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    Rudy Giuliani to Face Atlanta Grand Jury Investigating Trump Today

    The former New York mayor has been told that he is a target in the investigation concerning whether Donald J. Trump and his associates tried to illegally influence the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.ATLANTA — When Rudolph W. Giuliani traveled to Georgia’s capital city in December 2020 to make fanciful public accusations of election fraud on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, he was greeted in a manner befitting the emissary of the most powerful man on earth, and posed for photos with admirers and sympathetic state politicians.On Wednesday morning, Mr. Giuliani was back in Atlanta, this time under very different circumstances.The former New York City mayor, who was serving as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer after the November 2020 election, showed up shortly before 8:30 a.m. to appear before a Fulton County special grand jury conducting a criminal investigation into postelection meddling by Mr. Trump and his associates. Local prosecutors informed Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers this week that he was a “target” in that investigation, meaning that his indictment was possible.Instead of visiting the elegant gold-domed State Capitol — where he and a pro-Trump group made a number of false claims about election fraud, raising concerns about untrustworthy voting machines and suitcases of illegal ballots — Mr. Giuliani appeared a few blocks away at the Fulton County court complex, where Atlantans go to resolve real estate disputes, file for divorce or be arraigned for armed robberies.Mr. Giuliani arrived in a black Yukon Denali with his lawyer, Robert Costello, and Vernon Jones, a prominent Trump supporter in Georgia and a vociferous promoter of the unfounded idea that Mr. Trump won the state in 2020.Asked what he expected to talk about, Mr. Giuliani told a large crush of reporters outside the courthouse, “They’ll ask the questions, and we’ll see.”Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis has asked the F.B.I. to provide stepped-up security at the downtown courthouse, after Mr. Trump called prosecutors like her “vicious, horrible people.”Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers fought to keep him from having to travel to Atlanta. Instead, they offered to have him appear via videoconference, and argued that he was too feeble to travel by air after having a pair of cardiac stents inserted in early July. But Judge Robert C.I. McBurney ruled last week that Mr. Giuliani could always travel “on a train, on a bus or Uber.” On Monday, a lawyer for Mr. Giuliani declined to say how his client planned to get to Atlanta from New York.Mr. Giuliani is not the only high-profile member of Mr. Trump’s team who is less than thrilled about having to show up in Georgia to be asked about what prosecutors call “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was ordered by a federal judge on Monday to appear before the special grand jury.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSenator Lindsey Graham was ordered by a federal judge on Monday to appear before the special grand jury, after Mr. Graham tried to find a way out of it. Mr. Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said he would take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, arguing that under the Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution, his status as a senator shielded him from having to testify.“This weaponization of the law needs to stop,” Mr. Graham said in a statement. “So I will use the courts. We will go as far as we need to go, and do whatever needs to be done, to make sure that people like me can do their jobs without fear of some county prosecutor coming after you.”Two other lawyers on the Trump team, Jenna Ellis of Colorado and John Eastman of New Mexico, were scheduled to have hearings in their home states after Ms. Willis’s office filed “petitions for certification of need for testimony” concerning them. Such petitions are typically filed only when a potential witness refuses to testify or cannot be reached by prosecutors.In Ms. Ellis’s hearing on Tuesday, a court in Colorado ordered her to appear and testify before the special grand jury in Atlanta on Aug. 25. Mr. Eastman is expected to appear at a court hearing in Santa Fe on Aug. 26.It seems unlikely that Mr. Giuliani, 78, will say much to the grand jury when he is called to testify behind closed doors. “I just can’t imagine, at this point, him cooperating,” said Michael J. Moore, an Atlanta lawyer who served as a U.S. attorney in Georgia. “He’s got several avenues that he can take. One is to claim that he can’t answer questions because of attorney-client privilege. Another is because he’s been identified as a target, and he’s going to invoke the Fifth Amendment.”Still, the visit may be of use to the prosecutors leading the Georgia investigation, which Ms. Willis has said may result in racketeering or conspiracy charges against several defendants.Though it is not clear what charges Mr. Giuliani might face, witnesses who have already gone before the grand jury have said that the jurors were particularly interested in two appearances by Mr. Giuliani in December 2020 before state legislative panels, where he made a number of false assertions about election fraud.Unlike a trial jury, which would be instructed not to make any inferences about a criminal defendant’s silence, a grand jury is allowed to draw its own conclusions when witnesses or targets invoke their Fifth Amendment rights in declining to answer questions. (The special grand jury in Georgia cannot indict anyone; its job is to write a report saying whether the jurors believe crimes occurred. A regular grand jury could then issue indictments based on the special jury’s report.)Page Pate, a veteran Atlanta trial lawyer, said that prosecutors may also try to argue to a judge that attorney-client privilege does not apply to some questions asked of Mr. Giuliani, because of the “crime fraud exception” to the privilege, which essentially states that lawyers cannot be shielded from testifying if they helped their clients commit a crime.Even if Mr. Giuliani is successful in dodging questions much of the time, Mr. Pate said, important information about the scope of the scheme to reverse Mr. Trump’s election loss might still be divulged in the course of questioning.