Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) blowout loss to primary challenger Harriet Hageman is just “the latest sign that the central organizing principles of today’s Republican Party are tethered less to specific policies,” we are told, “than to whatever Mr. Trump wants at any given time.”
But is that really the lesson?
Especially when plenty of Republican candidates have also survived primaries despite publicly defying former President Donald Trump in the most high-profile situations, just ask Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Cheney’s real problem is that she abandoned any effort to engage in policy and defined herself entirely as anti-Trump. Just look at her press releases, the vast majority of which have nothing to do with subjects that matter to the people of Wyoming and everything to do with Trump.
Republican primary voters care about real issues that affect their daily lives, such as inflation, illegal immigration, and education. They don’t believe Trump represents some unique threat to democracy, especially when Cheney’s partner on the Jan. 6 committee voted not to certify President George Bush’s 2004 election or when Stacey Abrams is still running around claiming she won the 2018 Georgia governor’s race. To average voters, Cheney’s heartburn about contested elections seems awfully selective.
If you want to know how to prevent Trump from becoming president again, which Cheney says she will “do whatever it takes” to accomplish, look at Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
As hard as Democrats tried to make the 2021 Virginia governor’s race about Trump, Youngkin stuck to the issues of inflation and education, scoring a surprise win in a state that had become reliably Democratic recently.
In Florida, DeSantis has relentlessly delivered for his constituents, fighting President Joe Biden to keep schools open, closing organizations that facilitated illegal immigration, and ridding universities of woke indoctrination.
As a result of his relentless focus on specific policies, DeSantis now leads Trump in polls in Florida and New Hampshire and has closed ground with him nationally. However, Cheney has already said she couldn’t support DeSantis.
If anti-Trump Republicans want to keep losing, then, by all means, they should continue the Cheney blueprint of focusing on Trump all the time. But if they want to win for a change, they should do the hard work of identifying specific policies they support and find candidates willing to run on those issues.
