Liz Cheney, daughter of the former Vice President Dick Cheney and head of the January 6 investigative committee, is tanking among Wyoming voters, according to a poll conducted by the Casper Star-Tribune. Cheney has represented Wyoming’s “At-large” district since 2017.
Cheney is being challenged in the August Wyoming Congressional primary by Harriet Hageman, an attorney native to Wyoming.
Cheney has been one of President Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics. She lost her position as the chairwoman of the Republican Conference for the 116th Congress; the Republican National Committee censured her in early 2022 after she took the Jan. 6 Committee position.
The local poll surveyed likely primary voters in Wyoming and found that Hageman has a 52 percent approval while Cheney has a mere 30 percent. Only 27 percent of Wyoming natives said they have a favorable view of Ms. Cheney.
Hageman has also been a critic of President Trump; in 2016, she publicly said that Trump was the weakest Republican candidate. In that presidential election cycle, Hageman supported Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). More recently, Hageman publicly said that she was wrong about her initial opinion of Trump. She has referred to him as the “greatest president of her lifetime.”
Hageman has garnered an endorsement from President Trump, who seems to be a magic talisman for most Republican Congressional candidates this election season. Of the 173 candidates Trump has endorsed, only a handful have not won their primaries.
At one time, Cheney was considered the third top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives. Her colleague, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has thrown his support behind Hageman.
Polled Wyoming voters cited Cheney’s participation in the January 6 investigation as the reason they no longer support her. Cheney has said that this work is the most important part of her professional legacy, but the Wyoming newspaper’s independent poll shows that at least 54 percent of Wyoming voters disagree.
Cheney had hoped that crossover or independent voters would make up the difference in support; the survey found that 69 percent of crossover voters said they would vote for Cheney. However, Cheney still trails a surprising 22 points in polls.
Just last month, it was publicly revealed that Cheney’s campaign was encouraging Democratic voters in Wyoming to change their party affiliation. The New York Times reported Cheney was emailing voters with instructions on how to do so; many political pundits claimed Cheney was attempting to shore up votes in doing so.
Cheney wasn’t the only House Republican who voted to impeach Trump in the aftermath of January 6. At least ten others did so. Since then, however, those Republican Congresspeople have either retired or they have chosen not to publicly bash Trump. Cheney has led the January 6 Committee with vigor, and she recently spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, where she admonished Republicans and suggested the party must either accept “truth or Trump.”
The poll conducted by The Casper Star-Tribune surveyed 1,100 registered voters in Wyoming between July 7 – 11. The margin of error in the poll is said to be +/- 3 percent.
The January 6 hearings began with televised evening-hours ratings of 18 – 20 million viewers across multiple stations. Approximately that many viewers watch the evening news on the same stations that broadcast the hearings, so no more people than normally watch the evening news tuned in to the hearings. The most-watched of the hearings has been the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson with 3 million viewers in mid-afternoon.
By contrast, President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in January drew 40 million viewers.
How do Americans feel about the January 6 incident and the hearings conducted in Congress? With inflation at 9.1 percent, gas prices hitting a historic high in June of more than $5 per gallon, and the price of basic groceries up by more than 11 percent, voters may have other priorities.