“Why not just grill him and see what happens?” Mr. Pate said.Outside the grand jury room, Mr. Giuliani has been talkative. In an interview on Monday with Newsmax, a far-right news channel, he said the Fulton County inquiry amounted to a “desecration of the Sixth Amendment,” which guarantees the right to a public trial and a lawyer, among other things.“I was his lawyer of record in that case,” Mr. Giuliani said, referring to Mr. Trump and his concerns about the election results. “The statements that I made are either attorney-client privileged, because they were between me and him, or they were being made on his behalf in order to defend him.”In total, 18 people are known to have been identified as targets of the investigation, including 16 pro-Trump “alternate electors” in Georgia who were sworn in on the same day as the state’s legitimate presidential electors. On Tuesday afternoon, 11 of the alternate electors began an effort to potentially disqualify Ms. Willis and her office from handling the case — an attempt connected to Ms. Willis’s previous disqualification from one portion of the investigation.In July, Judge McBurney prohibited Ms. Willis and her office from developing a criminal case against Georgia State Senator Burt Jones, a Trump ally and alternate elector, citing a conflict of interest — namely, that Ms. Willis, a Democrat, had headlined a fund-raiser for a fellow Democrat running against Mr. Jones in the race for lieutenant governor.Judge McBurney ruled that the decision to bring charges against Mr. Jones must be left to a different prosecutor’s office.On Tuesday, a lawyer for 11 of the alternate electors asked the court to disqualify Ms. Willis and her office from the entire proceeding, or at least to let the 11 electors be part of the “carve out” affecting Mr. Jones, on the grounds that all of the electors “have significant roles” in the state Republican Party, and that most of them had supported Mr. Jones’s campaign for lieutenant governor. 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    What Liz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss Says About the State of the G.O.P.

    Representative Liz Cheney’s martyr-like quest to stop Donald J. Trump has ensured her place in Republican Party history. But her lopsided defeat in Wyoming on Tuesday also exposed the remarkable degree to which the former president still controls the party’s present — and its near future.Ten House Republicans voted to impeach Mr. Trump in early 2021 for his role inciting the mob that stormed the Capitol. Only two have survived the 2022 Republican primaries, a breathtaking run of losses and forced retirements in a chamber where incumbents typically prevail with ease.No single defeat was as freighted with significance as Ms. Cheney’s, or as revealing of the party’s realignment.The sheer scope of her loss — the daughter of a former vice president was defeated in a landslide — may have only strengthened Mr. Trump’s hand as he asserts his grip over the Republican Party, by revealing the futility among Republican voters of even the most vigorous prosecution of the case against him.Casting her mission of combating election denialism as a moral imperative and her work as just beginning, Ms. Cheney pledged to “do whatever it takes” to prevent a second Trump presidency. “Freedom must not, cannot and will not die here,” she declared in her concession speech on Tuesday night in Jackson.Not long ago, Ms. Cheney had been seen as a rising Republican star, even a potential House speaker-in-waiting. Now, after becoming her party’s most dogged Trump detractor — turning the Jan. 6 committee hearings into a bullhorn with which to warn of the dangers Mr. Trump and his enablers posed to the party, the country and even democracy itself — she is soon to be out of her job.Ms. Cheney had hoped the Jan. 6 riot would be a turning point for Republicans. It did prove to be a dividing line. But it was those who crossed Mr. Trump who have suffered the electoral consequences.“She may have been fighting for principles,” said Taylor Budowich, a spokesman and adviser to Mr. Trump. “But they are not the principles of the Republican Party.”Ms. Cheney made clear she was more than willing to lose her House seat, and she hinted broadly at a 2024 presidential campaign of her own, invoking Abraham Lincoln’s failed bids for lesser offices before he sought and won the presidency. On Wednesday, she formed a new political action committee, the Great Task, whose name nods to Lincoln and which will be filled with leftover campaign cash, and said she was “thinking” of running for president.But the outcome in Wyoming showed that while anti-Trump Republicans can count on ample money and media attention, the actual Republican constituency for them is far more limited. Indeed, one of Ms. Cheney’s last gasps was an effort to get Democrats to switch parties to vote in the G.O.P. primary.While anti-Trump Republicans may garner media attention, Mr. Trump is tightening his grip on the party.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesHer loss was also the latest sign that the central organizing principles of today’s Republican Party are tethered less to specific policies — she was a reliable vote for much of the Trump agenda — than to whatever Mr. Trump wants at any given time.Most recently, that has meant lashing out at federal law enforcement authorities over the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home for missing materials with classified markings. More broadly, it has meant embracing his obsession with denying his 2020 defeat and amplifying his false claims of election fraud, regardless of the bloody fallout nearly 20 months ago or its destabilizing effect on the nation.