When former President Donald Trump came to Casper, Wyoming, to campaign for Liz Cheney’s opponent in today’s Republican primary, he called out: “Liz, you’re fired!”
The crowd responded with raucous cheers. They will be part of those who vote today to end Cheney’s attempt to keep her seat in the House of Representatives.
Harry Enten, CNN’s political analyst, predicts she will go down in flames by more than 20 points. The latest poll is predicting closer to 30 points.
In a state that went for Trump by more than a 40-percent margin in 2020, Cheney has only herself to blame for her political banishment today. She was the state’s fair-haired girl, riding on strong name recognition (her father, Dick Cheney, was a Wyomingite who served as George W. Bush’s vice president) and a perceived conservative voting record. She first won election to the state’s only seat in the House in 2016 by 60 percent. She easily won reelection in 2018 and in 2020.
But then she voted to impeach President Trump. And then she accepted Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to co-chair the committee “investigating” the riot that took place during mostly peaceful protest on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.
The tide turned against her to the point where she was removed from the third-highest position in the House and voted out of the Wyoming Republican party.
The final nail in the coffin was her latest ad, featuring her father, that excoriated Trump, calling him a “coward” and not “a real man,” angering Wyoming Republicans.
Still, she continued to receive millions of dollars from out-of-state supporters who see today’s catastrophe at the polls as merely the first battle in the long war against Trump. A Cheney ally who was given anonymity by Yahoo News called today’s loss “the first battle in a much larger and longer war.”
How would that work, exactly? Jon Ward, writing for Yahoo, explained: In 2024 she would first run in the Republican presidential primary, attracting anti-Trump votes. She would then run as a “conservative” independent hoping to carry with her those disaffected voters in sufficient numbers to keep Trump from winning.
It would be a “spoiler” campaign, said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant, “designed to prevent Trump from becoming President. It [would be] designed to take from the GOP base and make it mathematically impossible for Trump to win.”
Cheney has a big hill to climb, but the presidential election is more than two years away. A Morning Consult poll released last week showed that 56 percent of Republican registered voters would choose Donald Trump in 2024, with Florida Governor Don DeSantis coming in a distant second, with 18 percent. Cheney came in tied for last place, at two percent.
Of the $15 million she has received, most of it from out of state, she has barely spent half in the losing campaign, possibly hoarding the balance for a run in 2024. In the meantime, she will work hard to burnish her image as a “staunch conservative,” probably with the help of the mainstream media.
Newsweek opened the first salvo in that coming battle, noting that “questions have begun to arise concerning whether she will run as the Republican’s Primary 2024 Presidential election candidate.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper said last week that there is no question: Cheney is going to run for the presidency in 2024. Following an interview with her last week, he concluded,
When you hear a politician talking about the country “standing on the edge of an abyss” and the need to elect “serious candidates,” well, it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to figure out what’s going on there.
Cheney will have some work to do to sell herself as that “staunch conservative.” The Epoch Times points out that “among the 211 Republicans in the House of Representatives, only 13 have a lower score this term … Cheney is easily among the 10 percent most liberal Republicans … [and] is easily among the five percent most liberal Republicans. You don’t get much more RINO than that.”
The Freedom Index, published by The New American and based upon how closely members of Congress follow the Constitution (to which they swear an oath to support and defend), shows Cheney at 60 percent. Put another way, when given the opportunity to vote in line with the Constitution, Cheney’s history shows she fails 40 percent of the time.
She voted for the $250 billion corporate welfare package for Big Tech known as the CHIPS Act, she voted for the gun-control bill, and she voted for Biden’s $1.5 trillion spending monstrosity in March.
Starting tomorrow, anyone thinking that Wyoming has offloaded Cheney into the dumpster of electoral history will be sorely disappointed. The RINO from Wyoming is just getting started.
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