Liz Cheney’s political stock is down, and allies of former President Donald Trump are ready to sink their teeth into a revenge primary challenge.
But grabbing and holding on to outrage over her vote to impeach Trump for over a year and organizing that opposition into a winning campaign makes for a long road for MAGA world.
The No. 3 House Republican is fighting off members who want to revoke her from her leadership position and already has one primary challenger, Wyoming state Sen. Anthony Bouchard. More are expected.
Florida congressman and MAGA figure Matt Gaetz, one of the Republican House members calling for Cheney’s removal, headlined an anti-Cheney rally in Wyoming on Thursday calling on Equality State GOP primary voters to defeat Cheney and “bring Washington to its knees.”
“Washington, D.C., mythologizes the establishment powerbrokers like Liz Cheney for climbing in a deeply corrupt game. But there are more of us than there are of them,” Gaetz said.
Cheney won her 2020 reelection with 69% support, on par with Trump’s 70% support there. But voters have turned on her in the wake of her impeachment vote and her scathing statement placing blame on Trump for the Jan. 6 mob that broke into the U.S. Capitol.
Donald Trump Jr. called into the rally on Thursday, and Gaetz held a cellphone up to a microphone so he could address the crowd.
“It seems like Liz Cheney’s favorables there are only slightly worse than her father’s shooting skills,” Trump Jr. said, referencing former Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shooting a hunting partner in 2006.
Trump’s Save America PAC this week circulated numbers from a McLaughlin & Associates poll that painted a bleak picture for Cheney, with 69% disapproval of her vote to impeach Trump and head-to-head matchups showing her trailing both Bouchard and potential primary challenger Chuck Gray, a state representative, by 27 points. Only 13% of voters said that they would vote to reelect Cheney regardless of her opponents.
Some argue that McLaughlin’s numbers are dubious. An internal poll from the firm in 2014 for then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor found he had 34% support in a primary that he lost a month later by 11 points.
But those in tune with Wyoming’s electorate say that the shift is real.
“She has a big problem,” said Bill Cubin, son of former Republican Rep. Barbara Cubin and a Wyoming party insider who said he is hearing a lot of frustration with Cheney. “When you upset people with a vote like that, well, then everything people have complained about but have overlooked comes back to the forefront.”
Cheney has shed much of the criticism that she is successful in politics due to being born into the establishment, the daughter of former vice president, who was previously defense secretary, White House chief of staff, and who held the same House seat 1979-89. But her impeachment vote reminded voters about the attributes that they don’t like, that she’s a neoconservative insider who seems more like ski resort destination Jackson than rural towns, Laramie and Rock Springs.
“She doesn’t fit in. And I don’t think she connects,” said Rob Jennings, a former Republican fundraiser now based in Cheyenne, and not a Cheney fan. “She’s a woman in a hurry.”
Allies of Cheney have faith that the effort to unseat her will fizzle out, believing 18 months is an eternity in politics. Anger about the 2020 election might not last that long.
The Wyoming congresswoman has the advantage of an organized and deep network of movers and shakers in the state working to spread the word to explain her impeachment vote and keep the outrage mob confined to the usual activist wing. They stand ready to jump to her defense.
“She’s been a steadfast and tireless advocate for my industry,” said Travis Deti, head of the Wyoming Mining Association.
Former state Rep. Amy Edmonds said that the strategy of flying in Gaetz, who promptly declared that he felt like he knew more about Wyoming than Cheney after being there for an hour, was not going to sway the needle.
“We do not like people coming in from outside and telling us what to do,” Edmonds said. “We’ve had other people come. Rand Paul has come here before and tried to stir up problems” — the Kentucky senator last year lobbied for an anti-war bill dealing with the state’s National Guard. “It didn’t work, and I just don’t think it’ll work this time either.”
Another point in Cheney’s favor is that Wyoming has an open primary, and many Democrats and independents vote in it to have a say in their representation because the GOP almost always wins the general election. They don’t want to get stuck with an incendiary right-winger representative like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But an institutional advantage only goes so far.
“You can only send them so many mailings,” said Jennings, the former fundraiser, noting that Cheney already has 100% name recognition. “It’s almost like Trump in the end with all of his tweets. It’s like, the more her face keeps showing up in your mailbox, the more you don’t like her.”
The effort back in Washington, D.C., to remove Cheney from her leadership position is her first battle in her impeachment vote fallout. But no matter how that goes, those in Wyoming don’t see that challenge as being closely tied to next year’s election or that it will be a determining factor.
The question is whether Cheney will face a formidable primary challenger. Bouchard is a Second Amendment activist type who some think lacks wider appeal. Gray, the other possible challenger that Trump’s PAC poll-tested against Cheney, has a background in conservative talk radio.
Ironically, Cheney could benefit from a wave of outrage challenges, resulting in splitting the anti-Cheney vote and delivering her a win.
MAGA world is aware of the problem a plethora of candidates poses, and they are not being subtle about trying to quell a barrage of challengers that fails to hit the target.
“Let’s find one person and back them,” Trump Jr. said at the rally on Thursday. “The only way that never-ending-war Liz Cheney stays in there is if 20 people run, 20 people split up the vote, and she gets a couple of the RINO losers together to actually take the biggest number. So let’s be careful about who it is. Don’t just back the first person that comes along.”
A few people in the rambunctious crowd responded by chanting Bouchard’s name.
David M. Drucker contributed to this story.
