CHEYENNE, Wyoming –
Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, leader of the Republican resistance against former President Donald Trump, is fighting to save her seat in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday as voters weigh in on the direction of the GOP in two states. deep red.
Cheney’s team is bracing for a loss against a Trump-backed challenger in the state in which he won by the largest margin during the 2020 campaign.
Win or lose, the 56-year-old daughter of a vice president vows to stay in national politics as she contemplates a 2024 presidential bid. But in the short term, Cheney faces a serious threat from Republican opponent Harriet Hageman, a lawyer for the cattle industry in Cheyenne who has harnessed the full fury of the Trump movement in his attempt to oust Cheney from the House.
In Jackson, Republican voter Dan Winder said he felt betrayed by his state’s only representative in the House.
“Over 70% of the state of Wyoming voted Republican in the last presidential election and she turned around and voted against us,” said Winder, a hotel manager, explaining her vote for Hageman. “She was our representative, not hers.”
Cheney’s allies struggled not to lose hope in the hours before the polls closed.
“I’m still hoping the poll numbers are wrong,” said Landon Brown, a Wyoming state representative and a vocal Cheney ally. “It will be a real shame if she loses. It shows how much dominance Donald Trump has over the Republican Party.”
Tuesday’s races in Wyoming and Alaska offer one of the final tests for Trump and his brand of hard-line politics ahead of the November general election. So far, the former president has largely dominated the fight to shape the GOP in his image, having helped install loyalists in key general election matchups from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania.
This week’s contests come just eight days after the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Florida property, recovering 11 sets of classified records. Some were marked “compartmentalized sensitive information,” a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets. Initially, the Republican Party supported the former president, although the reaction turned somewhat mixed as more details emerged.
In Alaska, a recent change in state election law gives a regular Trump critic, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a chance to survive the former president’s wrath, even after she voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial.
The four primary candidates for the Senate in Alaska, regardless of party, will advance to the general election in November, where voters will rank them in order of preference.
In all, seven Republican senators and 10 Republican members of the House joined all Democrats in supporting Trump’s impeachment in the days after his supporters stormed the US Capitol as Congress tried to certify the president’s victory. Joe Biden.
Only two of those 10 House members won their Republican primary this year. The rest have either lost or refused to seek re-election. Cheney would be only the third to return to Congress if she defies expectations on Tuesday.
And Murkowski is the only pro-impeachment senator running for re-election this year.
He faces 18 opponents, the most prominent of whom is Republican Kelly Tshibaka, who has been endorsed by Trump, in his effort to preserve a seat he has held for nearly 20 years. Trump criticized Murkowski on social media and in his home state of Alaska, where he staged a rally with Tshibaka last month in Anchorage.
Unlike the vulnerable GOP candidates who reached out to Trump in other states this summer, Murkowski continues to tout his bipartisan credentials.
“When ideas from both sides come together, a little bit of compromise in the middle, this is what lasts beyond administrations, beyond changes in leadership,” the Republican senator said in a video posted online. social over the weekend. “This is what allows for stability and certainty. And it comes through bipartisanship.”
On the other side of the GOP tent, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, hopes to spark a political comeback on Tuesday.
Backed by Trump, he finished first among 48 candidates to qualify for a special election seeking to replace Rep. Don Young, who died in March at age 88, after 49 years as the only House member from Alaska. In fact, Palin is on Tuesday’s ballot twice: once in a special election to complete Young’s term and once for a full two-year term in the House beginning in January. She is running against Republican Nick Begich and Democrat Mary Peltola in the special election and a larger field in the primary.
Always an outsider, Palin has spent the last few days attacking Murkowski, a fellow Republican, and those who instituted the open primary voting and ranked-choice system in 2020.
“I have said all along that ranked voting was designed to benefit Democrats and RINOs, specifically Senator Lisa Murkowski (who had no chance of winning a Republican nomination) along with other members of the Murkowski family. the political dynasty in Alaska,” Palin wrote in a recent statement calling for the law’s repeal.
Back in Wyoming, Cheney’s political survival may depend on persuading enough Democrats to vote in his Republican primary. While some Democrats have backed it, it’s not clear if there are enough of them in the state to make a difference. Biden got just 26% of Wyoming’s vote in 2020.
Ardath Junge of Cheyenne said he recently changed his registration from a Democrat to a Republican.
“I did it just to vote for Cheney because I believe in what he’s doing,” said Junge, a retired school teacher.
Many Republicans in the state, and in the country, have basically excommunicated Cheney for his outspoken criticism of Trump. The House Republican Party ousted her as the House’s No. 3 leader last year. And more recently, the Wyoming Republican Party and the Republican National Committee censored it.
Anti-Trump groups like U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s Country First PAC and the Republican Accountability Project have worked to encourage independents and Democrats to support Cheney in recent weeks. They are clearly disappointed in the expected outcome of Tuesday’s election, though some are hopeful about her political future.
“What’s remarkable is that in the face of almost certain defeat, she never wavered,” said Sarah Longwell, executive director of the Republican Accountability Project. “We have been watching an American national figure take shape. It’s funny how small the election feels, the Wyoming election, because she feels bigger than that now.”
Cheney has apparently welcomed the defeat by devoting nearly every resource at his disposal to ending Trump’s political career since the insurrection.
He emerged as a leader on the congressional committee investigating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack, giving the Democratic-led panel genuine bipartisan credibility. He, too, has devoted most of his time to the committee rather than to the campaign trail at home, a decision that still fuels murmurs of disapproval among some Wyoming allies. And he has closed the primary campaign with an unwavering anti-Trump message.
“In the 246-year history of our nation, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” former Vice President Dick Cheney said in a recent ad produced by his daughter’s campaign.
He continued: “There is nothing more important for her to do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never near the Oval Office again.”