaign. The scorecard shows the citizens of Wyoming what their elected officials have done.”
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Protect Wyoming isn’t an advocacy organization. It’s not trying to change the hearts and minds of lawmakers. Its goal is to oust the state politicians who vote against public lands and wildlife, and usher in lawmakers who back the interests of the sporting and conservation communities.
The relatively novel approach comes at a time when sportsmen and women are increasingly frustrated with lawmakers voting against their best interests. On Thursday, for example, the U.S. Senate agreed with the House in overturning a mineral leasing withdrawal at the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness, paving the way to building a Chilean copper sulfide mine on the borders of pristine wilderness. Hunting and fishing groups resoundingly opposed the legislative maneuver used to overturn the leasing withdrawal. Senators voted for it anyway.
Lentsch says it’s time for more of the hunting and fishing community to vote and make their voices heard. According to voter data, only about 28,000 Wyomingites who held hunting or fishing licenses in the last two years voted in the last election cycle. But about 120,000 Wyomingites eligible to vote hold hunting or fishing licenses.
“We know that hunters and anglers are a huge swath of the population in Wyoming, and we know they have a lower propensity of voting in the primaries than the general public,” he says. “We don’t think we have representation of the values of those who love public lands and wildlife because those people aren’t voting.”
The scorecards are one of the first steps Protect Wyoming is taking to help Wyoming hunters and anglers see where their lawmakers stand. They highlight lawmakers like Sen. Bob Ide from Natrona County in Central Wyoming, who has been a vocal opponent of public lands including proposing a resolution in 2025 that would have demanded the federal government transfer federal lands to the state.
The scorecards also look at other lawmakers who are perhaps less vocal in their opposition to public lands and wildlife but still voted for resolutions like Ide’s, or for bills that would have taken the ability to manage bears away from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department or would have allowed for the private sale of landowner hunting licenses.
Convincing people to vote in primaries who don’t typically vote may seem like a tall order, but Lentsch says their public meetings are already drawing crowds. One such meeting in rural Park County brought dozens of people who weren’t even registered to vote to hear about the issues.
“If we had fifty to sixty people who never voted in a primary before, that is a big deal in races that are won by one hundred votes,” he says. And many primaries in Wyoming — the least populated state in the country where most voters are Republican — are decided by very thin margins. Protect Wyoming isn’t trying to persuade hunters and anglers to vote for a particular party; instead, they’re trying, among other efforts, to get voters to elect pro-public-land lawmakers within their parties.
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On top of trying to recruit more public-lands voters, Lentsch says, Protect Wyoming hopes educating people who already go to the polls could help sway elections. The difference between the number of people who voted in the last election in Ide’s district but chose not to cast a vote in his race exceeded the number of votes he won by. It’s wonky math, but it matters for public lands.
“And if you engage folks who didn’t vote before,” Lentsch says, “we can push the needle over the top.”
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