August 17, 2022 |
Incumbent Congresswoman Liz Cheney was booted from her House seat Tuesday, completing a long fall from political grace that began with her impeachment vote against then President Donald Trump.
At 3:06 a.m. this morning, with 95 percent of the votes counted, Harriet Hageman was up 38-percentage points over the incumbent.
CNN didn’t need to wait that long to announce the winner. Cheney was losing to Trump-endorsed Hageman by a 20-point margin when the liberal cable news channel announced Hageman the winner at 8:17 p.m., a little over an hour after the poll closed.
Pictured above: Photos courtesy Harriet Hageman, Liz Cheney/Facebook.
The outcome was clear from the start. By 7:30 p.m., Hageman had jumped out to a 16 point lead with 7,000 votes counted in Natrona and Sweetwater Counties. By 8 p.m. with results from Platte and Park Counties coming, Hageman’s lead climbed to nearly 35 points.
Minutes after the CNN called the race for Hageman, Cheney took to a stage on a cattle ranch outside Jackson where she conceded defeat and vowed to continue the fight that had cost her Wyoming’s sole seat in the U.S. House.
Cheney’s lopsided defeated concludes a free-fall that began with the Wyoming Republican party disowning her last year and then the loss of her leadership position in Congress.
About a half-hour after Cheney delivered her remarks in Jackson, Laura Ingram of Fox News asked Hageman during a live segment about the phone call Cheney said she had made to Hageman conceding the race.
Although much of the discussion on CNN and in Cheney’s speech itself focused on election deniers, Trump supporters who still question the fairness of the 2020 election process, the defeated incumbent refused take the vote as a sign that she has taken a wrong a path. She vowed to continue her personal fight against Donald Trump.
Cheney at separate points in her concession speech compared herself to Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses Grant, who suffered defeats, she said, before seizing victory.
Hageman responded to Cheney’s single-minded fixation with Trump as an enemy of the United States and the Constitution.
Leading up to the election, polling showed Cheney trailing by 30 points overall, and as much as 57 among Republican primary voters. Teton County sealed the long-standing perception that it is in Wyoming but not of it. Jackson went for Cheney by a 50-point margin over her Trump-back. Albany County was the only other county in the state where Cheney won. The Democrat stronghold with a university town and a large contingent of state workers who commute to Cheyenne gave Cheney a nine-point win, likely on the strength of cross-over voting.
Hageman will join Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, who both extended their congratulations. Lummis called Hageman a “tireless fighter for Wyoming.” Barrasso said in a statement that Hageman “will be tremendous ally in the fight unleash American energy, combat inflation and secure the southern border.
