Cody business owner challenging longtime Wyoming senator

Posted 9/6/16

Cindy Baldwin, the owner of Cody’s Lockhart Inn and Aspen Realty, successfully petitioned to join the ballot as an independent candidate.

“Hank Coe has been in there quite a while and I’ve had people approach me and say, ‘We want to have …

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Cody business owner challenging longtime Wyoming senator

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Seven-term state Sen. Hank Coe, R-Cody, cruised through last month’s primary election without an opponent, but he’s drawn a challenger for November’s general election.

Cindy Baldwin, the owner of Cody’s Lockhart Inn and Aspen Realty, successfully petitioned to join the ballot as an independent candidate.

“Hank Coe has been in there quite a while and I’ve had people approach me and say, ‘We want to have a choice; we want to have a choice,’” Baldwin said in a Wednesday call to KODI-AM’s “Speak Your Piece.” “And when I looked at my primary (ballot), I went, ‘There is no choice,’ and it hit me in the gut. I used to be very involved up here and I thought, ‘People need a choice.’”

Baldwin indicated she’ll run to the right of Coe, saying many candidates are “Republican in name only.”

“As I look back on votes, I haven’t seen a true, solid conservative vote coming out of a lot of our representatives that say quote-unquote they’re ‘Republicans’ representing the Republicans’ constituency that put them in office,” Baldwin said on KODI, adding, “That’s not right.”

Baldwin said she wanted to appear on the general election ballot as a Republican, but she lost that opportunity by failing to run for the party’s nomination in the primary election. Coe is the Republican nominee for Senate District 18.

Baldwin explained on KODI that she didn’t run for the office earlier “because until I got my primary (ballot), I didn’t realize the lack of choice we had up here.”

Coe said in a Wednesday interview with the Tribune that he believes the primary election is the place for a Republican challenge and that in some ways, Baldwin running as an independent candidate “doesn’t show a lot of respect for the process.”

However, he also said that, “it’s a democratic process, and I welcome the challenge and I’ll work hard. So it won’t be easy for her.”

The senator — who has been in the Wyoming Legislature since 1989 — said this will be his last campaign. Coe had indicated his current term would be his last, but he said a lot of people encouraged him to continue serving, especially with the state facing tough times.

“I think the experience does matter when you’re making hard decisions, and understanding revenue streams and how money flows and how (state) agencies work,” Coe said. “And that’s really why I’m running.”

As an unopposed candidate, he had a weak showing in last month’s primary election.

Coe’s name appeared on 4,204 Republican voters’ ballots and he only received votes on 2,801, or 66.6 percent of them. Some 372 voters (8.9 percent) wrote in a different name while 1,031 others (24.5 percent) left their ballot blank.

Across Wyoming, a total of 34 incumbent senators and representatives ran unopposed in their primary. On average, they were supported on 85.3 percent of all the ballots cast. (For example, 82.3 percent of voters filled in the bubble for Rep. David Northrup, R-Powell.)

Outside of Coe’s 66.6 percent, no other lawmaker received less than 75 percent support.

Baldwin called into “Speak Your Piece” during an appearance by Big Horn Basin TEA Party leaders Rob DiLorenzo of Emblem and Vince Vanata of Cody. She immediately got their endorsements.

“By God, in this seat here, I think it’s time for a change; I think it’s time for a term limit. So I wish you all the luck,” Vanata told Baldwin.

“We both do,” added DiLorenzo.

For her part, Baldwin said she shares a lot of beliefs with the tea party movement, but will be running on the Republican Party platform.

When she reads that statement of the party’s beliefs, “I get tears in my eyes and it’s like I’m reading the Constitution of the United States,” Baldwin said on KODI.

The Big Horn Basin TEA Party and other more conservative members of the local GOP have sparred with Coe in the past — including over his leading role in a 2013 bill that stripped most of the powers from the elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction and gave them to a governor-appointed Director of Education. That bill, Senate File 104, was struck down as unconstitutional in early 2014.

Right around that time, some more conservative Republicans bought newspaper ads headlined, “Coe Must Go” and encouraged people to ask the senator to step down. A conservative faction attempted to pass a resolution censuring Coe at the Park County Republican Party’s March 2014 convention, but their efforts came up a handful of votes short. One repeated argument against the censure was that disagreements with Coe should be dealt with in an election and not in a resolution.

However, when the filing period closed in May, not a single challenger had stepped up to face the senator.

“Candidly, yes, I was surprised,” Coe said. “I totally expected to have a challenge and I didn’t. That’s fine. I would have welcomed the challenge then as well as the challenge now.”

Baldwin had to submit at least 176 valid signatures from registered voters within the district to make November’s ballot; she turned in somewhere around 290 signatures for the Secretary of State’s Office to review.

Baldwin plans to officially kick off her campaign this (Tuesday) evening in Cody.

Senate District 18 is made up of Cody, Ralston, the Heart Mountain area, the Willwood, Clark, Wapiti, Crandall, Sunlight and the northern part of Yellowstone National Park.

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