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss: The Republican congresswoman’s defeat in Wyoming exposed the degree to which former President Donald J. Trump still controls the party’s present — and its near future.2024 Hint: Hours after her loss, Ms. Cheney acknowledged that she was “thinking” about a White House bid, a prospect that would test the national viability of a conservative, anti-Trump platform.The ‘Impeachment 10’: With Ms. Cheney’s defeat, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.Alaska Races: Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin appeared to be on divergent paths following contests that offered a glimpse at the state’s independent streak.“You could write the history of the modern Republican Party over the last two years, and what does Jan. 6 look like? A hiccup,” said William Kristol, the neoconservative writer who co-founded Republican Voters Against Trump, a group spending millions of dollars to oppose Trump-backed election deniers. “The price of admission to today’s Republican Party is turning a blind eye to Jan. 6.”That was the experience of Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment weeks after taking office and lost his re-election primary this month. He said his constituents asked him about his impeachment vote 10 times as much as about anything else.“Policy is not policy toward improving government,” Mr. Meijer explained. “It’s policy as a signifier of whether you’re part of the in group or the out group.”Refusing to repeat the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, he said, put Mr. Meijer squarely in the “out group.”In Michigan, Representative Peter Meijer, who voted for impeachment, lost his primary to a Trump-backed rival. Brittany Greeson for The New York Times“I can’t tell you the number of times somebody said, ‘You don’t have to believe the election is stolen, the important thing isn’t believing it, it’s saying it,’” Mr. Meijer recalled in an interview. “That is what a Republican is supposed to do right now.”If a series of primary setbacks this spring had showed that Mr. Trump was not invincible, then races in August have showcased his enduring influence.Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State, another Republican vote for impeachment, was ousted by a Trump supporter. A Trump-backed candidate, Tim Michels, who has entertained trying to overturn the 2020 election, won the Republican nomination for governor of Wisconsin. And Mr. Trump’s preferred candidates swept the nominations in Arizona for Senate, governor, attorney general and secretary of state. All embraced his election denialism. More

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    Liz Cheney Says She’s ‘Thinking’ About Running for President in 2024

    Representative Liz Cheney said early Wednesday that she was “thinking” about running for president in 2024, a prospect that would test the national viability of a conservative, anti-Trump platform that failed resoundingly in Wyoming.Ms. Cheney — who lost her House primary by more than 35 percentage points on Tuesday to a challenger, Harriet Hageman, endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump — also announced the formation of a political action committee, the Great Task, that would educate Americans about threats to democracy and oppose any effort by Mr. Trump to return to the White House.The committee filed a statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday. Its name refers to the Gettysburg Address, in which President Abraham Lincoln said “the great task remaining before us” was to ensure “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”It is a reference Ms. Cheney has made often, including in her concession speech on Tuesday night.Speaking to Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “Today Show” on Wednesday, Ms. Cheney initially avoided the question of whether she had a 2024 campaign in mind. But after being pressed, she said, “It is something that I am thinking about, and I’ll make a decision in the coming months.”“I think that defeating him is going to require a broad, united front of Republicans, Democrats and independents,” she said of Mr. Trump. Later — referring in particular to “the lies that he has put out in the last few days” about the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, and to his demonization of federal law enforcement officials even as they face threats from his supporters — she added that she believed “millions of Republicans and Americans across this country” would reject his actions.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss: The Republican congresswoman’s defeat in Wyoming exposed the degree to which former President Donald J. Trump still controls the party’s present — and its near future.2024 Hint: Hours after her loss, Ms. Cheney acknowledged that she was “thinking” about a White House bid, a prospect that would test the national viability of a conservative, anti-Trump platform.The ‘Impeachment 10’: With Ms. Cheney’s defeat, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.Alaska Races: Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin appeared to be on divergent paths following contests that offered a glimpse at the state’s independent streak.But while most Democrats and independents do oppose Mr. Trump, the Republicans who do are a small minority of the voters who will choose the party’s nominee in 2024. And while some Democrats in Wyoming changed their party affiliation to support Ms. Cheney in her primary when the alternative was a far-right Republican, it is hardly clear that Democrats nationally would support her when the alternative is a Democrat.Ms. Cheney’s