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    Wyoming Democratic Caucus Results 2024

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    Source: Election results are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Camille Baker, Neil Berg, Michael Beswetherick, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Leo Dominguez, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jasmine C. Lee, Alex Lemonides, Ilana Marcus, Alicia Parlapiano, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Additional reporting by Patrick Hays; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White.
    Editing by Wilson Andrews, Lindsey Rogers Cook, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. More

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      ‘Whatever it takes’: Liz Cheney mulls third-party run to block Trump victory

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      Liz Cheney, a leading Republican critic and antagonist of Donald Trump, has said she is considering mounting her own third-party candidacy for the White House, as part of her effort to thwart the former president from returning to the Oval Office.In her most explicit public statements to date on a potential presidential run, Cheney told the Washington Post on Tuesday she would do “whatever it takes” to block a Trump return.Cheney, the daughter of former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney, has previously floated the idea. But she had never explicitly stated if she was thinking of running as a semi-moderate Republican party candidate or would run as an independent.“Several years ago, I would not have contemplated a third-party run,” Cheney said in the interview. “I happen to think democracy is at risk at home, obviously, as a result of Donald Trump’s continued grip on the Republican party, and I think democracy is at risk internationally as well.”Cheney echoed that sentiment in remarks with USA Today. She said: “I certainly hope to play a role in helping to ensure that the country has … a new, fully conservative party. And so whether that means restoring the current Republican party, which looks like a very difficult if not impossible task, or setting up a new party, I do hope to be involved and engaged in that.”Cheney added that she would make decision in the next few months, describing the threats facing the US as “existential”. She the country needed a candidate to “confront all of those challenges”, adding: “That will all be part of my calculation as we go into the early months of 2024.”The former Wyoming congresswoman was speaking as part of a book tour promoting Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, which calls on the US to back pro-constitution candidates against what she describes as Trump enablers in Congress.“Every one of us – Republican, Democrat, independent – must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated,” she wrote, calling it “the cause of our time”.With Trump 40 points ahead of 2024 Republican presidential primary challengers, she told the Post, the “tectonic plates of our politics are shifting”, upending conventional wisdom about third party candidates.The primary system process that produces a single Republican and Democrat presidential nominee, Cheney added, is “pretty irrelevant, in my view, in the 2024 cycle, because the threat is so unique”.If Cheney decides on a third-party run, she will join Robert F Kennedy Jr, Cornel West and Jill Stein. Other potential candidates include West Virginia’s soon-to-retire senator Joe Manchin, the former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, and ex-Maryland governor Larry Hogan.In a Harvard CAPS-Harris survey in November, Kennedy led the declared pack in terms of favorability at 52%. Kennedy scored higher than the runner-up Trump, at 51%, and Joe Biden, at 46%.“Robert Kennedy has positioned himself to appeal to members of both parties, though it is unclear how much of his ratings are from in depth knowledge of Kennedy versus his popular family name,” Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard Caps-Harris Poll, told the Hill.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAgainst a backdrop of warnings that third-party candidates may only succeed in helping Trump win a second term in the White House, and others that it would do the opposite, polling suggests that a year out from the election voters are open to alternatives to the two-party lock-up.According to a Gallup poll in October, 63% of US adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do “such a poor job” of representing the American people that “a third major party is needed”.According to Pew Research in September, Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are unrelentingly negative. Elected officials are widely viewed as self-serving, ineffective and locked in partisan warfare. And a majority said the political process is dominated by special interests as well as campaign cash.On Monday, efforts to oppose No Labels and other third-party presidential bids ramped up with a $100,000 political advertising campaign funded by Citizens to Save Our Republic, a bipartisan group that has warned that any effort to upset democratic norms will play into Trump’s hand.“We are worried about any third party. We realize it is a free country. Anybody can run for president who wants to run for president,” former US House minority leader Richard Gephardt told reporters on Monday. “But we have a right to tell citizens the danger they will face if they vote for any of these third-party candidates.” More

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      FBI Investigating Spy Ring’s Political Contributions

