Legislative Service and Gubernatorial Bid
Jones was elected to the Wyoming House in 1954 and elevated by voters to the Senate in 1956, where he served until he resigned to run for governor in a bid to succeed retiring Republican Governor Stanley K. Hathaway. Jones was also the Wyoming Senate President from 1967 to 1968 and for a time was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. While he was a senator, Governor Hathaway named him to the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education.
Jones won the Republican nomination for governor by only 834 votes (1.4 percent) over his closest competitor, then state Senator Malcolm Wallop, a New York City-born rancher and businessman from Sheridan in northeastern Wyoming. Two years later, Wallop would unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Gale W. McGee. Jones received 15,502 (26.5 percent) of the primary ballots to Wallop's 14,688 (25.1 percent). Two other candidates were marginally behind, Roy Peck, a newspaper publisher from Riverton, with 14, 217 (24.7 percent), and Clarence Brimmer (born 1922), with 14,014 (24 percent). Brimmer was appointed in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., to one of the Wyoming federal judgeships and has announced his retirement. There is no runoff election in Wyoming; so Jones' primary plurality was sufficient for the nomination.
Jones then faced Democrat Edgar Herschler of Kemmerer in Lincoln County. With 19,997 votes (46.6 percent), Herschler defeated two primary rivals, Harry E. Leimback and John J. Rooney, who polled 15,255 (35.5 percent) and 7,674 (17.9 percent), respectively. Rooney had been the unsuccessful 1970 Democratic nominee against Hathaway. Herschler prevailed, 71,741 (55.9 percent) to Jones' 56,645 (44.1 percent). The national political mood worked against Republicans in light of the Watergate scandal though nearly all of the Republican candidates nationally had nothing to do with the matter. The total Republican vote in the primary had been 58,421. So Jones failed to acquire 1,776 votes cast in the Republican primary and made no apparent gains among Democrats. Herschler, however, polled 28,815 more votes in the general election that the combined Democratic primary total. Herschler served three terms as governor from 1975 to 1987.
In 1978, former Republican State Senator John C. Ostlund (1927–2004) of Gillette, the seat of Campbell County in northeastern Wyoming, polled 67,595 votes (49.1 percent) in his unsuccessful effort to deny Herschler a second term. Ostlund's vote was hence 10,950 more than Jones' had been four years earlier.
Jones was thereafter a financial supporter of Reagan in 1976, 1980, and 1984 and contributed to various Republican candidates in Wyoming during that time as well as the state GOP and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. In 1999, he became a contributor to the first presidential campaign of U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona. He also donated to former primary rival Malcolm Wallop and former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Cody.
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