record, particularly on foreign policy, is anathema to many Democrats, and she indicated in the interview on Wednesday that she would continue to push for policies that she said the Republican Party “used to stand for,” including beliefs “in limited government and low taxes and a strong national defense,” and “that the family has got to be the center of our community and of our lives.”Ms. Cheney — who has helped lead the House investigation into actions by Mr. Trump and his allies surrounding the Capitol riot, and said she would continue that work in the months before her term ends in January — also spoke critically of Republicans who have gone along with Mr. Trump in rejecting the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory.She warned against embracing Mr. Trump’s “cult of personality” and said the country needed leaders who stood by their oath “whether or not it’s politically convenient.”“Kevin McCarthy does not fit that bill,” she said, referring to the House Republican leader.Mr. McCarthy is poised to become House speaker if Republicans gain control of the chamber in November. But when Ms. Guthrie asked if the country would be better off if Democrats remained in charge, Ms. Cheney avoided directly endorsing that.“I think we have to make sure that we are fighting against every single election denier,” she said. “The election deniers, right now, are Republicans. And I think that it shouldn’t matter what party you are. Nobody should be voting for those people, supporting them or backing them.”To the Wyoming voters who criticized her for focusing too much on Mr. Trump and too little on the issues they cared about, she said that the former president posed an existential threat to American democracy, and that “as a nation, you don’t get the opportunity to debate and discuss any other issue if you simply turn your head away from that kind of a fundamental threat on our republic.”Asked if she had misjudged Republican voters’ understanding of the importance of duty to the Constitution, Ms. Cheney responded: “Donald Trump has betrayed Republican voters. He’s lied to them. Those who support him have lied to them.”She added, “They’re using people’s patriotism against them.”At the end of the interview, Ms. Guthrie asked Ms. Cheney if she identified with Obi-Wan Kenobi’s words in his final battle with Darth Vader: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” which Ms. Guthrie summarized as being “stronger in political death this morning.”“Well, I don’t see it as death this morning,” Ms. Cheney said. “My kids certainly appreciate that analogy. They’ve been running the YouTube clip around the house.” More

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    Lisa Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka Advance in Alaska’s Senate Contest

    Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a centrist Republican seeking a fourth full term in Washington, advanced to the general election along with her chief rival, Kelly Tshibaka, in the state’s Senate primary race, according to The Associated Press. Ms. Murkowski and Ms. Tshibaka each earned enough votes to advance to the general election in the fall as part of Alaska’s new open primary system. Ms. Murkowski is hoping to fend off a conservative backlash over her vote in the Senate to convict former President Donald J. Trump of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. With an estimated 50 percent of the vote reported, Ms. Murkowski and Ms. Tshibaka were neck and neck at just over 40 percent apiece. The nearest rival after them was in the single digits.Ballots are still being counted, and two other candidates will also advance as part of the state’s top-four system, but it was unclear which two.Ms. Murkowski, 65, is the only Senate Republican on the ballot this year who voted to convict Mr. Trump in his impeachment trial. She has been frank about her frustrations with Mr. Trump’s hold over the Republican Party, though she has maintained the backing of the Senate Republican campaign arm. She has also repeatedly crossed the aisle to support bipartisan compromises and Democratic nominees, including the nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court and the confirmation of Deb Haaland, the Interior secretary. And she is one of just two Senate Republicans who support abortion rights and have expressed dismay over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a move that eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years.Those stances have rallied both national and local Republicans against her, and her impeachment vote garnered her a censure from Alaska’s Republican Party. Mr. Trump, furious over her vote to convict him, summoned his supporters to line up behind Ms. Tshibaka, a former commissioner in the Alaska Department of Administration, who fashioned herself as an “America First” candidate who could more adequately represent conservatives in the state. “It’s clear that we are at a point where the next senator can either stand with Alaska or continue to enable the disastrous Biden administration that is damaging us more every day,” Ms. Tshibaka wrote in an opinion essay published days before the primary. “When I’m the next senator from Alaska, I will never forget the Alaskans who elected me, and I will always stand for the values of the people of this great state.”Kelly Tshibaka at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump in Anchorage in July. In addition to his endorsement, she has the backing of the Alaska Republican Party.Ash Adams for The New York TimesBut the new open primary system, paired with the use of ranked-choice voting in the general election, was designed in part with centrist candidates like Ms. Murkowski in mind, and was championed by her allies in the famously independent state. Voters in November can rank their top four candidates. If no candidate receives a majority, officials will eliminate the last-place finisher and