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      Prosecutors are scrutinizing a series of campaign contributions made by right-wing operatives who were part of a political spying operation based in Wyoming.Federal prosecutors are investigating possible campaign finance violations in connection with an undercover operation based in Wyoming that aimed to infiltrate progressive groups, political campaigns and the offices of elected representatives before the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter and documents related to the case.As part of the operation, revealed in 2021 by The New York Times, participants used large campaign donations and cover stories to gain access to their targets and gather dirt to sabotage the reputations of people and organizations considered threats to the agenda of President Donald J. Trump.In recent days, prosecutors have issued subpoenas for at least two of the people The Times identified as being part of the operation, including Richard Seddon, a former British spy, and Susan Gore, a Wyoming heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, the people said. The subpoenas were reported earlier by CNN.According to one of the subpoenas reviewed by The Times, prosecutors and F.B.I. agents in Washington are seeking a trove of information related to the political spying operation, including documents related to Mr. Seddon’s firm, Branch Six Consulting International, along with at least two other entities registered in his name.Prosecutors also sought communications, documents or financial records tied to Erik Prince, the international security consultant, as well as former operatives who worked for the conservative group Project Veritas and its founder. Mr. Prince and Mr. Seddon are longtime associates.The operatives working for Mr. Seddon made several large political donations — including $20,000 to the Democratic National Committee, which gained them entree to a Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas in 2020. They also made donations to the election campaigns of Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona; Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold; as well as to the Wyoming Democratic Party.Drew Godinich, a spokesman for Ms. Griswold, said she returned that donation.Mr. Seddon used money from Ms. Gore to fund the operation. Ms. Gore has said publicly that she was not aware her money was being used for sabotage operations. Robert Driscoll, a lawyer for Mr. Seddon, declined to comment. Nicholas Gravante, a Manhattan lawyer for Ms. Gore who represents many high-profile clients, also declined to comment.It is not clear if the operatives who made the donations — Beau Maier and Sofia LaRocca — did it at someone’s behest and were reimbursed. Both were named in the subpoena reviewed by The Times. It is also unclear whether the couple had been subpoenaed or were cooperating with federal authorities.The F.B.I. declined to comment.Mr. Seddon closely managed the two operatives, who filed weekly intelligence reports to him about their activities and targets, according to a person with direct knowledge of the operation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret details.Under federal law, it is illegal to make campaign donations at the behest of another person and be reimbursed for them. So-called straw donations have been central to several federal investigations.According to interviews and documents obtained by The Times, the operation began in 2018, when Mr. Seddon persuaded several former employees of Project Veritas — the conservative group that conducts undercover sting operations — to move to Wyoming and participate in his new venture.Mr. Seddon, who at the time was working for Ms. Gore, wanted to set up espionage operations in which undercover agents would infiltrate progressive groups and the offices of elected officials, and potentially recruit others to help collect information.It is unclear how much information Mr. Seddon’s operatives gathered, or what else the operation achieved. But its use of professional intelligence-gathering techniques to try to manipulate the politics of several states showed a greater sophistication than more traditional political “dirty tricks” operations.It also showed a level of paranoia in some ultraconservative Republican circles that the electoral map in the United States might be changing to their disadvantage. Specifically, there was a concern that even a bedrock Republican state like Wyoming could gradually turn toward the Democrats, as nearby Colorado and Arizona had.Republicans have sought to install allies in various positions at the state level to gain an advantage on the electoral map. Secretaries of state, for example, play a crucial role in certifying election results every two years, and some became targets of Mr. Trump and his allies in their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.One target of the spying ring was Karlee Provenza, a police reform advocate who won a seat in the Wyoming Legislature representing one of a few Democratic districts in the state. Ms. Provenza said she was heartened that federal authorities had not ignored the episode, while Wyoming officials have not acted.“I am glad to see that the Justice Department is investigating efforts to try to dismantle democracy in Wyoming,” she said. “The actions of Susan Gore and the people she supports have been unchecked since this spying operation was revealed.”In 2017, Mr. Seddon was recruited to join Project Veritas by Mr. Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and brother of Betsy DeVos, who was Mr. Trump’s education secretary at the time. According to people with knowledge of Mr. Prince’s role, he believed Mr. Seddon could turn Project Veritas into a more professional intelligence-gathering operation.Soon afterward, Mr. Seddon was engineering an effort to discredit perceived enemies of Mr. Trump inside the U.S. government, including a planned sting operation in 2018 against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster. He also helped set up operations to secretly record F.B.I. employees and other government officials. More

