Will Wyoming Become A One Party State?

In Wyoming, out of 60 state representatives, Democrats hold 6 seats, and out of 30 state senators, Democrats hold 2 seats. But, they aren't actually realistically at risk of losing major party status because they will almost surely get at least 10% of the voter for at least one statewide office in November.

The Wyoming Democratic Party is at risk of losing major party status if Democrats in the state don’t register and vote in the general election. The Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office reported that out of the more than 182,000 votes cast in the primary election overall, only 4.5% were for Democratic candidates. Republican candidates received 94.4% of the vote, and nonpartisan votes cast were at 1.1%.

The lopsided numbers were the result of many Democrats “crossing over” and voting Republican to support incumbent U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, who has taken a strong stance against former President Donald Trump and serves as vice chair of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. . . .  

Cheney lost to challenger Harriet Hageman by 63,709 votes. Democrats need to meet the 10% threshold of total votes cast for any one of the statewide offices — U.S. House of Representatives, governor or secretary of state – in the general election, or else they will be considered a minor political party.

Under state statute, a minor political party is a political organization that receives not less than 2% or more than 10% of the total votes cast in the same office elections.

If they received less than 2%, a representative from the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Election Division said the Democratic Party would need to petition to gain access as a provisional party. Minor and provisional political parties must nominate through a convention, meaning only the Republican Party would be allowed to nominate candidates by primary election, if Democrats lost major party status. Laramie County Democratic Party Communications Director Lindsey Hanlon said it also impacts participation in debates. (Hanlon is also a member of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle’s editorial board.)

From Wyoming Democratic Party at risk of losing major party status.

The Platte River Basin

Denver is a part of the Platte River basin that in turn feeds into the Mississippi River basin (other parts of Colorado are sources for many of the other major U.S. river basins). The Platte River basin is part of the Louisiana Territory as the French had claimed the entire Mississippi River basin as their own. The territory of Colorado that is west of the Continental Divide and much of Southern Colorado, in contrast, was not part of the Louisiana territory. Much of that territory was part of "Old Mexico".

Here is a nice map of that river basin via a Facebook post by John Orr whose blog is Coyote Gulch.

Yellowstone Won't Wipe Us Out In The Near Future

The geologists, at least, unlike the economists, have some good news for once. The Yellowstone Caldera, despite repeatedly exploding into a supervolcano more castastrophic than anything on earth short of a comet, is not poised to destroy life as we know it in the Rocky Mountain West, something my son was recently curious about and we discussed.

[T]he Huckleberry Ridge eruption of present-day Yellowstone Park about two million years ago. . . was more than 2,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington. . . . The Yellowstone eruption is one of the largest super-volcano events in history and it has happened several times. Other super-volcano sites include Lake Toba in Sumatra, the central Andes Mountains, New Zealand and Japan.

[D]espite its explosive history, it doesn't appear that Yellowstone is primed for another super-eruption anytime soon, though the slow process of volcanic uplift is taking place every day.

"The uplift of the surface at Yellowstone right now is on the order of millimeters. . . When the Huckleberry Ridge eruption took place, the uplift of the whole Yellowstone region would have been hundreds of meters high, and perhaps as much as a kilometer."

From here.

Indeed, the timing is right for climate impacts of the Huckleberry Ridge eruption to have triggered the first Out of Africa migration by hominins, specifically, Homo Erectus.