reallocate his or her supporters’ votes to the voters’ second choices until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.While she has never crossed that threshold in previous elections, Ms. Murkowski has overcome tough odds before: In 2010, she triumphed memorably with a write-in campaign after a stunning primary loss to a Tea Party challenger. That victory came largely because of a coalition of Alaska Natives and centrists. Ms. Murkowski has leveraged her seniority and her bipartisan credentials to make her case to voters in Alaska, highlighting the billions of dollars she has steered to the state through her role on the Senate Appropriations Committee and her role in passing the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law. She invokes her friendships with Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and the legacies of Alaska lawmakers like former Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young, who died in March, to show that there is still a place in Congress for her style of legislating. “You’ve got to demonstrate that there are other possibilities, that there is a different reality — and maybe it won’t work,” Ms. Murkowski said in an interview this year. “Maybe I am just completely politically naïve, and this ship has sailed. But I won’t know unless we — unless I — stay out there and give Alaskans the opportunity to weigh in.”Her challengers, however, are seeking to capitalize on the frustrations toward Ms. Murkowski in both parties. In addition to branding her as too liberal for the state, Ms. Tshibaka has seized on simmering resentment over how Ms. Murkowski’s father, Frank, chose her to finish out his term as senator when he became governor in 2002. Alyce McFadden More

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    Liz Cheney Loses Wyoming Primary to Trump-Backed Harriet Hageman

    JACKSON, Wyo. — Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming was decisively defeated by Harriet Hageman in her Republican primary on Tuesday, handing Donald J. Trump his most prized trophy yet in his long campaign to purge the Republican Party of his critics.Ms. Hageman, a lawyer in Cheyenne, was lifted by Mr. Trump’s endorsement in her race against Ms. Cheney, the daughter of a former vice president and former member of the House Republican leadership. Ms. Cheney’s loss was as anticipated as it was consequential. The leading Republican voice against Mr. Trump, and vice chairwoman of the committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, next year will no longer have her perch in Congress from which to battle a figure she believes poses a grave threat to American democracy.Ms. Cheney conceded defeat just as The Associated Press called the race, suggesting she was setting a model for accepting the will of voters. “Harriet Hageman has received the most votes in this primary — she won,” Ms. Cheney told supporters gathered outdoors on a ranch here. She went on to implore Americans to stand up to Mr. Trump and others who deny his loss in the 2020 presidential election. “No citizen of this republic is a bystander,” she said, adding: “We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.”But the repudiation of Ms. Cheney made clear Republican primary voters’ frequent willingness to reject officeholders who openly and aggressively confront Mr. Trump, even as the former president remains embroiled in multiple investigations. Just two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump last year will advance to the general election this fall.None of those 10, however, had the stature of Ms. Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.Her loss, two months after George P. Bush’s landslide defeat in a bid for attorney general in Texas, represents the full and perhaps final transition of the G.O.P. from the traditional conservatism of the Bush-Cheney era to the grievance-oriented populism of Mr. Trump.Other contests held Tuesday would reveal the extent of that transformation. In Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski, another daughter of local political royalty and one of seven Republicans to vote to convict Mr. Trump of incitement of insurrection, is in a re-election fight against a field led by Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican and former state official whom Mr. Trump endorsed.Alaskans were also deciding whether to embrace a comeback for former Gov. Sarah Palin, the onetime vice-presidential nominee whose slashing attacks on the media presaged Mr. Trump’s rise. Ms. Palin is running both in a special election runoff for a House seat and in a primary for a full term of her own. The state’s system of ranked-choice voting allows the top four finishers in the primaries to move on to the general-election ballot in November. Results in those races were not expected Tuesday night.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney: If the G.O.P. congresswoman loses her primary, as is widely expected, it will end the run of the Cheney dynasty in Wyoming. But she says her crusade to stop Donald J. Trump will continue.The Impeachment 10: Ms. Cheney is part of a group of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 riot. Most of them have lost their primary races or are retiring.Sarah Palin: As the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential Republican nominee seeks the state’s lone House seat, voters appeared torn on whether she remained committed to them or had abandoned them for national fame.Abortion Ads: Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Democrats have spent nearly eight times as much on abortion-related ads as Republicans have, with Democratic strategists believing the issue has radically reshaped the 2022 landscape in their party’s favor.Ms. Cheney has vowed to continue her fight against the former president, casting the primary as only one front in a longer political war in which she’s determined to prevail.Focused almost entirely on the Jan. 6 panel, and reluctant to campaign publicly while facing death threats and venomous criticism, Ms. Cheney has long been resigned to her political demise in the state that elevated her father 44 years ago to the seat she now holds. She has set her sights beyond Wyoming, arguing that blocking Mr. Trump’s return to the White House is her most important task, a mission that has fueled speculation that she’s considering a presidential bid.Ms. Cheney delivered her concession speech in measured tones, speaking as if she was on the Jan. 6 committee rostrum in the Capitol rather than standing in front of bales of hay at a ranch in the shadow of the Teton Mountains. She hinted at a potential presidential bid, or at least a grass-roots and bipartisan effort, to block Mr. Trump’s comeback, as she extended a hand to Democrats and independents. More

