The Folly of a Liz Cheney Independent Presidential Bid

[80%]

This is what happens to bitchy fat broads who stab honest men in the back.

A few folks, like the usually astute Quin Hillyer, argue that if
Liz Cheney wants to run for president in 2024, she must do so as
an independent. I concur that there is no realistic path to
Cheney getting the GOP nomination against Trump, either in a one-
on-one race, or in a multi-candidate field that included someone
like Florida governor Ron DeSantis. (If you’re getting blown out
in a one-on-one GOP primary in Wyoming, you’re not gonna win the
GOP presidential nomination. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you get a
respectable finish in the New Hampshire primary.)

But I am skeptical that an independent or third-party bid by
Cheney would have much of an impact at all.

Quin makes the best argument available, pointing to the “22
percent of Trump voters, some 16 million, [who] were motivated
more against eventual winner Joe Biden than for Trump. It is
from that universe of hold your nose for Trump voters from which
Cheney could draw, although she certainly wouldn’t attract all
of them.”

Yes, theoretically, Cheney could. The problem is, those 16
million or so all ended up voting for Trump anyway. They could
have voted for other candidates, who represented the longest of
longshots, but they chose not to do so. Maybe some factor like
the January 6 riot would make these people not vote for Trump in
2024. But polling and the 2022 primaries indicate those
Republicans are relatively few and far between.

The Libertarian presidential candidate isn’t a perfect
comparison, because Cheney would be better known, probably
better funded, and hold different positions on several issues.
But I think the number of ballots cast for the Libertarian
candidate gives us a sense of the portion of the electorate that
was intractably anti-Biden, and simultaneously found Trump
unacceptable. In 2020, Libertarian Jo Jorgenson got 1.18 percent
nationwide; that ranged from 2.6 percent in North Dakota to .6
percent in Mississippi. As much as people complained about the
options of Trump and Biden, 98.17 percent of Americans who voted
opted for one of the two.

It was a similar story in 2016, when Libertarian nominee Gary
Johnson did a little better, but not by much. Johnson won 3.28
percent nationwide; that ranged from 9.3 percent in Johnson’s
home state of New Mexico to 1.19 percent in Mississippi.
Separately, independent Evan McMullin won .54 percent of the
vote (a bit more than one-half of 1 percent) nationwide, ranging
from 21 percent in his home state of Utah to effective zero in
states where he wasn’t on the ballot.

Once again, as much as people complained about the lousy options
of Trump and Hillary in 2016, 94.27 percent of voters voted for
one of the two major party candidates.

When push comes to shove, roughly 94 to 98 percent of American
voters put aside their complaints and pick one of the major-
party nominees. That could change in the coming years, but I
wouldn’t bet on it.

As an independent candidate, in which state does Cheney threaten
to play spoiler? Wyoming and its three electoral votes?
Virginia, where she and her husband own a house? You really have
to squint to see a scenario where the conservative-but-anti-
Trump demographic ends up swinging a state, and leaving Biden or
Harris with the largest plurality.

Quin does offer a scenario where the threat of a Cheney
independent bid effectively strongarms Republican primary voters
into nominating someone besides Trump:

If keeping the dangerous and increasingly deranged Trump from
office again is Cheney’s main motivator, her outsider run would
thus pose more of a threat to him (if he is the Republican
nominee) than to Democrats. In fact, that might be part of her
message: Nominate Trump, and she stays on the ballot and hands
victory to Democrats; nominate someone else, and she drops out.
Such a threat might motivate just enough GOP primary voters to
consolidate around another GOP contender to provide that
contender a fighting chance against Trump.

But a scenario of metaphorical hostage-taking where Cheney
effectively threatens GOP primary voters, “Nominate DeSantis, or
I’ll run as an independent and help reelect Biden,” is a
scenario ensuring that Cheney is effectively loathed by
Republicans for the rest of her days. It also probably wouldn’t
help DeSantis much.

Everyone would know, from the get-go, that Cheney had no shot of
being sworn in at noon on January 20, 2025. If she launched an
independent bid against Trump, everyone would know she was doing
so just to ensure that the Democratic nominee won the election.
And Republicans have a word to describe a person whose primary
objective is to ensure Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Gavin
Newsom or some other like-minded figure heads the executive
branch for the next four years. They call people like that
“Democrats.”

<https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-folly-of-a-liz-cheney-
independent-presidential-bid/>

[80%]

This is what happens to bitchy fat broads who stab honest men in the back.

