Over 21,000 Wyomingites get WyoFile delivered straight to their inbox. Join your neighbors and stay informed with the stories shaping Wyoming.

Shortly after Mark Gordon became Wyoming’s governor, he bought a house on a handshake deal.

“There was no contract or anything,” Gordon told a crowd gathered in a Lander hotel Thursday afternoon. “[We] just came to an agreement. Everything he said he was going to do, he did. Everything I said I was going to do, I did.

“That’s the state I grew up in.”

But that implicit trust and sense of civility, Gordon said, has eroded in recent years, at least in government. Election attack ads, public name-calling and refusals to participate in public debates are all examples of shifting norms of Wyoming politics.

“I think we have lost a sense of decorum,” G

See Full Page