This Tuesday there are primary elections in Wyoming and it is most likely that at the end of the day Harriet Hageman, a lawyer for the cattle industry, who opposes Liz Cheney, the architect of the resistance against the former president, will win. donald trump in the House of Representatives.
Cheney won Trump’s hatred when he twice supported his disqualification trial and was recently one of the most active participants in congressional investigations into the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6 last year.
But this Tuesday he is fighting to save his seat in the lower house because the former president managed to mobilize the most extreme of his followers in Wyoming. In any case, the eldest daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney has already warned, even if she is not elected in the Republican primary, she will not retire from politics.
“I’m still hoping the poll numbers are wrong,” said Landon Brown, a Wyoming state representative and a Cheney ally. “It will be a real shame if she loses. It shows how much dominance Donald Trump has over the Republican Party.”
Tuesday’s races in Wyoming and Alaska offer one of the final tests for Trump and his brand of hard-line politics before the november general election. So far, the former president has largely dominated the fight to mold the GOP in his image, helping install loyal candidates in key election matchups from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania.
The primary comes a week after the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Florida property, where it recovered 11 sets of classified records. Some were marked “compartmentalized sensitive information” or “top secret,” categories meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets.
Initially, the GOP supported the former president, though reaction fractured over the weekend as more details emerged.
In Alaska, a recent change in state election law gives a regular critic of Trump, US Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a chance to survive, even after she voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial.
The four primary candidates for the Senate in Alaska, regardless of party, will advance to the general election in November, where voters will rank them in order of preference.
In all, seven Republican senators and 10 Republican members of the House joined all Democrats in support impeachment of Trump for disqualification.
Only two of those 10 House members have won their Republican primary this year. The rest have either lost or refused to seek re-election. Cheney would be only the third to remain in Congress if she manages to defy the odds. And Murkowski is the only pro-impeachment senator running for re-election this year.
Unlike the vulnerable GOP candidates who reached out to Trump in other states this summer, Murkowski continues to tout his bipartisan credentials.
“When ideas from both sides come together, a little bit of compromise in the middle, this is what endures beyond administrations, beyond leadership changes,” the Republican senator said in a video posted on social media. during the weekend. “This is what allows for stability and certainty. And it comes through bipartisanship.”
But on the other side of the Republican stage is Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and former vice-presidential candidate, who hopes to stage a political comeback on Tuesday.
Backed by Trump, she finished first among 48 candidates to qualify in a special election seeking to take the place of Rep. Don Young, who died in March at age 88 after 49 years as the only member of the House of Representatives. for Alaska.
In fact, Palin appears twice on Tuesday’s ballot: once in a special election to complete Young’s term and once for a full two-year term in the House beginning in January. She has run against Republican Nick Begich and Democrat Mary Peltola in the special election and against a larger field in the primary.