(CNN)The surprising story out of Tuesday's Republican House
primary in Wyoming wasn't that Rep. Liz Cheney lost. The pre-
election polls all showed her losing handily to eventual winner
Harriet Hageman.

The big news from the Cowboy State was her margin of defeat.
Cheney's loss is one of the biggest on record for a House
incumbent and is part of a pattern this primary season pointing
to former President Donald Trump's strength within the
Republican Party.
Cheney's defeat appears to be the second worst for a House
incumbent in the last 60 years, when you look at races featuring
only one incumbent. As of Wednesday afternoon, she trailed
Hageman by 37.4 points, which is just worse than California Rep.
Marty Martinez's loss by 37.2 points to fellow Democrat Hilda
Solis in a 2000 blanket primary.

Assuming the Wyoming result margin stands, South Carolina
Republican Bob Inglis would then be the only House incumbent in
the last 60 years to lose by a wider margin than Cheney. He lost
by 41 points in a 2010 primary runoff to Trey Gowdy.

The Inglis comparison to Cheney's loss is notable for two
reasons.

The first is that Inglis' lopsided defeat occurred in a runoff,
with only about 77,000 people voting. That was down from the
about 87,000 who voted in the first round for the upstate South
Carolina seat and far less than the roughly 217,000 who voted in
the fall election in that district.

Cheney can't blame low turnout for her historic defeat. About
170,000 votes have been counted in Wyoming as of Wednesday
afternoon. That's not too far off from the approximately 201,000
Wyomingites who voted in the last midterm general election.
Cheney's loss was no fluke.

The second reason the comparison is notable is that Inglis had
alienated the Republican base by opposing the 2007 Iraq troop
surge, voting for the so-called bank bailout in 2008 and
believing in man-made climate change.
In Cheney's case, the offense in voters' minds was that she
voted to impeach Trump last year and seemed to relish her
opposition to him.

Beyond Cheney
Cheney's loss wasn't the only historic defeat this primary
season.

GOP Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina, who also voted to impeach
Trump, got blown out in his primary in June. He pulled in a mere
24.6% of the vote while losing to Russell Fry. That percentage
appears to be the worst performance for a House incumbent in a
partisan primary with just one incumbent running since 1992.

Indeed, all six House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump and
ran for reelection faced tough battles. Four of them (including
Cheney and Rice) lost their primaries, which is extremely
unusual. Just 2% of other House Republicans who have run for
reelection this season have lost primaries, and those defeated
lawmakers were either scandal-plagued or lost to a fellow
incumbent because of redistricting.

Perhaps, more notable is that none of the aforementioned six
impeachment-backing Republicans got a majority of votes cast for
GOP candidates in their primaries. Since 1956, House incumbents
have averaged more than 90% of the primary vote.
All of these historical anomalies related to those who voted to
impeach Trump help us understand Trump's strength with the
Republican Party today.

It makes Cheney's postelection goal of stopping Trump from
regaining power a tough one. (She told NBC's "Today" show on
Wednesday that she was "thinking about" running for president in
2024, something Trump is also considering.)

The former President is averaging about 50% of the national GOP
primary vote for 2024 right now. That's the best for any
nonincumbent Republican at this point in the modern primary era.

Cheney's favorable rating among Republicans nationally is 13%,
which probably makes her a terrible messenger to GOP voters.

The truth is that Republicans are inclined to believe that
President Joe Biden didn't win the 2020 election (which he did).
Trump's favorable rating with this group is somewhere north of
80% in most polls. But if Trump is going to be beaten in a GOP
primary, it'll very likely be by someone who has adopted most of
his message. Someone like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

If Trump is defeated in a general election, it will almost
certainly be by a Democrat.

An effort led by a Republican who doesn't like Trump would be
speaking to a very small part of the US population.

<https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/politics/liz-cheney-worst-defeat-
house-incumbent/index.html>

[80%]

This is what happens to bitchy fat broads who stab honest men in the back.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. - Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, Donald Trump’s
fiercest Republican adversary in Congress, soundly lost a GOP
primary, soundly lost a GOP primary, falling to a rival backed
by the former president in a rout that reinforced his grip on
the party’s base.

The third-term congresswoman and her allies entered the day
downbeat about her prospects, aware that Trump’s backing gave
Harriet Hageman considerable lift in the state where he won by
the largest margin during the 2020 campaign. Cheney was already
looking ahead to a political future beyond Capitol Hill that
could include a 2024 presidential run, potentially putting her
on another collision course with Trump.

