A short history

We began as a small group of progressive Democrats, independents, and others who don't exclusively identify as Democrats but supported our candidate Bernie Sanders for president in 2016. We spent almost a year and a half phone-banking, knocking on doors, and holding events in the lead up to the 2016 Wyoming caucus and became friends. Our membership has been fluid with people coming and going and our meetings are typically attended by a half dozen to two dozen people.

After the 2016 Democratic National Convention, we convened to discuss our path forward and reached the consensus that none of us were terribly excited to work within the Wyoming Democratic Party to reform it from within due to consistency of past experience. Unlike our Bernie delegate friends who created its Progressive Caucus, we wished to remain independent of the Democratic Party. We share a common goal of returning the party to its New Deal populist, progressive roots with them. We're currently discussing co-association with the Democratic Socialists of America in order to continue to reclaim and co-opt a word subject to unwarranted stigma that simply represents a value in people over profit.

Although we had the numbers to take over the county Democratic Party for Bernie, our group decided it was better to remain independent of the Democratic Party. We discussed at length the merits of starting or joining a caucus or third party that better represents our values and concluded we would trust Bernie's lead in affiliating with Our Revolution, the political non-profit he started that represented the continuation of the political revolution we started together.

New people/ideas are always welcome. Yes, we can. It doesn't matter if it's been tried before. The tallest oaks are felled by many strokes.

A mission simply state's an organization's primary/principal goal or goals. A vision communicates how an organization intends to accomplish them.

Our Revolution Casper's current mission is to restore the state of Wyoming to its progressive, populist roots.*

Our vision for so doing is for us to develop the collective competency to more effectively communicate our values through the art of storytelling that changes minds through relationships and social media, one post, one phone call and one knock on the door at a time. We hope to recruit and support candidates that advance that vision, create a progressive state-wide PAC, and expose Wyomingites to perspectives to which they're largely deprived that will benefit all of us, not just some of us.

Some people question whether Wyoming ever truly had progressive, populist roots. In some ways they're right as Wyoming has always, like America, struggled to fulfill the promise of human equality under the law and democracy.

That acknowledged, many Wyomingites are unaware that the state's founding fathers not only were the first to grant women the right to vote, but also socialized its water as public property, regulated the railroads, banned union-busting labor-union organizer-framing Pinkertons from operating within its borders, enshrined a free and quality public education as a civil right not in the Wyoming Constitution's Bill of Rights but in one of its main articles, and guaranteed residents of the state a publicly-funded college education as close to free as possible. At the turn of the 20th Century, Wyoming was one of the most populist, progressive states in the nation judging by those measures.

And throughout the 1990s, Wyoming regularly elected Democrats as governors and held a large minority of the seats in the state legislature and occasionally the federal Congress. Unfortunately, twenty years of Fox News and AM talk radio, importation of minerals workers from more conservative states, President Obama's presidency, and a stealth takeover of the state by reactionary conservatives from across the country have moved the center of Wyoming's political spectrum much further to the far right over our lives. We aim to move the needle back.

In 1989, skinheads tried to set up their headquarters in Casper, WY. Democrats and Republicans marched together in the streets of Casper to tell them that they were not welcome. In 2018, both are ominously silent about the growing threat of Sovereign Citizens targeting Wyoming and the presence of the international headquarters of the World Church of the Creator in Riverton (a white supremacist, Christian identity group). We also hope to raise political consciousness of people in the state about these grave and growing threats to the future of our state.