According to her campaign website today, Liz Cheney, daughter of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, has ended her bid for U.S. Senate from Wyoming. Cheney’s withdrawal comes as a relief to Senator Mike Enzi, the Wyoming Republican incumbent who Cheney was challenging from the right. Enzi was one of a number of Republican U.S. Senators who are or were facing primary challenges from fellow Republicans aligned with the right wing Tea Party.
While Cheney is citing unspecified “serious health issues” for quitting her Senate primary race, Cheney’s Senate bid faced an uphill battle from the start. First, Enzi has a solid conservative record, receiving a score of more than 80 out of 100 by the American Conservative Union in February 2011. Cheney’s Wyoming credentials were also shaky, as she has been a longtime resident of the Washington, DC area. An extremely embarrassing and damaging example of Cheney’s carpetbagger status occurred in 2012 when Cheney applied for a Wyoming fishing license. Somehow, Cheney received the license, even though she did not meet Wyoming’s residency requirement. Cheney blamed the incident on a clerk’s error. Cheney was eventually fined for making a false statement on her fishing license application.
More recently, Cheney got into a family feud with her sister Mary, who is gay. Beginning last August, and seemingly to shore up her conservative credentials, Liz Cheney made public statements opposing same-sex marriage, and making clear her disagreement with her sister on the issue. Cheney’s statements caused a rift in her family, and even threatened the goodwill of the Cheney family Thanksgiving dinner. Perhaps in part as a result of these missteps, recent polls showed Enzi well ahead of Cheney in the Wyoming Republican U.S. Senate primary race.
Republican Civil War Continues
While Mike Enzi may be breathing a sigh of relief, the rest of his Republican Party is still mired in a civil war that goes back at least as far as the bloody 2011-12 Republican Presidential primaries. The bashing of eventual Republican nominee Willard Mitt Romney by his rivals including Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum provided early fodder for eventual attacks on Romney by President Obama’s campaign team. This year, approximately seven other Republican incumbent U.S. Senators face primaries from the right. The primary challengers are attacking their Republican incumbents on issues such as immigration reform and the Affordable Care Act a/k/a “Obamacare,” and the Republican Party civil war thus shows no sign of ending soon.