On Wednesday, calling Trump "a very grave threat and risk to our
republic," she told NBC that she thinks that defeating him will
require "a broad and united front of Republicans, Democrats and
independents — and that’s what I intend to be part of." She
declined to say if she would run for president but conceded it’s
"something that I’m thinking about."

Cheney described her primary loss on Tuesday night as the
beginning of a new chapter in her political career as she
addressed a small collection of supporters, including her
father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, on the edge of a vast
field flanked by mountains and bales of hay.

"Our work is far from over," she said, evoking Abraham Lincoln,
who also lost congressional elections before ascending to the
presidency and preserving the union.

The primary results — and the roughly 30-point margin — were a
powerful reminder of the GOP’s rapid shift to the right. A party
once dominated by national security-oriented, business-friendly
conservatives like her father now belongs to Trump, animated by
his populist appeal and, above all, his denial of defeat in the
2020 election.

Such lies, which have been roundly rejected by federal and state
election officials along with Trump’s own attorney general and
judges he appointed, transformed Cheney from an occasional
critic of the former president to the clearest voice inside the
GOP warning that he represents a threat to democratic norms.
She's the top Republican on the House panel investigating the
Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump
supporters, an attack she referenced in nodding to her political
future.

"I have said since Jan. 6 that I will do whatever it takes to
ensure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office
— and I mean it," she said Tuesday.

Four hundred miles (645 kilometers) to the east of Cheney’s
concession speech, festive Hageman supporters gathered at a
sprawling outdoor rodeo and Western culture festival in
Cheyenne, many wearing cowboy boots, hats and blue jeans.

"Obviously we’re all very grateful to President Trump, who
recognizes that Wyoming has only one congressional
representative and we have to make it count," said Hageman, a
ranching industry attorney who had finished third in a previous
bid for governor.

Echoing Trump’s conspiracy theories, she falsely claimed the
2020 election was "rigged" as she courted his loyalists in the
runup to the election.

Trump and his team celebrated Cheney’s loss, which may represent
his biggest political victory in a primary season full of them.
The former president called the results "a complete rebuke" of
the Jan. 6 committee.

"Liz Cheney should be ashamed of herself, the way she acted, and
her spiteful, sanctimonious words and actions towards others,"
he wrote on his social media platform. "Now she can finally
disappear into the depths of political oblivion where, I am
sure, she will be much happier than she is right now. Thank you
WYOMING!"

The news offered a welcome break from Trump's focus on his
growing legal entanglements. Just eight days earlier, federal
agents executing a search warrant recovered 11 sets of
classified records from the former president’s Florida estate.

Cheney’s defeat would have been unthinkable just two years ago.
The daughter of a former vice president, she hails from one of
the most prominent political families in Wyoming. And in
Washington, she was the No. 3 House Republican, an influential
voice in GOP politics and policy with a sterling conservative
voting record.

Cheney will now be forced from Congress at the end of her third
and final term in January. She is not expected to leave Capitol
Hill quietly.

She will continue in her leadership role on the congressional
panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack until it dissolves at the
end of the year. And she is actively considering a 2024 White
House bid -- as a Republican or independent -- having vowed to
do everything in her power to fight Trump’s influence in her
party.

With Cheney’s loss, Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are
going extinct.

In all, seven Republican senators and 10 Republican House
members backed Trump’s impeachment in the days after his
supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress tried to certify
President Joe Biden’s victory. Just two of those 10 House
members have won their primaries this year. After two Senate
retirements, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is the only such
Senate Republican on this year’s ballot.

Cheney was forced to seek assistance from the state’s tiny
Democratic minority in her bid to pull off a victory. But
Democrats across America, major donors among them, took notice.
She raised at least $15 million for her election, a stunning
figure for a Wyoming political contest.

Voters responded to the interest in the race. With a little more
than half of the vote counted, turnout ran about 50% higher than
in the 2018 Republican primary for governor.

If Cheney does ultimately run for president — either as a
Republican or an independent — don’t expect her to win Wyoming’s
three electoral votes.

"We like Trump. She tried to impeach Trump," Cheyenne voter
Chester Barkell said of Cheney on Tuesday. "I don’t trust Liz
Cheney."

And in Jackson, Republican voter Dan Winder said he felt
betrayed by his congresswoman.

"Over 70% of the state of Wyoming voted Republican in the last
presidential election and she turned right around and voted
against us," said Winder, a hotel manager. "She was our
representative, not her own."

<https://www.fox13news.com/news/rep-liz-cheney-primaries-gop-
direction-wyoming-alaska-august-16-2022>

[80%]

This is what happens to bitchy fat broads who stab honest men in the back.

