Republican primary voters in Wyoming — the nation's reddest state — appear to have soured on the Wyoming Freedom Caucus after its candidates were "annihilated" in the state's recent primaries.

The "reddest state" label is not incidental. Wyoming has not backed a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, and Donald Trump carried it with roughly 70 percent of the vote in each of the last two elections — numbers that make the state an unusually blunt instrument for testing which brand of Republican its voters actually prefer.

That is the assessment of conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who argued Wednesday that Wyoming's results have crushed the narrative, popular on the right, that establishment Republicans are out-of-touch "RINOs" — Republicans In Name Only, a pejorative long aimed at members of the party deemed insufficiently conservative.

While the state's Freedom Caucus urged voters to hand it a supermajority in the Wyoming House, "the conservative Republican establishment, meanwhile, pushed back," Olsen wrote.

"Establishment Republicans annihilated Freedom Caucus candidates last Tuesday," he added in a Washington Post column titled "Wyoming Republicans just proved the 'RINO' narrative wrong."

Freedom Caucus candidates lost every statewide primary they entered, while 13 caucus-aligned state House incumbents were defeated, according to Olsen. The losses came after the Freedom Caucus took hold of the Wyoming House in 2025 and pursued an aggressive movement-conservative agenda, clashing along the way with fellow Republican Governor Mark Gordon over budgets and spending. The group is part of a broader State Freedom Caucus Network launched in 2021, which has organized like-minded conservative blocs in state legislatures across the country — a spread that gives Wyoming's outcome relevance beyond its borders as the larger fight between insurgent and establishment Republicans plays out in state capitols.

The primary results, Olsen argued, suggest that Republican voters support "spending cuts on the margins, especially if the cuts don't touch public education or university spending." Republicans, he concluded, can either acknowledge those preferences or continue pursuing what he called "their cuts-only fever dream."

In a state where Republicans hold commanding majorities in the Legislature, primary results go a long way toward deciding who actually serves — leaving the reconstituted House majority's approach to the next budget session, and how freedom-caucus movements in other states read Wyoming's result, as the questions to watch from here.

"There's an old saying in politics: The voters have spoken, damn them," he wrote. "Maybe Republicans will finally listen?"