IS LIZ CHENEY TOAST? A new poll in the Casper Star-Tribune shows Republican and Jan. 6 committee star Rep. Liz Cheney losing big to challenger Harriet Hageman in the Wyoming House GOP primary. The survey has Hageman’s support at 52% and Cheney’s at 30%, with minor candidates or undecideds making up the rest of the total.
A 22-point lead is pretty hard to overcome with less than a month to go before the Aug. 16 primary. And remember, the Wyoming primary is a winner-take-all affair. Whoever gets the most votes wins the Republican nomination. There won’t be a runoff or any other second act. The Republican winner then goes on to certain victory in November’s general election in heavily Republican Wyoming.
Hageman’s lead in the poll is roughly consistent with other surveys of the race. “Polling from Wyoming is limited, but what does exist paints an ominous picture [for Cheney],” CNN’s Harry Enten wrote recently in an article headlined “Why Liz Cheney is in a lot of trouble in Wyoming.” The poll is just the latest confirmation of warning signs for Cheney.
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Why is Cheney so far behind? Most coverage of her predicament has focused on her starring role with the Jan. 6 committee, and especially on her vow to make sure that, one way or another, former President Donald Trump will not be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. Trump, of course, is popular in Wyoming. He won the state in 2016 with 68.2% of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 21.9%. In 2020, Trump won with 69.9% to Joe Biden’s 26.6%.
So, it is no surprise that Cheney’s Ahab-like fixation on getting Trump is unpopular in a state where so many voters have a favorable view of the former president. The Casper Star-Tribune poll fleshed that out with three questions related to Cheney’s work on the Jan. 6 committee.
One question was: “Do you approve of Liz Cheney’s decision to serve on the January 6 committee?” Sixty-three percent of voters likely to participate in the primary said no, versus just 29% who said yes. Another question was: “Has Liz Cheney’s opposition to Trump affected her ability to deal with the important Wyoming issues?” Sixty-one percent said yes, while 34% said no. And finally: “Has Liz Cheney’s performance on the January 6 committee made you more or less likely to vote for her?” Fifty-four percent said less likely, while 22% said more likely and 24% said it had no effect at all.
Hageman, on the other hand, has received Trump’s endorsement. Some of the former president’s top political aides are now working for her campaign. And no visitor to her website could miss the “ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP!” declaration on the home page. The endorsement of the man who won nearly 70% of the vote in two presidential elections in Wyoming is no small thing.
So, it is easy to see the race as All About Trump. But here’s the thing: It’s more complicated than that. The Trump factor in the race is important in part because it revives an accusation that has followed Cheney for a decade — that she long ago left Wyoming, spent most of her life somewhere else, and returned to the state only to win political office.
Cheney’s family roots in Wyoming go back generations. But, as CNN noted in 2013, Cheney herself “was born in Wisconsin and grew up in Virginia’s DC suburbs before attending college in Colorado and law school in Illinois … She spent most of her career working in the nation’s capital before moving to Wyoming last year.”
The accusation that Cheney is a carpetbagger arose in 2012 when, 46 years old and living in Virginia, she bought a house in Wyoming. The house, in Wilson, “a posh enclave a few miles west of Jackson,” in the words of the Associated Press, was listed for $1.9 million. “She lives in Virginia but lately has been showing up at Republican events around Wyoming,” AP reported. “While Liz Cheney would be unlikely to take on any member of the all-Republican and safely popular Wyoming congressional delegation, the visits have led to speculation she has an eye on office.”
It turned out the AP was wrong. Cheney did intend to take on a member of the all-Republican and safely popular Wyoming congressional delegation, GOP Sen. Mike Enzi. In July 2013, Cheney announced her candidacy for Enzi’s seat, which Enzi very much intended to keep. Cheney apparently thought her family name, and a lot of money raised outside of Wyoming, would be enough to muscle Enzi out of the race. A baffled Enzi told reporters, “I thought we were friends.”
