Trump effect: Wyoming Republican Party votes to expel Rep. Liz Cheney from party

By
Suzanne Downing
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The Wyoming Republican Party on Saturday voted narrowly, 31-29, to no longer recognize Rep. Liz Cheney as a member of the party.

The vote comes eight months after the Alaska Republican Party did the same, voting to not only censure Sen. Lisa Murkowski, but to also ask her to leave the party. The Alaskan Republicans also voted to search for another candidate to run, and in June endorsed candidate Kelly Tshibaka.

The Alaska vote to censure Murkowski was a landslide at 77 percent in favor of the censure resolution, which was offered by House District 23 Chairman Kris Warren of Anchorage.

In Cheney’s case, this was the second vote taken against her. The first was a censure of her after her vote to impeach President Donald Trump in February. During that vote, only eight of the Wyoming GOP’s 74-member central committee opposed the resolution to censure.

Murkowski, too, voted to convict Trump during that impeachment, which occurred after Trump was no longer in office. That’s what got her in deep trouble with her base back home in Alaska. She has not attended a Republican event since that fateful March vote and can have no support from any of the Republican affiliates, including women’s clubs, which often provide lots of volunteers for candidates.

While Murkowski has just one viable opponent in Tshibaka, Cheney faces at least four Republicans who want to unseat her in the 2022 primary. One of them, attorney Harriet Hageman, has been endorsed by Trump, just as Alaskan Tshibaka has Trump’s endorsement.

Cheney has long been considered a moderate but has recently yanked the wheel of her political expression to the left, angering conservatives across the nation even more than at home in Wyoming.

Although Alaska Republicans are strongly anti-Murkowski in the polls, Alaska’s senior senator has enjoyed support from the middle and left, and she has the financial backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a fundraising PAC that supports her incumbency.

Cheney has been U.S. representative for Wyoming since 2017.

Seventeen Republican members of Congress voted to impeach or convict President Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection following the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Of those, six have been censured, and five have been rebuked by their state parties.