Around 2002, Miller took a job with The Nature Conservancy in Texas, sweet-talking good old boys into preserving their spreads for posterity by telling them, “We're gonna lighten the tax load on your ranch, and we've got good, clean American money.”

“I grew up with those guys,” Miller says. “For the first 35 years of my life, I was on horseback. I can read the body language.”

After his Texas stint, Miller landed near Buford, Wyoming, sometimes called the tiniest town in America, where, he jokes, a startling number of his neighbors were in the federal witness-protection program. “I was living the life of a hermit,” Miller says. “A lotus eater, navel gazer kind of thing.”

Full tilt into a midlife crisis, Miller grew his hair and beard, which eventually developed two dangling dreads. Tie-dye became his apparel of choice. Then, in 2017, Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary soldier outfit Blackwater, made noises about invading Miller's home turf to run for the U.S. Senate.

“This was part of Steve Bannon's grand plan,” Miller says. “I read about that, and it was like that scene in Godfather III when Pacino almost got out of the Mafia. I thought, Erik Prince is gonna be senator from Wyoming over my dead body.”

From his Buford cabin, Miller called old friends, gauging support for a run against Prince. When Prince dropped his plans for Wyoming, one of those friends told him not to give up on his comeback plans: “You want to run against a carpetbagger from back east, run against Liz.”

“She sure has absolutely no Wyoming street cred,” Miller says. “So I entered the Republican primary against her.”

“I got a $500 contribution from New York City,” Miller says, “but it was from the girl I took to the junior prom at Rawlins High School. Mostly I get $20, $30 contributions.”

Carpetbagger is not an unfair charge to levy against Elizabeth Cheney, whose longest stretch in Wyoming until she ran for Congress was the two years she spent there in sixth and seventh grade. In 2014, Cheney dropped her bid for the Senate after it was discovered that she hadn't been a Wyoming resident long enough to qualify for a fishing license.

In 2016, a chastened Cheney won the state's at-large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she has ably represented the Republican Party's extreme right on domestic issues. Cheney opposes abortion rights and gay marriage, a stance that caused a rift with her gay (and married) sister, Mary, and has said she wants to do away with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. As a freshman congresswoman, she introduced legislation to require congressional approval for denying coal leases on federal lands, a direct hit at Obama-era attempts to stop what had been criticized as a giveaway to the coal industry. (She really loves coal.) When asked what the Republican Party should do about climate change, Cheney's one-word answer was worthy of her taciturn father: Nothing.

The majority of Cheney's campaign contributions come from out of state and hit $651,111 in August, thanks to big bucks from coal and defense industries. Meanwhile, Miller, who is eschewing PAC money and corporate contributions, trails mightily with a war chest in the high four figures. “I got a $500 contribution from New York City,” Miller says, “but it was from the girl I took to the junior prom at Rawlins High School. Mostly I get $20, $30 contributions.”

Miller has managed to win passionate support in Wyoming, and not just among the state's handful of Volvo drivers, with a social-media-heavy effort that's become a test for what constitutes modern campaigning. Cheney is well-equipped to go the traditional route of a last-minute TV blitz, but Miller is killing it on social media with the help of his “hipster” videographer, a former editor at the Sundance Institute named Mike Vanata. He's working the retail politics hard, cracking wise at every picnic and barbecue from Cody to Cheyenne and engaging in the occasional barroom debate, including one at the Bear Trap Cafe & Bar in Riverside, where he went mano a mano with two Democrats and a painting of Liz Cheney propped up in a chair, live-streamed on video by the local newspaper.