As Liz Cheney gave her defiant concession speech Tuesday night, after a bruising 37-point loss to her Republican primary opponent Harriet Hageman, her parents, former Vice President Dick Cheney and second lady, Lynne, looked on from their seats at the picturesque Mead Ranch, outside Jackson, Wyoming.
Liz is heir to the Cheney political legacy in the state, but that wasn’t enough to help her overcome her very public battle with former President Donald Trump. As Cheney said in her speech, “I will do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office.”
While many cheered her for what they saw as courage for being one of the few Republican lawmakers who was willing to publicly take on Trump, in a state he won with 70% of the vote in 2020, that message didn’t land well. While the Cheney name helped propel Liz to office in Wyoming, it wasn’t enough to help her overcome the perception that she was out of touch with the people she was elected to represent — a perception that has dogged her since she first declared her intention to run for office in the state.
And while Cheney lost resoundingly to Trump-backed Hageman, in one of the worst primary losses for an incumbent in modern political history, Trump only had mixed success in the state with his other endorsements. The Trump-backed candidate for state superintendent lost his race, while incumbent Gov. Mark Gordon beat his primary challenger, even though he’d publicly tangled with Trump.
Bob Beck, who has covered Wyoming politics for almost 40 years, most of that time for Wyoming Public Radio, said Gordon was successful because he “got out and talked to people.”
While, undoubtedly, Cheney lost her race because “Wyoming is a state that really, really loves Donald Trump,” said Beck, it’s also true that Cheney “hasn’t been around much since she was elected.”
“I think that’s always been a knock on her, that she doesn’t come back often,” he said.
Beck said when she did come back, she tended to go to places where she knew she wouldn’t encounter much opposition. Meanwhile, Hageman, daughter of a popular former state legislator, is considered a “Wyoming woman.”
His observations about Liz Cheney were echoed by Lincoln County GOP Chair Marti Halverson, a former state lawmaker and RNC national committeewoman.
“I know she did have a lot of meetings here in the state,” said Halverson. “They were private, invitation-only, and very exclusive. I don’t know how effective that is in rallying the voter base.”
When asked whether the Cheneys still held political power in the state, Halverson pointed to the votes Cheney received on election night.
“She did get 29% of the vote, so the Cheney family will still have some influence here,” she said.
But, ultimately, Halverson attributed Cheney’s loss to “her failure to represent the 70% of Wyoming Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.”
In an election year when Republican voters seem determined to punish establishment candidates who defied Trump, Cheney just didn’t have enough personal popularity to overcome what some in the party saw as a betrayal when she took up the fight against Trump on the Jan. 6 committee.
While the Cheneys have been part of the Republican establishment in Wyoming for decades, starting with Dick Cheney’s 10 years — from 1979 until 1989 — as Wyoming’s lone congressman, Liz Cheney has had to fight off accusations of carpetbagging since she decided to enter Wyoming politics in 2013. She had largely grown up in Virginia, and only moved back to the state not long before she announced her decision to run.
It also didn’t help, said Beck, that for her first foray into politics she chose to run in the Republican primary against the late Sen. Mike Enzi, then a popular incumbent.
“She was trying to push out a very nice guy who a lot of people liked,” he said. “Back then you didn’t run against incumbents. That got her soured with some people.”
Cheney ended up dropping her primary run, saying it was because of health issues in her family. She was also trailing Enzi badly in the polls, despite strong support from her father.
Even when he was vice president, Dick Cheney kept a hand in Wyoming politics. He stepped in to help then-Republican Congresswoman Barbara Cubin out of a political scandal after she said she’d like to slap a wheelchair-bound opponent in 2006. Cubin looked like she was going to lose the usually-safe seat for Republicans until Cheney flew to Wyoming to campaign for her, helping to push her just past her Democratic opponent in that year’s general election.
Dick Cheney’s continuing popularity likely helped Liz in 2016, when she made her first successful run for office, winning the at-large congressional seat in Wyoming that was once her father’s. She won two subsequent elections, but barring a run in the general election as an independent, Liz Cheney will no longer hold that seat after the 2022 midterms.
In defense of his daughter this year, Dick Cheney came out swinging against Trump in an ad he made for her campaign.
“In our nation’s 246 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” said Cheney. “He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election and he lost big. I know it, he knows it, and deep down I think most Republicans know it.”
Liz Cheney has vowed to carry on the fight against Trump. A Cheney spokesman told Politico this week that Cheney would launch an organization to organize opposition to Donald Trump. The morning after her loss, Cheney told NBC she was thinking about running for president, whether as a Republican or an independent.
While she clearly has national ambitions, in Wyoming Liz Cheney’s quest for public office is likely done, ending for now the Cheney dynasty in the state.