Sen. John Barrasso (foreground), a Wyoming Republican, will be seeking his third term in the Senate this year. | J. Scott Applewhite Wyoming's Barrasso draws independent challenger

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso is getting a self-financing challenger after all — but it’ll be in the general election instead of a Republican primary.

David Dodson, a Jackson-based former CEO and part-time lecturer at Stanford, will jump into the Senate race on Thursday as an independent, saying in an interview ahead of the announcement that his wife has given him the sign-off to spend $1 million, and, “if she’s not looking, I’d be willing to put in more.”


Dodson is the latest candidate to jump in with the backing of a group called Unite America, which is providing campaign infrastructure and donor support for independent candidates for Senate in Maryland and Missouri, and for gubernatorial candidates in Maine, Kansas and Alaska, where Gov. Bill Walker is running for a second term. They say they’re hoping to create a bloc of senators who could, by providing swing votes in a closely divided chamber, shape the agenda across a range of issues.

Megadonor Foster Friess and Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince had both been talked about as potential candidates against Barrasso in the Republican primary, but neither materialized. Dodson, a longtime Republican himself, said he believes that making Barrasso run hard across the state through the general election is the only real path to victory.

“I want as an independent, I want to return my party to the party of Alan Simpson and Ronald Reagan,” he said.

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Dodson called the Affordable Care Act a good start but said it had failed at keeping costs down — and that Barrasso, one of three trained physicians in the Senate, failed at coming up with an alternative. He said he supports increased border security and pathways to green cards for immigrants in the country legally but admitted that with only a few hundred so-called Dreamers in his state, that issue was not at the top of his mind.

And he called the tax bill passed by Republicans at the end of last year “an insult to the middle class.”

“A middle-class tax cut, to me, is where I get nothing and the middle class gets what they deserve,” Dodson said.

Barrasso, who has about $5 million on hand, hasn’t faced a serious challenge in either of his two previous elections to hold his seat. There is a Democrat in the race, Gary Trauner, but the race is far from the top of the party’s prospects.

Dodson is hoping to take Barrasso by surprise, blaming him for the economic troubles in his state.

“He’s got a fight on his hands,” Dodson said. “I intend to take his job from him so I can provide jobs to the people of Wyoming.”