As she positions for a presidential bid, the defeated
representative imagines herself as Lincolnesque. That’s absurd.

iz Cheney wanted to prove that the Republican Party was not a
wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump.

She failed. Miserably.

The three-term US representative from Wyoming didn’t just lose
her reelection bid in that state’s Republican primary on
Tuesday; she was wiped out. In the state that has long served as
a political launchpad for the national ambitions of the Cheney
family, Liz Cheney won less than 29 percent of the vote, as
opposed to the more than 66 percent that went to challenger
Harriet Hageman. Cheney lost all but two of Wyoming’s 23
counties—Albany, the home of liberal Laramie and the University
of Wyoming, and Teton, the wealthy ski-resort enclave that has
long been the most Democratic County in one of the nation’s most
Republican states.

Cheney never really had a chance. After she broke with Trump,
the former president who has made himself the undisputed boss of
the Grand Old Party, she was doomed to defeat in a Republican
primary where her last best hope was a massive Democratic
crossover vote that still would not have been enough to save
her. Even if every Democrat and Democratic-leaning independent
in the state had voted for Cheney, she would have lost because
she was so incredibly unpopular with the Republican base.

So, in this moment of complete and utter rejection by the
Republicans who know her best, Cheney is busy making her next
political move. And it’s a big one.

On the morning after her crushing defeat, the soon-to-be former
congresswoman went on NBC’s Today show and signaled that she is
interested in bidding for the presidency in 2024. “It is
something that I am thinking about, and I’ll make a decision in
the coming months,” said Cheney, who on Wednesday announced the
formation of a new group that could serve as a base for a
presidential run.

The group will have plenty of money. Instead of going all in as
a Wyoming primary candidate, Cheney banked a lot of the money
she collected from donors across the country. Her last pre-
primary campaign finance report showed that she had spent only
half of the more than $15 million she raised for the
congressional race.

Cheney, an ambitious and calculating politician, will keep right
on raising money to keep herself in contention. But for what?
Her presidential prospects would appear to be no better than
those of her father, Dick, who before installing himself as vice
president mounted a failed bid for the 1996 Republican
presidential nomination. So there’s a creeping suspicion that
all the post-primary positioning could be more about promoting
Liz Cheney’s brand than her stated goal of “doing whatever it
takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.”

The notion that Cheney would be a serious contender for the
Republican nomination in a challenge to Trump’s all-but-certain
2024 bid is comic. The Grand Old Party is now Trump’s political
plaything. Of the almost 200 candidates he has endorsed in 2022
Republican primaries, 182 have won and just 15 have lost. Cheney
is the fourth House Republican who voted for Trump’s impeachment
to be defeated in a GOP primary, and four others decided to drop
their reelection plans rather than face a Trump-backed
challenger.

The likelier route for Cheney is as an independent, or as the
leader of a new party that would try to attract disaffected
Republicans, as well as independents and Democrats who have been
impressed with the representative’s fierce opposition to Trump.

That’s comparable to what Abraham Lincoln did in 1860, when he
and his allies pulled former Whigs, Free Soil land reformers,
dissident Democrats, and abolitionists together in a Republican
Party that won an election where four major candidates split the
presidential vote. Cheney would very much like to be considered
the Lincoln of her time.

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln,
was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he
won the most important election of all,” Cheney said after
suffering her own defeat. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he
saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for
all of history.”

In case anyone missed the connection she was trying to make,
Cheney added:

Speaking at Gettysburg of the great task remaining before us,
Lincoln said that, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a
new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the
people, and for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”
As we meet here tonight, that remains our greatest and most
important task.

The reference to “the great task” was a marketing move. Within
hours of referencing Lincoln’s 1863 reflection on winning the
Civil War as “the great task remaining before us,” Cheney’s
political team announced that the new group that will serve as
her springboard for future fundraising and campaigns will be
called The Great Task.

Cheney egos are every bit as big as Trump egos. Don’t doubt for
a moment that Liz Cheney does, indeed, see herself as similar to
the 16th president.

But she’s not, personally or politically. And the notion that
Cheney might form a new party with appeal to moderate
Democrats—or even moderate Republicans—is absurd.

While her work on the House Select Committee to Investigate the
January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has been exemplary,
Cheney’s record is that of an extreme right-wing advocate for
positions that have mirrored those of Trump when it comes to
attacking immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and Democrats. Before
her split with the 45th president, she voted with him 93 percent
of the time. And she has an ugly history of exploiting political
divisions by promoting Big Lies, as Cheney did when she refused
to reject Trump’s vile “birther” lies about former President
Barack Obama, and when she claimed that Vice President Kamala
Harris “sounds just like Karl Marx.”

