ROCK SPRINGS, Wyo.—There’s no secret cabal of Democrats working with Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) campaign to reelect the most ardent Republican critic of former President Donald Trump.
Many Wyoming Democrats will tell you openly that they’re switching parties on Aug. 16 to cast their ballots for Cheney in her GOP U.S. House primary against Fort Laramie land use-water rights attorney Harriet Hageman.
But few think it will matter.
Hageman, who has been endorsed by Trump, leads Cheney by nearly 30 percentage points—57 percent to 28 percent—with 41 percent saying that they’re voting more against Cheney than for Hageman, according to a University of Wyoming survey released on Aug. 11. The poll of 562 likely primary voters was taken July 25 to Aug. 6.
Unless Cheney has a stealth reservoir of support—“quiet Republicans,” she called them recently—within the GOP, there aren’t enough Democrats or, for that matter, enough non-Republicans, to have much efficacy in the state.
Math confirms the veracity of polls that show a very narrow path to a third term for Cheney, who enraged many Wyoming Republicans for voting to impeach Trump, serving as co-chair of the House’s Jan. 6 House committee, and being among Trump’s most severe, unrelenting critics.
Of 284,557 registered voters on Aug. 1, 207,674 were enrolled as Republicans, according to the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office. There were 39,753 registered Democrats and 33,769 registered as unaffiliated, with about 4,000 registered with third parties.
In January, the Secretary of State’s Office documented that there were 280,741 registered voters with 196,179 signed on to the Republican Party, 45,822 registered as Democrats, and 35,344 registered as unaffiliated.
Earlier polls indicate about 70 percent of the state’s Republicans support Hageman over Cheney. According to some estimates, the embattled incumbent would need at least 40,000 votes from non-Republicans to make up that interparty difference.
“We see some movement from registered Democrat to registered Republican,” Wyoming Democratic Party communications director David Martin told The Epoch Times regarding the past few months. “But we don’t believe it will influence the GOP (primary) as much as people think it will.”
At a weekly gathering of about a dozen Sweetwater County Democratic Party committee members at Los Cabos restaurant in Rock Springs on Aug. 12, there was no cabal or orchestrated plan to vote for Cheney—just people who say they want their vote to count in a state that’s overwhelmingly dominated by the Republican Party.
Carolyn Molson says that instead of asking for a Democratic ballot on primary day, she'll request a Republican one “because we have no voice as Democrats and no power” in the state.
Wyoming is one of six states where primaries are “partially open,” meaning that voters in one party can vote in another party’s primary if they register with the party before casting a ballot.
Therefore, under Wyoming law, voters can change parties on primary day by registering with the party they want a ballot for. If the state’s GOP-dominated legislature wanted to change that law, it would. But it shot down a proposal to close the primaries during its 2022 session so, obviously, a majority of lawmakers see “crossover” voting as a benefit to them.
“There are a lot of people trending in this direction,” Molson said. “I’m not going to be [a Republican] in the general election.”