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    What Liz Cheney’s Loss in Wyoming Means

    If Liz Cheney’s loss to Harriet Hageman in Wyoming’s primary election on Tuesday seems like a bad dream to many of Ms. Cheney’s Democratic admirers, that’s because it is: For a generation, progressives have imagined the moment when the white working class would finally turn against an insular and privileged Republican establishment. That day has arrived. But it isn’t what Democrats dreamed.Apparently uninterested in everyday governing, the new insurgents who elected Ms. Hageman are consumed with demonstrating that they are authentic conservative Republicans. And in that sense, they are succumbing to the same impulses they associate with their liberal opponents: a shrill hostility to different viewpoints, an obsession with virtue signaling and a willingness to purge their own ranks. The older tradition of Republican politics — the one that cradled Ms. Cheney from girlhood and shaped her in office — is still alive, though embattled, even in Wyoming. Progressives who realize that this privileged Republican establishment was a linchpin of our democracy all along may start rooting for a counterrevolution from above rather than a revolution from below.In the not very distant past, Wyoming’s G.O.P. was focused on governing the state by addressing everyday challenges, like distributing a limited number of liquor licenses and funding its public schools. Politics was “frankly boring,” recalled Tim Stubson, a partisan of the old school.The Cheneys exemplified Wyoming’s establishment: They are quiet and diligent legislators, even a little bland. They are also highly educated and wealthy, splitting their time between Washington and Wyoming’s Teton County, one of the wealthiest counties in the United States.Wyoming politics began to change beneath their feet, slowly at first, as the Tea Party rose to power, and then rapidly during the Trump years, as a new guard waged war with the establishment, making politics less about ordinary governance than about identity.We’ve spent the last year traveling Wyoming, from Cheyenne in the south to Sheridan in the north, from Evanston in the west to Wheatland in the east, talking to local political activists and leaders. This obsession with identity left a mark everywhere, but nowhere more obviously than at the recent Republican state conventions. Just a decade ago, few delegates would have attended party meetings with guns strapped to their hips. Now many do. That wasn’t enough for one delegate at the last convention: He reportedly strutted about with a gun fully cocked. In another departure from old norms, many delegates have taken to wearing their cowboy hats inside the convention center. “That’s not a Wyoming thing,” noted JoAnn True, a patron of the old party. This is mostly because there is no need to wear a cowboy hat indoors — unless your goal is to sport a costume that signals a conservative social identity.Virtue signaling is also on the rise. One convention delegate argued that Wyoming schoolchildren should not be required to say the Pledge of Allegiance, since the word “indivisible” suggests that states can’t secede from the union. Another Republican Party figure was criticized for allegedly failing to adopt an appropriately respectful posture during the pledge.Acting the part of a true Wyoming conservative is a delicate art. It’s not only about signaling that you belong to a rugged, rural working class, but also about highlighting your conservative bona fides, which often means exiling anyone who doesn’t toe the line. Now a conservative cancel culture as unforgiving as its progressive rival is sweeping over the Wyoming G.O.P.Ms. Cheney, of course, is the most prominent victim of that cancel culture: She has been censured twice by the party, and now has been voted out of office. But she is just the tip of an iceberg that mostly lies beneath the media’s radar. Other members of the old type have been censured as well. Their crimes are varied, ranging from supporting Medicaid expansion to founding a nonpartisan PAC to fund female candidates.Websites have emerged that help the new censors identify politically incorrect Republicans. WyoRINO, for example, exposes legislators “who falsely claim to be Republicans” by scrutinizing their voting records for the slightest signs of apostasy. According to the site’s index, nearly a two-thirds majority of Wyoming’s Republican legislators are faking it.Those who are formally censured, though, usually have something else in common: They are from the upper class. In recent years the party has censured a wealthy activist, a state senator with a doctorate and a physician. Joe McGinley, the physician — a prominent party leader of the old style — was censured for reasons that are still a bit mysterious. But as a Stanford-trained doctor, he was a perfect symbol of an inauthentic conservative. Joey Correnti IV, a pistol-packing delegate, mocks his supposed haughtiness, claiming that he introduces himself as “Doctor Joe McGinley.”Plenty of the new insurgents are themselves comfortable members of the professional class pretending to be “one of the people.” Some, like Ms. Hageman, simply seem opportunistic, while others sincerely share cultural affinities with Wyoming’s working class. But to its credit, the new identity politics has also done something rare in this gilded age of American politics: It has elevated genuinely working-class citizens into positions of power. For example, Tom James, elected to the State Senate in 2018, grew up in a foster home and campaigned for office as he delivered pizzas. Meanwhile, Frank Eathorne, the current chairman of the state party, previously worked as a Terminix pest exterminator. As Tim Stubson of the old establishment acknowledged, “It’s a much more blue-collar party.”These candidates are starting to reshape the G.O.P. beyond Wyoming as well. