Sam Mead, Wyoming son, fifth-generation rancher, whiskey maker, Blue Origin engineer and small-town politician, will run against U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate.
Mead, 36, grew up in Jackson Hole’s Spring Gulch, where his family has a long history of ranching and politics. He studied Italian, math and business at the University of Denver, worked as an engineer at the space firm Blue Origin, branded cattle in Hot Springs County, boosted production at his family’s Wyoming Whiskey distillery in Kirby and was elected mayor of that town, population perhaps 75.
“I think I had 13 votes,” Mead said of his first election to his mayor’s post.
While 13 votes don’t represent a winning tally for a U.S. Senate seat, even in Wyoming, there’s lineage and a deep political history behind Mead.
He is the great-grandson of the late Wyoming U.S. Sen. and Gov. Cliff Hansen, the grandson of the late Mary Mead, who ran for governor in 1990, and the nephew of former Gov. Matt Mead. His mom, Teton County school board member Kate Mead, ran for the state Legislature in 2018 but lost to Democrat Mike Gierau.
“There’s kind of a standard that you have to live up to,” he said of his family’s political heritage. “I don’t feel like I can sit on my hands anymore when Wyoming deserves so much better.”
In announcing his run, Mead pointed to Wyoming’s public lands and his desire that they remain public, the federal deficit that will plague his two children and countless others if not addressed and a lack of accountability on the part of Hageman, among other things. The proposed sale or “disposal” of millions of acres of public land in the West, endorsed by Hageman, spurred him into the race, he said.
“I think that’s incompatible with a lot of the values that I believe are central to people in Wyoming,” Mead said of public land disposal. Hageman never explained herself adequately, he said.
“And when confronted about it, there didn’t seem to be a lot of listening going on,” he said of the congresswoman. “It was kind of ‘dig your heels in and say that’s the way things are.’
“It seems like the only way you can explain that is there’s interests outside of Wyoming that think [public land sales/disposal] is a good idea,” he said. “I don’t know how you can defend that and say that you’re representing Wyoming.”
“Wyoming,” Mead said, “deserves better than that.”
Lessons learned
Mead learned from his time at Blue Origin, Wyoming Whiskey, at family ranches and as mayor, he said, and all that prepared him to run.
“A lot of what I like to do is identify things that can be improved,” he said of his time at the distillery. “We went from maybe 800 barrels a year that we were making to on the order of 3,000 barrels.
“It was quite a trial by fire,” he said. “You’re so rural, there’s no cavalry to call on you when you get into trouble. We just got down to business and got it done.”
Adversity steeled him, he said. “The only good lessons are hard lessons, and I certainly had a few there.”
His department at Blue Origin, where he manufactured parts for spacecraft, was like the Wild West, he said.
“We were trying to figure things out and solve challenges that, to my knowledge, no one had solved,” he said. “It was really cutting-edge.
“I don’t feel like I can sit on my hands anymore when Wyoming deserves so much better.”
Sam Mead
“It didn’t matter, really, who brought suggestions forward,” Mead said. “It was the merit of the suggestion that mattered.”
As Kirby’s mayor, “I learned that listening is one of the most important things,” he said. “Sometimes the best advice comes from the least expected places.”
Being a good leader, “it’s really just a willingness to work with other people — listen to everybody in the room and put the work in to get it done.”
The future
Mead and his wife, Brianna, have two children, “and I worry about the future of this country if we don’t start spending in a way that reflects what we can bring in in terms of revenue.” He said legislative measures have to ensure they will pay for themselves, and more.
Americans agree we can run our government more efficiently, he said. “But I think we need to fish where the fish are.”
He pointed to the military, which he believes should remain strong. But things like the procurement process are inefficient beyond the intent of reducing fraud. He pointed instead to NASA as a model where the agency has been successful with a strategy of “smaller, cheaper, faster.”
“I think we can apply some of our best thinkers and come up with a better way to do things,” Mead said.
The Wyoming delegation has to be more in touch, Mead said. “No representative of Wyoming should talk down to the people of Wyoming,” he said. “Our representatives need to listen to us, and they need to hear us.
“I’m someone who has a wide range of experience across a wide range of careers, and full confidence that I can serve the people in Wyoming,” Mead said. “I’ve always been drawn to really hard challenges, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get over my head every once in a while, but that’s largely served me well.”
