Wyoming held its primary on Tuesday and as expected, Liz Cheney decisively won the GOP nod for the state’s only House seat. Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, defeated state Sen. Leland Christensen 40-22. Cheney should have no trouble in November in this solidly red state.
Cheney’s victory comes less than three years after the end of her disastrous U.S. Senate campaign. In 2013, Cheney announced that she would challenge Sen. Mike Enzi in the primary, and as we’ve detailed in the past, things started going wrong for her almost immediately. Enzi was popular with fellow Republicans, and Cheney struggled to come up with a good reason for voters to fire him. Cheney had only moved to Wyoming from Northern Virginia in 2012, and she didn't do a particularly good job dispelling the idea that she was a carpetbagger. Most memorably, just 72 days after closing on her new Wyoming residence, Cheney filled out an application with the state for a fishing license that listed her as a 10-year Wyoming resident.
Ugly drama also followed Cheney. Her campaign against Enzi angered ex-Sen. Alan Simpson, a longtime friend of the Cheneys, and he got into a nasty fight with the family. Cheney had a terrible relationship with the state's newspapers: While picking fights with the media usually works in GOP primary campaigns, it's not such a great strategy in a place where newspapers are still strong and have loyal conservative readers. And worst of all, Cheney got into a feud with her openly gay sister after the candidate publicly claimed she opposed marriage equality in the face of right-wing attacks. The well-connected Cheney had trouble raising cash against Enzi, and she even lied about how much she brought in. In the face of awful polls, Cheney dropped her campaign in early 2014, and Enzi went on to easily win renomination.
However, Cheney got the chance to redeem herself sooner than she probably expected. In November 2015, GOP Rep. Cynthia Lummis unexpectedly announced that she would retire. Cheney soon expressed interest in a House bid, and she kicked off her bid in early February. Aside from accidentally announcing her campaign on Facebook from Virginia, Cheney’s second bid for Congress went completely smoothly. Simpson supported her this time, and she raised a massive amount of money.
And while there may still have been voters who disliked Cheney from 2013, they didn’t have one candidate to rally behind. Neither Christensen, state Rep. Tim Stubson, nor Christian Broadcasting Network executive Darin Smith raised much money or earned many influential endorsements, which prevented any of them from emerging as Cheney’s main rival. This race soon became a snoozer, and Cheney won her Tuesday primary without much trouble.