Liz cheney

“This is our great task and we will prevail. I hope you will join me in this fight,” Cheney concludes.

Cheney is looking far beyond Tuesday’s Republican primary for this state’s at-large seat in the U.S. House, a race that she is likely to lose, barring an unprecedented surge of non-Republican voters into the GOP contest.

She entered Congress six years ago as a relative celebrity, the daughter of the former vice president who spent several years using Fox News appearances to deliver acid-tongued critiques of the Obama-Biden administration. And she could exit the U.S. Capitol, likely in 4 1/2 months, as the face of an anti-Trump movement that has cost her old alliances but left her with new supporters, clamoring for a next act more nationally focused.

“I sure hope she runs for president,” James Rooks, elected to Jackson’s town council as a self-proclaimed “fierce independent,” said while sitting in a coffee shop looking up at Snow King Mountain.

Cheney has fielded questions about her ambitions since first taking office, but the intensity ramped up after this summer’s blockbuster hearings, in which she has served as vice chairwoman of the committee investigating the ex-president’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.

“I’ll make a decision on 2024 down the road,” she told CNN in late July.

But Cheney is clear-eyed when it comes to her chances of actually winning the presidential nomination in a party that is still so loyal to former president Donald Trump, according to friends and advisers. She sees her future role similar to how she views the work of the Jan. 6 committee: Blocking any path for Trump back to the Oval Office.

“It’s about the danger that he poses to the country, and that he can’t be anywhere close to that power again,” she told a crowd of supporters in Cheyenne just before the committee hearings launched in early June.

Traditional conservatives opposed to Trump have already discussed the possibility of Cheney running for the White House. “That chatter was very strong even before that Dick Cheney commercial,” Dmitri Mehlhorn said, referring to a campaign ad that ran nationwide on Fox News and featured the former vice president denouncing Trump.

Mehlhorn advises several donors across the political spectrum who are opposed to Trump, including the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. He said he and the donors he works with would consider funding a Cheney presidential bid.

In that regard, Cheney will spend the months after the committee concludes its work later this year figuring out her next steps. That might be launching a political organization that focuses on Trump, or some think-tank work matched with media appearances.

But, for certain, Cheney and a small but influential bloc of anti-Trump Republicans have decided that there must be a 2024 candidate who will run as an unabashed opponent of both the ex-president and other contenders who spew his mistruths about the 2020 election.

This anti-Trump group fears a repeat of the 2016 campaign, in which rivals refrained from attacking Trump’s unorthodox behavior and positions until it was too late. The emerging 2024 Republican presidential field consists of the former president, his allies looking to emulate him and a collection of other Republicans courting non-Trump voters but without forcefully denouncing Trump.

Cheney and her crowd want a candidate who would serve merely as a political kamikaze, blowing up his or her candidacy but also taking down Trump.

“You need that. I think it’s got to be somebody that’s willing to take the boos, take the yells,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, the only other Republican on the Jan. 6 committee, said in a recent interview. “Somebody [who] can stand on the stage and just tell people the truth, I think that would have a huge impact.”

Mehlhorn, the adviser to anti-Trump donors, said that if Cheney were to approach them “and say, you know, with an extra 10 million, I can make sure that Republican voters are reminded of how bad Trump is in a way that might allow someone else to emerge from the primary or might weaken him for the general, but I need another $10 or $20 million – look, we would take that seriously.”

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Cheney has been outspoken in her denunciations of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and other Republicans who have remained loyal to Trump despite his help precipitating the Capitol attack.

But she has also been upset with a separate group of Republicans who despise Trump but instead hope the ex-president will just fade away, particularly Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

“Where Kevin is like full-on public embrace, McConnell is: Ignore and hope he goes away. And that just doesn’t work,” Cheney told the authors of “This Will Not Pass,” a book about the fallout of the 2020 election.

But Cheney’s singular focus on preventing Trump from being reelected has come at a heavy cost. Her political world has turned upside down.