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      Wyoming becomes first US state to outlaw use of abortion pills

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      Wyoming has become the first US state to outlaw the use or prescription of medication abortion pills after the governor, Mark Gordon, signed into law a bill that was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this month.The crux of the two-page Wyoming bill is a provision making it illegal to “prescribe, dispense, distribute, sell or use any drug for the purpose of procuring or performing an abortion”.So-called “morning-after” pills, prescription contraceptive medication used after sex but before a pregnancy can be confirmed, are exempted from the ban.The measure also includes an exemption for any treatment necessary to protect a woman “from an imminent peril that substantially endangers her life or health”, as well as any treatment of a “natural miscarriage according to currently accepted medical guidelines”.Violation of the ban is to be treated as a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $9,000.The measure stipulates that a woman “upon whom a chemical abortion is performed or attempted shall not be criminally prosecuted”.In a statement, Wyoming ACLU advocacy director Antonio Serrano criticised the governor’s decision to sign the law.“A person’s health, not politics, should guide important medical decisions – including the decision to have an abortion,” Serrano said.The governor said he was also allowing enactment, without his signature, of a separate bill passed by state lawmakers to prohibit conventional abortion procedures except when necessary to protect the health and life of the mother, or in case of rape or incest. Exception is also permitted to end a pregnancy if doctors determine there to be a lethal abnormality of the foetus.Wyoming’s new law comes as a rightwing push to crack down on medication abortions gathers momentum, with a federal judge in Texas currently considering a nationwide ban on the abortion pill mifepristone in response to a lawsuit by anti-abortion groups.A two pill combination of mifepristone and another drug is the most common form of abortion in the US.Medication abortions were the preferred method for ending pregnancy in the US even before the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the ruling that protected the right to abortion for nearly five decades.Since that decision last June, abortion restrictions have been up to states and the landscape has shifted quickly. Thirteen states are now enforcing bans on abortion at any point in pregnancy, and one more, Georgia, bans it once cardiac activity can be detected, or at about six weeks’ gestation.Courts have put on hold enforcement of abortion bans or deep restrictions in Arizona, Indiana, Montana, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming. Idaho courts have forced the state to allow abortions during medical emergencies.Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Early Midterms Voting Begins in Michigan and Illinois

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      Michigan and some Illinois residents can start casting ballots on Thursday for the Nov. 8 midterm election as both states open early, in-person voting.Voting is also underway in some form in six other states: South Dakota, Wyoming, Minnesota, Virginia, New Jersey and Vermont.In Michigan, three Republicans endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump will take on three incumbent Democrats holding statewide offices. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is facing Tudor Dixon, a conservative media personality; Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is facing Kristina Karamo; and Attorney General Dana Nessel is being challenged by Matt DePerno. Both Ms. Karamo and Mr. DePerno have been outspoken champions of Mr. Trump’s election lies.Michigan voters will also decide on a ballot initiative that would add legal protections for abortion to the state’s constitution.Thursday is also when Michigan and many Illinois counties will begin sending absentee and mail ballots to registered voters who have requested them.Michigan lawmakers on Wednesday passed a bill that will let local elections officials start processing mail and absentee ballots two days before Election Day. While they will not be able to start counting ballots until Nov. 8, the extra processing time is intended to help ease the burden on officials on Election Day, potentially speeding up the release of results. The change was part of a series of election laws approved just before early voting got underway, and after a deal was reached with the governor’s office, the Detroit Free Press reported.In Illinois, where county officials can choose when to open early voting locations, Chicago residents will have to wait: Cook County, which encompasses the city, will not open early voting until Oct. 7. Most other Illinois counties opened early voting at clerks’ offices on Thursday.South Dakota, Wyoming and Minnesota opened early, in-person voting on Sept. 23 and have mailed out ballots. In those states, residents can opt to vote by mail without providing an excuse or reason they can’t make it to the polls.On Sept. 24, Virginia and New Jersey both started accepting some ballots. In Virginia, that is when voters could start casting ballots in person at county registrar offices. In New Jersey, early, in-person voting will not start until Oct. 29, but early mail voting began on Sept. 24.Election officials in Vermont are sending ballots to the state’s approximately 440,000 active voters, where a Senate seat and the state’s lone House seat are open. All ballots should be mailed by Friday and received by Oct. 10. Voters who would prefer to vote in person may do so at their town offices during normal business hours. More

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      Harriet Hageman: who is the Republican who beat Liz Cheney?

