What Cheney doesn’t know — until now — is that a band of Trump-loving Republicans will be on hand to greet her. They snapped up roughly a quarter of the 350 tickets, at $10 apiece, to give the embattled congresswoman a piece of their minds.
“I was here when the … Democrats dragged her father’s effigy down a village road behind a truck at one of their rallies, and those are the people who are supporting her now, that she’s embraced,” an angry Rebecca Cloetta, 66, said over breakfast at a greasy spoon called the Virginian.
“Can you believe it? Charging for a ticket! It’s a slap in the face,” said Rebecca Bextel, 41, another Trump-backing Republican planning to attend the voting event. “We have one person representing us” — Wyoming has a single House member — “and she shows up in town and it costs $10 to see her. It’s embarrassing.
“She is not,” Bextel vowed, “going to get reelected.”
Bextel may well be correct. Though there’s been scant public polling of her primary campaign against Trump-backed Harriet Hageman, it’s apparent that Republicans in Wyoming — which voted for Trump over Joe Biden, 70 to 27 percent, in 2020 — have turned against Cheney en masse since Jan. 6, 2021.
Republican U.S. House candidate Harriet Hageman talks to a supporter at a campaign event on March 7, 2022, in Cheyenne, Wyo.
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Mead Gruver/AP Photo
Just as obvious is that Cheney needs Democrats and independents to change their party registration and cast their vote for her in the Aug. 16 primary. Her campaign is loath to talk strategy publicly, but the math doesn’t lie — and neither do Cheney’s actions on the ground here in recent months.
She has shunned town halls and other voter forums in Wyoming’s overwhelmingly red counties in favor of controlled events. At the March 22 event, which is being hosted by Issue One, a bipartisan organization that advocates for “sweeping reforms to fix our broken political system,” Cheney will answer pre-selected questions.
When Cheney was censured by the state Republican Party in February 2021, three of the eight votes against the move were by officials from Teton County, which encompasses Jackson. The dissenters included Mary Martin, now the county’s GOP chair.
Since then, however, Martin has soured on Cheney. She said the congresswoman is rarely in the state, despite having been urged to explain why she voted to impeach Trump.
“She was absolutely invited to come and present what her facts were, to defend why you are doing this and instead she opted to call the Republicans radicals, which has made people upset within the party,” Martin said from the Jackson mansion of Nancy Donovan, a prominent Republican donor in Wyoming.
“She’s not in the state, she has not been anywhere, maybe one or two places,” Donovan echoed. “She doesn’t show up … she’s very entitled. Her parents have events at their house, I’ve spent money to go to her house to fund her. … I truly will never vote for her again.”
Martin went further, calling Cheney’s work on the Jan. 6 committee “duplicity.”
“She’s been MIA since Jan. 6. And what we all truly believe is that the Wyoming seat is a stepping stone to running for president in 2024 and she needs to get Trump out of the way. And to raise money, she’s using the anti-Trump commentary,” Martin speculated.
An empty chair labeled “Representative Cheney” sits in front of a meeting room in Rawlins, Wyo., on Feb. 6, 2021. The Wyoming Republican Party central committee voted to censure Rep. Liz Cheney for voting to impeach President Donald Trump. Republican officials said they invited Cheney, but she didn’t attend.
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Mead Gruver/AP Photo
Cheney declined to be interviewed for this story. But she told The New York Times last month that she will not openly court Democrats by supporting a “Democrats for Cheney” group or encourage an existing political action committee, dubbed “Switch for Wyoming,” that encourages Democrats to vote in Republican primaries.
Without an aggressive campaign strategy to win over Democrats, it might seem like a tough sell: Cheney, after all, voted with Trump 93 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight. But some Democratic voters in Jackson are embracing her. They appreciate Cheney’s work in Congress prosecuting Trump and they’re ready to switch parties to vote for her.
Even if they’re not ready to admit it publicly.
“I think her politics are crap, but I like how much hate she gets from the people of Wyoming,” said a 27-year-old event planner who will register as a Republican for the first time to vote for Cheney. He asked not to be named because “it’s a small town.”
“There are a lot of things about her that don’t appeal to me as a gay man,” he said. “She was not supportive of her sister until it came out in the news, and that is a big red flag. … At the same time, it’s Wyoming, a population of 500,000. Every vote counts.” Wyoming’s population is just under 579,000, according to U.S. Census figures.
Pete Jenkins, 54, a contractor who’s lived in Wyoming for three decades, said he identifies personally as a Democrat — he did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020 — but is registered as a Republican just to have some influence in Wyoming politics. He said he intends to vote for Cheney — and has heard from lots of other Democrats planning to do the same.
“I think it’s a fairly popular thing,” he said of the party-switchers-for-Cheney movement.
Cheney needs as many of them as she can get.
Wyoming political strategists say the only path to victory for Cheney is with the help of Democrats and independents. The state’s 2018 Republican primary for an open governor’s seat is instructive. Mark Gordon, the GOP state treasurer at the time, was facing stiff competition from the right. More than 10,000 voters switched parties or registered as Republicans for the first time between the primary and general elections.
Gordon won the primary by 9,000 votes against candidates that included Hageman. Turnout was 116,000 and Gordon received just shy of 39,000 votes.
While Cheney has yet to overtly court Democrats, her decision to aggressively investigate Trump as a leader of the select Jan. 6 House committee naturally appeals to voters who detest the former president.
Cheney allies are hopeful that crossover voters will bail her out this time. They are counting on a primary with at least two pro-Trump GOP candidates that will divide the anti-Cheney vote. With the help of even half of the 73,000 Democrats who voted for Biden in 2020, they believe Cheney could pull it off.
That theory isn’t lost on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has told members that he’s worried that the numbers add up for Cheney and that she might be back in Congress next session, according to a source with direct knowledge of the discussions. McCarthy did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump, too, is worried that Democrats will help reelect Cheney. He backed a bill in the Wyoming legislature that would have barred voters from switching parties on the day of a primary election in order to vote for a candidate of another party.
But that proposal died in the Wyoming legislature last week.
At an event in Cheyenne earlier this month where nearly 200 people in cowboy hats and boots showed up to support Hageman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) urged voters to call their legislators to back the measure.
“I’ll tell you this, there’s only one way Liz Cheney wins, and that’s if you let Democrats vote in your primary, so you need to call your state rep and let them know,” he said just days before the bill died.
After the event, Hageman told reporters, “I’m fully confident I can win this race whether the crossover bill happens or not. … It’s something that’s been an issue in our state for many years, it’s not just 2020.”
A progressive organizer who helped get the Democratic vote out for Gordon in 2018 crunched the numbers based on a hypothetical three-way race between Hageman, Cheney and Republican state Sen. Anthony Bouchard. The person said Bouchard — because he remains popular among the MAGA set even after Trump endorsed Hageman — could play spoiler by drawing as much as 15 percent of the vote.
That could open the door just enough for Cheney to slip through, the organizer said.
It will depend on Cheney’s “on-the-ground voter engagement — not high-priced advertising campaigns that will quickly saturate Wyoming’s small markets,” the person said. “We know at least some of these voters will vote if they think their vote will make a difference in a race that means something to them.”