Just when Representative Liz Cheney’s (R-Wy.) political career appeared to be over, along comes an unnamed political operative in the state to give her gasping campaign a breath of hope. According to Politico on Monday, “State Senator Anthony Bouchard … [who] remains popular among the MAGA set even after Trump endorsed [Harriet] Hageman … could play spoiler by drawing as much as 15 percent of the [Democrat] vote.”
Without disclosing the source, or the political calculation, the numbers he (or she) used are persuasive. A small state — population under 600,000 — Wyoming went for Trump in 2020 by 70 percent. Some 78,000 Democrats, however, voted for Biden.
In a three-way primary between Cheney, Trump’s pick Harriet Hageman, and dark horse Bouchard, Cheney could win enough votes to make it through the midterms and then on to another term in the House of Representatives.
It will take a lot of Democrats, however, to accomplish this feat. DemocratsForLiz is pushing the meme onto disaffected Democrats. They are milking Trump distaste among them by declaring that “Donald Trump told America that he won the 2020 election, that it was stolen from him. THE BIG LIE. Knowing he lost, he stoked an insurrection on January 6th, 2021, to topple the U.S. Democracy.”
This is where Cheney’s participation in the January 6 theatrical production could help. At the moment voters are much more concerned about gas prices, the conflict in Ukraine, the immigration inundation, and the cost of food at the local grocery store. But her noisy rejection of Republicans who oppose her as “crazies” is drawing support from the tiny Democrat minority in the state.
Next week, Cheney, who has refused to make campaign stops in the dark red state, will instead appear at a bright “blue” event in the liberal elitist stronghold of Jackson Hole. She accepted the invitation to speak from the liberal group Issue One, which tantalizes those Democrats with the following questions on its website:
Were Trump’s claims of a rigged election properly investigated? YES!
Were there actually hundreds of thousands of votes for Biden dumped in the middle of the night? NO!
Were Democratic election officials complicit in “fraud” in Arizona? NO!
This is red meat for Democrats who hate Trump, and so Liz will be there for them, pitching them to cross over in the August primary (Wyoming allows last-minute changes in party affiliations) in sufficient numbers to send her back to Washington for another term. She will, according to reports, be speaking and then answering “preselected questions” from the host group.
Things might not go as planned at the event, however. Pro-Trump, anti-Cheney activists have snapped up a third of the 350 tickets to it and will likely make enough noise to make the papers. None of the top 10 newspapers in the state — the Casper Star-Tribune, the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, the Jackson Hole Daily, the Riverton Ranger, the Gilette News Record, the Sheridan Press, the Rocket-Miner, the Laramie Daily Boomerang, the Rawlins Daily Times, and the Northern Wyoming Daily News — endorsed Trump in 2020 in a state that overwhelmingly went for Trump.
So, while the math for Cheney’s potentially miraculous survival in the Republican midterms in August is persuasive, on the ground activists are working to make sure this is Cheney’s final political appearance in the Cowboy State.
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