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado earned a G.E.D., having left high school after she got pregnant. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, a truck driver won a State Senate seat on a shoestring budget. And in Arizona, Rusty Bowers — who resisted pressure from Donald Trump to overturn his state’s election results — was just badly defeated by David Farnsworth, a small businessman and former crane operator with an A.A. degree.For decades, progressives have hoped that the white working class would turn against the affluent bankers, doctors and oil magnates who control the Republican Party. Well, it did. Class warfare of a kind did finally break out. It’s just not the sort of war progressives imagined, much less hoped for.That’s true partly because progressive longings for class war rested on a falsehood. Influential books like Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas” insisted that the Republican elite was rapaciously consumed with padding its wealth and exploiting its working-class supporters. Like other myths, that critique contained a kernel of truth. Wyoming’s establishment was too insular at times — and it practiced self-dealing on occasion.But whatever its sins, it was also public spirited. It cared about the general welfare of the state and worked hard on its behalf, laboring away for a pittance in a legislature that begins its sessions in the dead of Wyoming’s punishing winter, when driving is treacherous. The new identitarians infiltrating the State Legislature seem less interested in seeking remedies to real problems than in signaling to their base.Thus, they perform small symbolic acts, like pushing a bill that requires local law enforcement officials to ignore federal law that violates the Second Amendment, or sponsoring a bill that prohibited the teaching of critical race theory in Wyoming public schools. It failed because enough traditional conservatives don’t believe it’s a real problem. Tom Walters, a state representative of the old school, observed, “They speak of it as though it’s there, and yet they know all their teachers and they know their teachers aren’t teaching it.”Addressing these phantoms swallows up time, leaving larger issues neglected. Cathy Connolly, the Democratic minority leader in the State House, told us: “We have one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. We now have the highest workplace fatality rate. We’ve got Covid issues. We’ve got hospitals closing. We’re not looking at these issues because we have these stupid bills,” she said, adding an expletive.The right’s new identity craze wasn’t engineered by Donald Trump. It simply created an opportunity that he exploited. But Mr. Trump has rendered identity politics more dangerous than its progressive rival by wedding it to a cult of personality and a campaign to steal an election. Those changes have only widened the party’s class divide: While a substantial majority of white Republican primary voters without a college degree say they would prefer to vote for him in 2024, those with college degrees generally want someone else, according to a July New York Times/Siena College poll.Ms. Cheney’s fall highlights the cultish character of the right’s evolving politics of identity. During her first two terms, she supported Mr. Trump’s positions 93 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight (almost as often as Kevin McCarthy and more often than Elise Stefanik). Yet Ms. Cheney is not only considered to be a “Republican in Name Only” by many Wyoming Republicans — she is the face of the RINOs. At the state convention, one attendee sported a T-shirt that said “No More RINOs” with Ms. Cheney’s name circled and crossed out. To cross Mr. Trump is to become a fake conservative.Sadly, the G.O.P. establishment was not strong enough to save Ms. Cheney. Happily, though, it isn’t dead, even in Wyoming. In fact, it’s far more entrenched than Ms. Cheney’s defeat might suggest. The old guard still controls the State Legislature and Wyoming’s two most populous counties, both of which pushed back forcefully on efforts to censure Ms. Cheney. And in some places the new insurgents have been outmaneuvered and beaten back. For example, in Campbell County, where support for Mr. Trump surpasses that of most Wyoming counties, the establishment wrestled the party away from the new identitarians.Similar fights are playing out in state parties and legislatures from Colorado to Arizona, Idaho, Illinois and Texas, where the new identitarians are gaining momentum, chipping away at the old guard’s power. But even if they continue to advance, their style of politics may also contain the seeds of its destruction. Any party that elevates symbolism over governing risks stirring mass revolt down the road. Some practitioners of identity politics on the left have already discovered that lesson the hard way. When some members of the San Francisco Board of Education busied themselves renaming schools instead of prioritizing reopening them after lengthy closures during the pandemic, they were recalled. Results matter even in the age of identity politics.Though the outcome of the G.O.P.’s civil war is impossible to determine, one thing is clear: Both sides see the conflict in existential terms. As the traditionalist Dr. McGinley said of Ms. Cheney’s race: “The soul of the Republican Party is at stake.” Ms. Cheney fought valiantly for the party’s soul and was celebrated by traditional Republicans in Wyoming for doing so. They don’t believe her cause is lost — and neither should we.Stephanie Muravchik (@stephaniemurav1) and Jon A. Shields are professors of government at Claremont McKenna College and the authors of “Trump’s Democrats.” They are working on a new book about Liz Cheney’s Wyoming and the future of the American right.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Wyoming Democrats Voice Support for Liz Cheney at the Polls

    Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming may not prevail in her Republican primary on Tuesday, but her effort to convince Democrats and independents to support her candidacy appears to have paid off in Wyoming’s bluest county, Teton, where Ms. Cheney lives.Interviews at polling places in the county on Monday, the last day of early voting, and on Tuesday turned up a stream of voters re-registering as Republicans in order to participate in the party’s primary and vote for Ms. Cheney.“I think she knows somebody is unfit when she sees him and she’s not going to kiss the ring and I respect her for that,” said Brad Hoyt, an architect in Wilson, Wyo., a small community just west of Jackson where Ms. Cheney lives. Mr. Hoyt, who wanted to record his support for Ms. Cheney’s opposition to former President Donald J. Trump, said he was “in between” the major parties and would change his registration at Wilson’s Old Schoolhouse, the village’s polling place.Not far behind Mr. Hoyt was Andy Calders, a musician who said he is a Democrat but registered as a Republican in Wyoming so that he could participate in nominating contests for the state’s dominant party.“She’s only done one thing I liked, but I liked it so much I voted for her,” Mr. Calders said of Ms. Cheney’s effort to hold Mr. Trump “accountable for what he’s obviously done” in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Trump backed Harriet Hageman in the primary against Ms. Cheney, who is serving on a congressional panel investigating Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The anti-Trump voters were turning out in equally large numbers in Jackson, where the wait to vote reached 45 minutes at one point on Monday.Maggie Shipley, who works for a local nonprofit organization, said she was switching her registration to Republican so that she could vote for Ms. Cheney in the primary.“The election lies are terrifying to me and preserving democracy is really important and at least she has that going,” Ms. Shipley explained. More

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    Alaska Elections: Where to Vote and What’s on the Ballot

    Do not be misled by Alaska’ long history of voting for Republicans: Its slate of primaries and a special election on Tuesday offers plenty of intrigue, with multiple big names on the ballot such as former Gov. Sarah Palin and Senator Lisa Murkowski.The races pose another test of the power of an endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump. He is backing Ms. Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, for the state’s lone House seat, and also supports Kelly Tshibaka, Ms. Murkowski’s main Republican rival in the Senate primary.Here is a refresher on the rules for voting and what is at stake.How to voteThe registration deadlines for voting in person and requesting an absentee ballot have passed. Alaska does not have same-day registration for primaries, though it does for presidential elections.All registered voters, regardless of party affiliation, can participate in Alaska’s newly nonpartisan primaries.Where to voteAlaska’s voters can click here to look up their assigned place to vote. Absentee ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by Tuesday and received by state election offices by Aug. 26. They can also be hand-delivered to designated drop-off locations by 8 p.m. Alaska time on Tuesday, which is also when the polls close for in-person voting.Alaska offers no-excuse absentee voting — meaning voters are not required to provide a reason — with an option to receive ballots through the state’s secure online portal. Voters can choose to return their ballots by fax instead of mail but must do so by 8 p.m. on Tuesday.What is on the ballotMs. Murkowski was one of seven Republicans in the Senate who voted to convict Mr. Trump during his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, drawing a backlash from the former president and his supporters in her quest for a fourth term. Mr. Trump endorsed one her opponents, Ms. Tshibaka, a former commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Administration, in the primary.Another race creating national intrigue will decide who will fill the seat of Representative Don Young, a Republican who died in March, for the remainder of his term that ends in January. Mr. Young had held the seat since he was first elected to the House in 1973.The special election is headlined by Ms. Palin, who will face Nick Begich III, a Republican and the scion of an Alaskan political dynasty, and Mary S. Peltola, a Democrat and former state legislator. Voters will rank their choices in the special election. If no candidate receives a majority, officials will eliminate the last-place finisher and reallocate supporters’ voter to the voters’ second choices until one candidate has at least 50 percent.All three candidates, along with many others, are also listed separately on the regular primary ballot for the House seat, which will determine who will compete in November to represent the state for a full two-year term starting in January.Voters will also decide various races for governor and the State Legislature. Click here for a sample ballot. More