Over the weekend, McCarthy began hosting his annual big-donor fete in Teton Village, less than 15 miles north of Cheney’s polling place. It’s the same spot where Cheney and her father co-hosted a $1 million fundraiser on behalf of Trump in August 2019, but the resort owner has since denounced Cheney and is supporting her challenger, the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman.

Instead of her traditional GOP support, Cheney is trying to rally tens of thousands of Democrats and independents across Wyoming to cross over into the Republican primary.

Anecdotally, local liberals are perplexed by their rush of support after decades of seeing the Cheney family as the political enemy.

“I can’t believe I’m thinking about this. This world is insane,” Diana Welch, an adviser to Christy Walton, a billionaire heir to the Walmart fortune, recalled thinking. But last Monday, Welch happily co-hosted an event in nearby Wilson where Democrats, including local elected officials, outnumbered Republicans.

Alli Noland, a local public relations executive, spent years as a Democrat but eventually gave up a few years ago because the GOP primaries were so critical in this deeply conservative state.

She now organizes regular meetups at the Stagecoach Bar just outside Jackson for liberals interested in learning how to support Cheney.

And there are people like Mike May, who told his friends Saturday evening how, since the early days of the Bush-Cheney administration, he owned a Volkswagen bus with a blunt bumper sticker: “Cheney is a creep.”

His more traditional truck now has a “Cheney for Wyoming” sticker on it. He said he attended the Monday event just to tell her “thank you” for standing up to Trump.

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According to state records, the shift is real.

On Jan. 1, Republicans had more than 196,000 registered voters, while Democrats had about 46,000. By Aug. 1, Republicans gained 11,000 new voters, Democrats lost 6,000 and those voters unaffiliated with either party dropped by 2,000.

Teton County, traditionally the only liberal-leaning spot in Wyoming, now has more registered Republicans than Democrats, and voters can switch parties up until Tuesday’s primary.

The Teton County clerk, Maureen Murphy, reported a stunning tilt in early voting toward Republicans: 3,749 votes had been cast in the GOP primaries by the end of Monday, and just 190 came in the Democratic contests.

Cheney supporters believe those numbers suggest a real surge in crossover voters. Rooks, the Jackson councilman, has spent the past weeks proselytizing to Democrats and independents to join him crossing into the GOP primary, with a good amount of success.

“I have two friends who just can’t do it,” Rooks said, recalling one who got into an early voting polling station and ran out without voting for Cheney.

Republican friends are a much tougher sell, he said. “I might as well be trying to tell them to denounce their faith.”

That scares Noland, who warns that the push to get non-Republicans into the primary has only driven traditional GOP voters away from Cheney. “It’s really fired up all the Republicans,” she said.

If Cheney loses the usual Wyoming Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin, as polls suggest, she would need something along the lines of 40,000 Democrats and independents to cross over – an insanely high figure in a state where just 115,000 voted in the last midterm GOP primary.

Even these crossover voters, like Patrice Kangas, have moved beyond Tuesday’s outcome and want to know what comes next. As she recounted at the Stagecoach, she waited in line quite awhile to meet Cheney after the Monday event ended and finally asked whether she would run for president.

“Go big?” Kangas said.

“Oh,” Cheney responded, “I don’t know yet.”

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The Washington Post’s Hannah Knowles contributed from Washington.

Win or lose in deep-red Wyoming, the 56-year-old daughter of a vice president is vowing not to disappear from national politics as she contemplates a 2024 presidential bid. But in the short term, Cheney is facing a dire threat from Republican opponent Harriet Hageman, a Cheyenne ranching industry attorney who has harnessed the full fury of the Trump movement in her bid to expel Cheney from the House.

“I’m still hopeful that the polling numbers are wrong,” said Landon Brown, a Wyoming state representative and vocal Cheney ally. “It’ll be a crying shame really if she does lose. It shows just how much of a stranglehold that Donald Trump has on the Republican Party.”

Tuesday’s contests in Wyoming and Alaska offer one of the final tests for Trump and his brand of hard-line politics ahead of the November general election. So far, the former president has largely dominated the fight to shape the GOP in his image, having helped install loyalists in key general election matchups from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania.

