One would be forgiven for thinking Rep. Liz Cheney (R) was running against former President Donald Trump himself in Wyoming’s primary elections this week. She wasn’t, but she lost anyway — to a candidate Trump had endorsed.
Ironically, both Cheney and Trump seem to think the race was about him. She blamed Trump for her loss on Tuesday and vowed to continue to fight for the “foundational principles that Donald Trump continues to undermine.” Trump also credited himself for Cheney’s loss, saying he hopes she’ll now “disappear into the depths of political oblivion.”
Wyoming Republicans must feel the same way about Cheney — because she lost to her primary opponent by more than 36%.
Trump, however, isn’t the reason Cheney lost. Cheney lost because she’s Liz Cheney, a politician of the old establishment order who chose to focus her reelection campaign on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the supposed threat to democracy that Trump represents instead of the pressing issues voters actually care about. Maybe that makes her noble or courageous or whatever else the Democrats are saying she is. But Cheney wasn’t running as a Democrat. She was running as a Republican. And to Republican voters, she was out of touch and elitist.
Maybe that’s because, as Cheney likes to claim, Republican voters are incapable of seeing Trump’s faults. They’re just not looking hard enough or they would applaud her for joining Democrats’ partisan Jan. 6 committee, the only goal of which is to disqualify Trump from running again, and approve of her vote to impeach him, as if the Democrats who voted alongside her could be trusted to deal with Trump rationally.
Or maybe Republican voters are just really tired of hearing Cheney talk about Trump. She could have rejected Trump’s efforts to make her reelection effort about him. Her voting record confirmed she voted alongside him more than some of his closest allies did. And if she had stuck to espousing normal conservative positions, like when she voiced support for the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, her constituents may have been more sympathetic to her plight.
Instead, she decided to focus her entire campaign on the Capitol riot — something most Washington Democrats barely care about, let alone Wyoming Republicans — and recruited her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, to run a campaign advertisement on her behalf blasting Trump as the greatest threat to our nation in its entire history. In its entire history. If the former president was an obstacle to Liz Cheney’s reelection, it’s because she made him one.
The truth is that Liz Cheney represents a kind of politics that most Republican voters left behind when they elected Trump to the White House in the first place. She’s a part of the system — one of those entrenched family politicians who will always choose the establishment over the voters she’s supposed to represent.
When was the last time you heard Liz Cheney mention inflation? Or the border crisis? Or any one of the cultural issues that has parents ready to fight? In fact, when was the last time you heard Liz Cheney actually say her primary opponent’s name? (It’s Harriet Hageman, by the way.)
Liz Cheney allowed Trump to control the terms of her reelection. But really, he didn’t have to do much. All he did was throw his support behind her opponent and point out the obvious problem with electing someone like Liz Cheney: She’s always going to hate him more than she loves serving the state of Wyoming.
