This is why Community Organizing is Important to me.

Hello! I am Ted Hanlon. I’m passionate about field organizing for the Wyoming Democratic Party for three reasons. First, I am Wyoming through and through. Second, the Wyoming values that I am made of are Democratic values at their core. Finally, I believe that our state and our values will be destroyed if I stand by and do nothing.

I am a local boy, for sure. I was born in De Paul Hospital in Cheyenne. I attended Arp Elementary, Johnson Jr. High, and graduated from East. I wasn’t very social in those days—Dad had a little ranch south of Encampment. We spent almost all the time that we weren’t in school on the ranch. I learned to love the land, I learned to work hard, and I learned that operating a small ranch at an elevation of 8,000 feet was a pretty good way to go broke!

Because Wyoming has always done a very good job of funding education for those that otherwise would struggle to afford it, I was able to attend the University of Wyoming and get a degree in Chemical Engineering. The oil patch was booming when I graduated, so I went to work in the Big Horn Basin. Both my daughters were born up there. I worked in almost every aspect of the oil business: I was a field foreman, a production engineer, and a drilling engineer. I apprenticed as a workover foreman under some of the smartest and most colorful old guys you would ever meet—most of them remembered the days when workovers were done seven days a week without day off as the standard schedule!

I submit that you have never really experienced Christmas in Wyoming unless you have spent one at the foot of a real sand dune, 30 miles north of Glenrock, in a drilling foreman’s skid mounted living quarters while the wind blows 30 miles per hour and it is 10 below zero.

The Big Horn Basin is a sportsman’s paradise. My friends and I went on many adventures that ended by feeding livestock at 3:00 am, taking a shower and going to work without sleep. I have taken horses into most of the iconic wildernesses in Wyoming, including the Thorofare, Jedediah Smith, Cloud Peak, Encampment River, Platte River and Savage Run. Everyone who lives in Wyoming should see those places as often as they can—they are beautiful, and they put our place in the world in a different perspective.

One of the things we know for sure about the oil business in Wyoming is that it is boom and bust. I hung on as long as I could when it busted in the 80’s and then was fortunate to find work at a plant in Cheyenne whose main product is blasting agents used in the coal mines. My years of working there are a blur of starting plants in the dark and the cold, raising kids, and helping at the ranch in my spare time. I even tried raising cashmere goats as part of a University of Wyoming pilot project.

I left the plant in 2002 and started a little company to install solar and wind power in homes and cabins. It didn’t take me very long to lose all my money doing that. However, I did have some great experiences. I put power systems in for two very remote ranches in the Great Divide Basin. When you put a reliable power system in for a grumpy old rancher who never had power unless he ran a generator, he will love you forever!

Since that life experience success and financial disaster, I stumbled into a career doing technical training for refineries and chemical plants. That work has taken me all over the United States. I still love Wyoming best.

My point in telling that tale is to provide the backstory for my values: When I talk about “Wyoming Values”, they aren’t values that I brought here from somewhere else that I am trying to sell as Wyoming. I learned my values from my mom and dad and aunts and uncles who all worked hard and who would all drop everything to help each other out. I learned them from roughnecks who would “accidently” drop a hammer on you if you were fake and lay down their life for you if you were their friend. And I learned them from old ranchers who would (and did!) drive 100 miles just to tell you thank you for a job well done.

So, what are my Wyoming values? • We should always help people that need help. • Taking care of each other is more important than profit. • Everyone is equal. • When you do the same work as someone else, you deserve the same pay. • If we take care of the land, air, and water, those resources will take care of us.

When you transform those values into policies, they dovetail nicely into the platform of the Democratic Party. I am passionate about policies that provide health insurance for everyone and policies that result in a social safety net. I am passionate about policies that result in absolutely every worker earning a living wage. I am passionate about wiping out systemic racism and systemic sexism. I have watched the climate of our beautiful state change for the worse, and I understand the science that points to the root cause.

Now, unfortunately, the GOP does not care about my values. I am sorry to say that it appears to me that they only care about power. They don’t even seem care about governing.

If the GOP is the only party represented in Laramie County, a lot of bad things will happen: Our rural schools will close—in fact, they are already closing. You haven’t been to an Albin High School basketball game lately, have you? More and more people in the state will be without insurance. The consequences of that are more sickness, more financial hardship and more rural hospitals closing. The deadly drought that results in pine beetles, forest fires, and failed farms and ranches will only get worse. More and more good people will leave the state. Our children certainly can’t stay. They will graduate high school and move thousands of miles away, to some state that has not failed and that can provide them with an opportunity.

That is why I have chosen to become a field organizer! We must elect Democrats to positions of power. There is no other way out of this mess. In the 2020 election, we had many good candidates. They did a great job of campaigning. They still lost. There were just not enough Democratic voters to elect them.

I felt, and still feel, personally responsible. Something went awry. I started studying. I read Stacey Abram’s book. I looked into the effort Beto is undertaking in Texas. I studied the roots of Democratic organizing in Tammany Hall in the 1880’s and the 1890’s. I read Jane McAlevey’s book on organizing. To distill what I learned into a few sentences: In a county where the GOP outnumbers Democrats in a lopsided fashion, there are not enough swing voters to persuade to our side. However, there are thousands of voting age people that don’t vote. Many of them have the same values as us. We have to organize our fellow Democrats and as a committed team we have to find the non-voters and convince them that their interests are best served by electing Democrats. In 2022, we can give our candidates a fighting chance. Coaches often say that football games are not won on Friday nights in the fall, they are won on cold January mornings in the weight room.

Elections are the same way. I don’t know if I am an organizer or not, but I have the passion to become one. I am going to record my journey to the 2022 election in this space. I hope you enjoy the tale. More importantly, I hope you are inspired to join me!