Enzi proved more popular than Cheney thought. And Cheney faced criticism as the opportunistic outsider. Republican Cynthia Lummis, now a senator from Wyoming but at the time the representative holding the seat Cheney holds today, “blasted Cheney as a carpetbagger who will wind up losing to Enzi,” according to a CBS report. “When somebody’s never gotten a paycheck in Wyoming and lived their whole adult life in Virginia, I think they should run for Virginia,” Lummis said. “That’s her home state.” Cheney was the outsider who had joined forces with outsiders to oust a true Wyomingite.
In early 2014, Cheney gave up. “Her team’s early optimism that the 69-year-old Enzi could be driven into retirement quickly faded as the three-term incumbent’s resolve actually seemed to stiffen in response to Cheney’s bid,” Politico reported. But she kept looking for opportunities. In 2015, Lummis announced her retirement, and Cheney ran for the House. This time, she won, taking her seat in January 2017, just as Trump was entering the White House. Cheney was reelected by big margins in 2018 and 2020. Memories of Cheney’s carpetbagger gambit faded.
But now, they are back. Cheney’s Jan. 6 crusade, in which she has allied with Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and other national Democrats who are extremely unpopular with Republicans, has reminded some Wyomingites of everything they didn’t like about Liz Cheney.
Hageman is taking every opportunity to tell Wyoming that she has deep roots in the state and that, unlike some people, she didn’t leave. In an introductory ad, her brother Hugh said, “Harriet and I grew up together on our family ranch with the rest of our brothers and sisters. Our family has been in Wyoming since before statehood. Wyoming is in our DNA.”
Hugh Hageman then went into a list of what his sister has done for the state while Cheney was far away. It was pure Wyoming. “Harriet has spent her career fighting for us against unelected bureaucrats trying to change our way of life,” he said. “She beat them when they tried to take control of our irrigation and water rights. She beat them when they tried to force our livestock producers to use RFID ear tags and register every ranch with the federal government. When the Forest Service tried to block access to 3.2 million acres of national forest lands in Wyoming, she fought back. And she forced the federal government to turn over management of our grey wolf population to the state of Wyoming. I know she’ll protect us and fight for us because she already has.”
In Hageman’s latest ad, airing now, she pledges to stop “the radical Pelosi-Cheney agenda in D.C.” And while that is standard political ad speak, as far as Jan. 6 is concerned, there actually is a Pelosi-Cheney agenda in D.C. What Cheney has done by joining the House speaker and Jan. 6 committee Democrats is revive Wyoming suspicions that she is an outsider who only comes to the state seeking political opportunity and position. Those suspicions existed well before Trump ran for the presidency. They are still around today.
“The perception of her among people in Wyoming is that she has always been the D.C. elite,” said a Hageman adviser. “The stuff with the Jan. 6 committee, appearing on TV all the time, the way the national media just fawns all over her. Every time she is on TV, it is worse for her. CNN loves her. MSNBC loves her. The New York Times loves her. That is not the audience you shoot for in Wyoming.”
Certainly not for Wyoming Republicans. Which is why Cheney, desperate for votes, has turned to the state’s Democrats for support. Wyoming law allows voters to change their party affiliation on Election Day. On her website, Cheney is encouraging Democrats to become Republicans solely for the purpose of voting for her over Hageman. But here’s the problem: There aren’t enough Democrats in Wyoming to save her.
There are only 282,207 registered voters in Wyoming, according to the latest numbers from the secretary of state. Of them, 34,925 are not affiliated with any party, 43,285 are Democrats, and 200,579 are Republicans. (The remaining few are Libertarians, Constitution Party, and others.) It does not take a math whiz to see that if Hageman has a huge lead among Republicans, which seems to be the case, Cheney cannot win by asking Democrats to switch parties and vote for her.
So, it appears that yes, Liz Cheney is toast. But just remember, when news coverage of her race focuses on Trump, Trump, Trump, Cheney’s problems in Wyoming started well before Donald Trump became a serious political force. Recent events have just brought those long-standing problems back to the fore.
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