Voters in Wyoming on Tuesday decide the fate of former House GOP conference chairwoman Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) as she faces off against challenger Harriet Hageman after her decision to abandon Wyoming values to pursue a crusade against former President Donald Trump in the wake of the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Cheney has aggressively attacked Trump for over a year from her perch on the January 6 Committee in the House, a post to which she was appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi–a Democrat–in an unheard of arrangement that Pelosi engaged in when she kicked actual Republicans off the committee and then House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy withdrew his Party from it altogether. Cheney, who was one of the 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump in early 2021 in his second impeachment, has made her crusade against the former president the centerpiece of her time in office and even lost her conference chair position in the process. Trump, meanwhile, has moved to settle the score with her by endorsing Hageman, a rock-solid conservative who is now polling well above double digits ahead of Cheney in every poll conducted in the lead-up to the election.
While Cheney seems destined for embarrassing defeat barring any last second surprises, many in establishment media have done their best to make it appear as though her political career is not finished. What she does next, assuming she loses as expected, will be extremely telling and this whole saga could tell the nation a lot about the future of the GOP as Republican voters move further and further away from the failures of the Bush years–Cheney’s father is literally the former Vice President Dick Cheney–and onto successes of America First economic nationalism.
Also on Tuesday in Alaska voters will decide which candidates will advance to the general election in November in two important races, the U.S. Senate race for the seat currently occupied by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and for the open congressional seat vacated by the passing of the late Rep. Don Young (R-AK). What’s more, a special election for the remainder of Young’s term will take place as well. The state’s former Gov. Sarah Palin is running in both races–the special election and the 2022 election–and she has the endorsement of Trump. Trump has backed Kelly Tshibaka in the race against Murkowski, where the top-four vote-getters, Murkowski and Tshibaka, are expected to be among them, as well as a Democrat and another candidate, likely a libertarian, will advance to the general election for a ranked-choice vote in November.