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JACKSON, Wyo. – The two-minute video, ostensibly meant as a final appeal to voters here, probably served much more as a launching pad for a campaign that will last for years to come.
“No matter how long we have to fight, this is a battle we will win,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) says to the camera, promising to lead “millions of Americans” of all ideological stripes “united in the cause of freedom.”
“This is our great task and we will prevail. I hope you will join me in this fight,” Cheney concludes.
Cheney is looking well beyond Tuesday’s Republican primary for that state’s at-large seat in the U.S. House, a race he is likely to lose barring an unprecedented surge of non-Republican voters in the contest in GOP.
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 scathing criticism of the Obama-Biden administration. And she will leave the Capitol, probably 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 more focused next act at the national level.
“I sure hope he runs for president,” said James Rooks, elected to the Jackson city council as a self-proclaimed “fierce independent,” as he sat in a cafe overlooking Snow King Mountain.
Cheney has fielded questions about her ambitions since she first took office, but the intensity increased after successful hearings this summer, in which she served as vice chair of the committee investigating the role of the ‘former president in the January 6, 2021 uprising at the United States Capitol.
“I will make a decision in 2024 in the future,” he said CNN in late July.
But Cheney is clear-eyed when it comes to his 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 as similar to how she sees the Jan. 6 committee’s job: to block any path for Trump to return to the Oval Office.
“It’s about the danger he poses to the country and he can’t be anywhere near that power again,” he told a crowd of supporters in Cheyenne just before committee hearings that began in early June.
Traditional anti-Trump conservatives have already discussed the possibility of Cheney running for the White House. “That talk was very strong even before that Dick Cheney ad,” said Dmitri Mehlhorn, referring to a campaign ad that it was broadcast nationally on Fox News and featured the former vice president denouncing Trump.
Mehlhorn advises several donors across the political spectrum who oppose Trump, including billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Most are willing to provide critical funding for a Cheney bid.
In that sense, Cheney will spend the months after the committee finishes its work at the end of the year figuring out his next steps. This could be the launch of a Trump-focused political organization, or think tank work combined with media appearances.
But Cheney and a small but influential bloc of anti-Trump Republicans have certainly decided there must be a 2024 candidate who will run as a brazen opponent of both the former president and other contenders who launched the his falsehoods 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 is made up of the former president, his allies seeking to emulate him, and a collection of other Republicans courting non-Trump voters but not strongly denouncing Trump.
Cheney and his crowd want a candidate who will only serve as a political kamikaze, blowing up his candidacy but also taking down Trump.
“You need it. I think it has to be somebody who’s willing to take the yelling,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), the only other Republican on the Jan. 6 committee, in a recent interview. “Someone [who] If he can get on stage and tell people the truth, I think that would have a huge impact.”
Mehlhorn said his team of anti-Trump donors would take a Cheney campaign designed solely to attack Trump “seriously” enough to put at least $20 million behind it.
That way, he said, “Republican voters are reminded of how bad Trump is in a way that might allow someone else to get out of the primary.”
Cheney has been outspoken in her accusations against House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other Republicans who have remained loyal to Trump despite their help that precipitated the attack on the Capitol .
But he has also chafed at a separate group of Republicans who despise Trump but hope the former president fades away, particularly Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“Where Kevin is like a 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 aftermath of the election of 2020.
But Cheney’s singular approach to preventing Trump from being re-elected has come at a high cost. His political world has turned upside down.
Over the weekend, McCarthy began hosting his annual big-donor party in Teton Village, less than 15 miles north of Cheney’s polling place. It’s the same place where Cheney and his father jointly hosted a $1 million fundraiser on Trump’s behalf in August 2019, but the resort’s owner has since denounced Cheney and is supporting the his rival, Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman.
Instead of his traditional GOP support, Cheney is trying to rally tens of thousands of Democrats and independents across Wyoming to move into the Republican primary.
Anecdotally, local liberals are perplexed by their rush to support after decades of viewing the Cheney family as the political enemy.
“I can’t believe I’m even thinking about this. This world is crazy,” Diana Welch, an adviser to Christy Walton, billionaire heiress to the Walmart fortune, recalled thinking. But last Monday, Welch happily co-hosted an event in Wilson where Democrats, including local elected officials, outnumbered Republicans.
Alli Noland, a local PR executive, spent years as a Democrat but finally quit several years ago because the Republican primary was so critical in this deeply conservative state.
He now hosts regular meetings at the Stagecoach Bar outside Jackson for liberals interested in learning how to support Cheney.
And there are people like Mike May, who told friends on Saturday evening how, from the early days of the Bush-Cheney administration, he owned a Volkswagen bus with a bold bumper sticker: “Cheney is an idiot.”
His more traditional truck now has a “Cheney for Wyoming” sticker. He said he attended Monday’s event just to say “thank you” for standing up to Trump.
Seconds to declare recordsthe change is real.
As of Jan. 1, Republicans had more than 196,000 registered voters, while Democrats had about 46,000. On August 1, Republicans gained 11,000 new voters, while Democrats lost 6,000 and unaffiliated voters fell by 2,000.
Teton County, traditionally Wyoming’s only liberal-leaning seat, now has more registered Republicans than Democrats, and voters can switch parties until Tuesday’s primary.
Teton County Clerk Maureen Murphy reported an impressive tilt in early voting toward Republicans: 3,259 votes had been cast in the GOP primary as of late Friday and only 166 had come in the Democratic contests.
Cheney supporters believe these numbers suggest a real increase in crossover voters. Rooks, the Jackson alderman, has spent the past few weeks proselytizing Democrats and independents to join him by moving into the Republican primary, with good success.
“I have two friends who just can’t do it,” Rooks said, recalling one who walked into an early voting college and walked out without voting for Cheney.
Republican friends are a much harder sell, he said. “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 primaries has only alienated traditional GOP voters from Cheney. “He really fired up all the Republicans,” he said.
If Cheney loses Republican incumbents in Wyoming by a 2-to-1 margin, as polls suggest, he would need something like 40,000 Democrats and independents to get through, an incredibly high number in a state where only 115,000 voted in the last primary Midterm GOP.
Even those crossover voters, like Patrice Kangas, have moved beyond Tuesday’s result and want to know what comes next. As he told Stagecoach, he waited a long time in line to meet with Cheney after Monday’s event ended and finally asked if he was running for president.
“Going big?” Kangas said.
“Oh,” Cheney replied, “I don’t know yet.”
Hannah Knowles contributed from Washington
