Wyoming governor debate turns tense as Mark Gordon faces attacks from Throne, Rammell

The green room was tense before Thursday’s debate for Wyoming governor.

Packed in a small room on the Casper College campus, the four candidates — Democrat Mary Throne, Republican Mark Gordon, Libertarian Larry Streumpf, and Constitution Party candidate Rex Rammell — sat mostly in silence, limiting themselves to small talk about the mileage on their cars and their memories of the now-gone soda fountain in Shoshoni.

It turned out many of the candidates were saving their more pointed material for the debate to follow.

Standing in between Throne and Rammell in the debate order, Gordon was hit with attacks both credible and not throughout the evening, pressed both on specifics about how he would meet rising health care costs and anticipated shortages in the state’s education budget to environmental groups he had chaired decades ago. But Gordon, throughout the evening, was able to use that to his advantage.

Often answering questions before Gordon, Throne repeatedly used her responses to lay out her policies in brief before demanding of her Republican counterpart specifics on his plans on the major topics that have separated the pair — healthcare and education — and outlining what she saw as flaws in his concept of a “Wyoming-based model” for health insurance. For her part, Throne advocated for the expansion of Medicaid in Wyoming throughout Thursday’s debate.

Read more: https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming-governor-debate-turns-tense-as-mark-gordon-faces-attacks/article_a43f367a-1e76-5165-b4e6-7649d1cc267f.html