This week’s contests come just eight days after the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Florida estate, recovering 11 sets of classified records. Some were marked “sensitive compartmented information,” a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets. The Republican Party initially rallied behind the former president, although the reaction turned somewhat mixed as more details emerged.

In Alaska, a recent change to state election law gives a periodic Trump critic, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an opportunity to survive the former president’s wrath, even after she voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial.

The top four primary Senate candidates in Alaska, regardless of party, will advance to the November general election, where voters will rank them in order of preference.

In all, seven Republican senators and 10 Republican House members joined every Democrat in supporting Trump’s impeachment in the days after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress tried to certify President Joe Biden’s victory.

Just two of those 10 House members have won their GOP primaries this year. The rest have lost or declined to seek reelection. Cheney would be just the third to return to Congress if she defies expectations on Tuesday.

And Murkowski is the only pro-impeachment senator running for reelection this year.

She is facing 18 opponents — the most prominent of which is Republican Kelly Tshibaka, who has been endorsed by Trump — in her push to preserve a seat she has held for nearly 20 years. Trump railed against Murkowski on social media and in her home state of Alaska, where he hosted a rally with Tshibaka last month in Anchorage.

In contrast to vulnerable Republican candidates who cozied up to Trump in other states this summer, Murkowski continues to promote her bipartisan credentials.

“When you get the ideas from both sides coming together, little bit of compromise in the middle, this is what lasts beyond administrations, beyond changes in leadership,” the Republican senator said in a video posted on social media over the weekend. “This is what allows for stability and certainty. And it comes through bipartisanship.”

On the other side of the GOP’s tent, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential nominee, hopes to spark a political comeback on Tuesday.

Endorsed by Trump, she finished first among 48 candidates to qualify for a special election seeking to replace Rep. Don Young, who died in March at age 88, after 49 years as Alaska’s lone House member. Palin is actually on Tuesday’s ballot twice: once in a special election to complete Young’s term and another for a full two-year House term starting in January. She’s running against Republican Nick Begich and Democrat Mary Peltola in the special election and a larger field in the primary.

Ever an outsider, Palin spent recent days attacking Murkowski, a fellow Republican, and those who instituted the open primary and ranked-choice voting system in 2020.

“I’ve said all along that ranked-choice voting was designed to benefit Democrats and RINOs, specifically Sen. Lisa Murkowski (who stood no chance of winning a Republican nomination) along with other political dynasty family members in Alaska,” Palin wrote in a recent statement calling for the law’s repeal.

Back in Wyoming, Cheney’s political survival may depend upon persuading enough Democrats to cast ballots in her Republican primary election. While some Democrats have rallied behind her, it’s unclear whether there are enough in the state to make a difference. Biden earned just 26% of Wyoming’s vote in 2020.

Many Republicans in the state — and in the country — have essentially excommunicated Cheney because of her outspoken criticism of Trump. The House GOP ousted her as the No. 3 House leader last year. And more recently, the Wyoming GOP and Republican National Committee censured her.

Anti-Trump groups such as U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s Country First PAC and the Republican Accountability Project have worked to encourage independents and Democrats to support Cheney in recent weeks. They are clearly disappointed by the expected outcome of Tuesday’s election, although some are hopeful about her political future.

“What’s remarkable is that in the face of almost certain defeat she’s never once wavered,” said Sarah Longwell, executive director of the Republican Accountability Project. “We’ve been watching a national American figure be forged. It’s funny how small the election feels — the Wyoming election — because she feels bigger than it now.”

Cheney has seemingly welcomed defeat by devoting almost every resource at her disposal to ending Trump’s political career since the insurrection.

She emerged as a leader in the congressional committee investigating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack, giving the Democrat-led panel genuine bipartisan credibility. She has also devoted the vast majority of her time to the committee instead of the campaign trail back home, a decision that still fuels murmurs of disapproval among some Wyoming allies. And she has closed out the primary campaign with an unflinching anti-Trump message.

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” former Vice President Dick Cheney said in a recent ad produced by his daughter’s campaign.

He continued, “There is nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.”