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      Harriet Hageman: who is the Republican who beat Liz Cheney?The lawyer appears to be the ideal candidate to carry Trump’s rightwing banner into the midterms – but she hasn’t always been aboard his train A conservative lawyer with a passion for thwarting environmentalists, Harriet Hageman would appear to be an ideal candidate to carry Donald Trump’s rightwing banner into November’s midterm elections.On Tuesday night she beat the incumbent and member of Wyoming’s political royalty, Liz Cheney, for the thinly populated western state’s solitary seat in the US House of Representatives.Liz Cheney considers run for president after Republican primary defeatRead moreAfter trouncing Cheney, Trump’s most vocal critic within the Republican party, Hageman, 59, has a clear run at election success. In an overwhelmingly red state, Cheney defeated her Democratic challenger in 2020 by a margin of almost three votes to one.Hageman, however, has not always been such an enthusiastic passenger aboard the Trump train.Her stance has shifted from calling him “the weakest candidate” in the 2016 primaries, when she attempted to help maneuver the Texas senator Ted Cruz into the Republican presidential nomination, to “the greatest president of my lifetime” when she eagerly embraced Trump’s endorsement as his chosen candidate to topple Cheney, his latest bete noire.Neither is this her first foray into politics. She was a losing candidate in Wyoming’s 2018 contest for state governor, finishing a distant third to the eventual winner, Mark Gordon, and one other in the Republican primary, with barely 20% of the vote.Hageman’s political positions are rooted in the minutiae of her career as a trial lawyer representing Wyoming’s ranchers, and advocating for energy industries against federal protections for water, land and the endangered gray wolf.A 1989 graduate of the University of Wyoming’s college of law, her most successful case, according to the New York Times, was persuading a judge in 2003 to block regulations from Bill Clinton’s presidency protecting millions of acres of national forests from road-building, mining and other development.She is a vocal supporter of the fossil fuel industry, telling supporters at a campaign event earlier this month that coal was an “affordable, clean, acceptable resource that we all should be using”.She has previously also angered activist groups including Defenders of the Wild for her positions on endangered species.In 2017, as an attorney for the ultra-conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation, she praised a US appeals court for cutting through “emotional arguments” and upholding the delisting of gray wolves.The following year, the Sierra Club accused Wyoming of “waging a war” on wolves through hunting and allowing a “scorched earth” policy that threatened the species’ recovery from near-oblivion.Hageman was late in her campaign in converting to Trump’s false assertion that his 2020 election defeat by Joe Biden was fraudulent.In her victory speech on Tuesday night, she said: “Wyoming has spoken on behalf of everyone who is concerned that the game is becoming more and more rigged against them.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022WyomingUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpLiz CheneyfeaturesReuse this content More

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      What Liz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss Says About the State of the G.O.P.

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      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 'could not go along with Trump's lie' after primary defeat – video

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      Liz Cheney has been defeated in a GOP primary, losing her seat in Congress to Harriet Hageman, who was backed by the former president Donald Trump. Cheney, a third-term congresswoman, and her allies entered the contest downbeat about her prospects, aware that Trump’s backing gave Hageman a considerable lift in the state where he won by the largest margin during the 2020 campaign. 
      ‘Two years ago, I won this primary with 73% of the vote. I could easily have done the same again,’ Cheney said. ‘The path was clear, but it would have required that I go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enabled his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. That was a path I could not and would not take’

      Liz Cheney loses Wyoming Republican primary to Trump-endorsed rival
      Sarah Palin’s political career in the balance as Alaska holds special election More