The Wyoming congresswoman has emerged as the GOP’s most prominent critic of former President Trump after voting to impeach him and sitting on the House committee investigating his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Trump and his allies have made ousting Cheney a priority over the past year, backing attorney Harriet Hagman (R). And while recent polls have shown Hageman leading by a wide margin, Cheney has made it clear she won’t go down without a fight, even as some Republicans recognize her views and policy approach have put her in a difficult position.
“I think it’s debatable whether she should have come out and blown herself up that way, because obviously it’s going to cost her her position and her platform, but she chose a different path. And I think everybody has to make their own decisions in life,” said Scott Jennings, a GOP strategist and former special assistant to former President George W. Bush, who said he “respected” the Cheneys.
Cheney was among 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the rebellion on Capitol Hill, and since Jan. 6 she has emerged as the face of a small group of Republicans on Capitol Hill who continue to push back against their party. A few months after the attack on Capitol Hill, she said she regretted her decision to vote for the former president in 2020 and vowed to prevent him from returning to the White House again.
“I will do everything in my power to make sure that the former president never gets near the Oval Office again,” Cheney told reporters in May 2021, after House Republicans voted to remove her from leadership. position.
“We have seen the danger he continues to cause with his language. We have seen the lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution. And I think it’s very important that we make sure that whoever we elect is someone who is going to be true to the Constitution,” he said.
But of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, only two are seeking re-election after advancing in their primaries, while another seven chose not to run again or lost their nominations.
Some Republicans say that while they respect Cheney’s determination to stick to her conscience, they question her approach.
“I’m a big believer in people sticking to their guns and doing what they think is right for the country,” said one general. “So on the one hand, I really appreciate, you know, whether I agree or disagree with her approach to this, I appreciate and respect people who are willing to do that, because, frankly, there are very few of them in Washington. .”
“That said, I also think there’s a way to do that without poking a finger in the eye of a president or a former president or the party as a whole,” the general added.
Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has also maintained a conservative record. The Club for Growth gave her a 2021 legislator scorecard of 92 (she has a lifetime score of 69), while Heritage Action for America gave her a 78 percent score for the 2021-2022 session.
A Hageman adviser said the campaign felt good entering the primary, arguing that Hageman meets regularly with Wyomingites while Cheney does not. The adviser argued that Cheney was “more focused on her own agenda than the agenda of the people of Wyoming.”
But Hageman and Cheney have overlapped in the past. The New York Times reported last year, for example, that during the 2016 presidential cycle, Hageman once referred to Trump as “racist and xenophobic” and also “the weakest candidate.” He made the comments as he pushed for delegates to be allowed to vote for the candidate they wanted, not the way their state voted, in an effort to prevent Trump from taking the party’s nomination, according to CNN.
“By not having close primaries, we have Democrats often picking the candidates. They either pick the weakest candidate, or they pick the most moderate or the most liberal candidate in many, many, many of our races,” Hageman said during a 2016 Republican National Committee rules meeting, according to CNN .
Counsel Hageman pushed back against the context of the Times story.
“What Harriet thought [at the] The 2016 convention, she believes today, is that we need a closed primary system … in the Republican Party, and the argument she made to this reporter who has taken her words out of context is that Democrats will flood our primaries for to produce the most — the weakest candidate, right? That was the context that is missing from this quote,” the adviser said.
It’s this open primary system that may be Cheney’s best shot on Tuesday.
But primary polls in recent months have shown that Cheney faces an uphill battle. A survey released Thursday by the University of Wyoming Center for Research and Analysis showed 57 percent of state residents identified as likely voters in the primary backing Hageman, compared to 28 percent backing Cheney.
Andrew Garner, a professor who focuses on American and comparative politics at the University of Wyoming, noted that while it was likely that Hageman would win the primary based on recent polls, the margins could be closer than expected.
“I’d advise some caution, given that one of the big unknowns has to do with Democratic crossover votes for Cheney. This is such a unique situation in this particular contest, and so I’m not entirely sure how well the polls will be able to measure it,” he said in an email.
“National level contests are already difficult to poll accurately. Small state primaries are even more difficult. And when you have a low-turnout contest, like a primary in a small state, it doesn’t take a lot of people staying home, showing up, or changing their votes to create big changes,” he added.
Cheney’s campaign is increasingly relying on Democrats for support. The New York Times reported in June that Democrats in the state were receiving messages from her campaign about how to change their party registration in order to vote for her in the primary.
Gunner Ramer, the political director of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability PAC, has reached out to Democrats in the state to encourage them to vote in the GOP primary, which he said was not coordinated with Cheney’s campaign.
“If Liz’s support from Republicans is something that’s not great in the state of Wyoming, then you have to get creative in the way you think about campaigns, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with encouraging Democrats, regardless of the number , because we don’t know — we can’t predict elections,” Ramer said.
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As Cheney heads into Tuesday, it’s clear little has changed in the Wyoming incumbent’s messaging as she continues to hammer Trump and his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
A new ad released Thursday by her campaign showed Cheney calling those 2020 claims “poisonous lies” and “insidious.”
“After her work in the Jan. 6 hearings, she has as much right and information to speak about Donald Trump and her views as anyone,” said Jennings, the GOP strategist. “I don’t know how convincing she’s going to be for Republicans, but the point is … you don’t have to convince everybody, you just have to convince enough,” said Jennings, the GOP strategist.