Lincoln, like other early Republicans, read Marx, who was the
European correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune,
the newspaper that played a critical role in calling the party
into being. Indeed, a number of Marx’s German followers were
among the great many immigrants and refugees who helped to forge
a Republican Party that opposed the spread of slavery, promoted
worker rights, and implemented land reforms that were aimed at
alleviating poverty. When the Republican Party was founded in
Ripon, Wis., in 1854, a number of the people in the room were
members of the socialist Ceresco commune.

Lincoln was not as militant as the Radical Republicans who
supported him. But he was no conservative. Raised in a working-
class family on the frontier, he had nothing to do with the sort
of dynastic politics in which Liz Cheney was raised. Lincoln was
a circuit-riding country lawyer who won his campaign for the
state legislature as a champion of workers and farmers. Liz
Cheney came to prominence as a defender of the Iraq War that was
launched based on her father’s lies, and as a champion of the
sort of empire-building military interventionism that Lincoln
opposed as one of the US House’s most ardent critics of the 1846
US invasion of Mexico. Lincoln took inspiration from the anti-
colonial pamphlets of Thomas Paine. Cheney perfected her
rhetorical skills as a Fox News regular who defended the use of
torture.

No matter how hard Liz Cheney wants voters to think of her as a
new-model Lincoln, the reality is that she’s just a slightly
refurbished Cheney.

<https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/cheney-no-lincoln/>

[80%]

This is what happens to bitchy fat broads who stab honest men in the back.

WASHINGTON — Fresh off her congressional primary loss, Rep. Liz
Cheney, R-Wyo., said Wednesday that she plans to be part of a
bipartisan coalition whose goal is to ensure former President
Donald Trump never holds office again.

“I believe that Donald Trump continues to pose a very grave
threat and risk to our republic. And I think that defeating him
is going to require a broad and united front of Republicans,
Democrats and independents, and that’s what I intend to be a
part of,” she said in an exclusive interview with Savannah
Guthrie on NBC’s “TODAY” show.

She reiterated that she will be doing “whatever it takes” to
keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office in future
elections. Overnight, Cheney formed a new leadership political
action committee called “The Great Task,” an aide confirmed to
NBC. She filed with the Federal Election Commission to transfer
remaining cash from her federal campaign account to the new PAC.
At the end of July, she had more than $7 million cash on hand,
according to FEC filings.

NBC News projected Tuesday night that Cheney, former chairwoman
of the House Republican Conference and the elder daughter of
former Vice President Dick Cheney, lost her Republican primary
to Trump-backed candidate Harriet Hageman.

With 99% of the vote in Wednesday, Hageman led Cheney by about
37 percentage points.

Cheney told “TODAY” from her home in Jackson, Wyoming, that
defeating Hageman would have required that she “perpetuate the
big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that
Trump had won it.

Asked if she plans to run for president, she first deflected and
argued that the GOP needs to be taken in a different direction.
“We’ve now got one major political party, my party, which has
really become a cult of personality, and we’ve got to get this
party back to a place where we’re embracing the values and the
principles on which it was founded,” she said.

Pressed again about whether she’s contemplating running for
president, Cheney said, “That’s a decision that I’m going to
make in the coming months, and I’m not going to make any
announcements here this morning — but it is something that I am
thinking about.”

When asked if Democrats should retain control of Congress
because of the state of the Republican Party, Cheney suggested
that would be preferable over the possibility of election
deniers holding office.

“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,” she
said.

Cheney said the GOP is “in very bad shape” and “it could take
several election cycles” before it’s reformed and detached from
Trump and what she said was a cult of personality around the
former president. She also denounced the former president for
allegedly releasing the names of FBI agents involved in a search
of his Mar-a-Lago resort “when he knows that our law enforcement
is the target of violence.”

“I am absolutely going to continue this battle,” she said. “It’s
the most important thing I’ve ever been involved in, and I think
it’s certainly the most important thing, challenge, that our
nation has faced in recent history, and maybe since the Civil
War. And it’s one that we must win.”

Nobody in their right mind would have voted for Joe Biden and
Kamala Harris.

Same goes for Miss Piggy Cheney.

<https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/17/liz-cheney-says-shes-thinking-
about-a-white-house-bid-after-primary-loss-will-do-whatever-it-
takes-to-keep-trump-out-of-power.html>

[80%]

This is what happens to bitchy fat broads who stab honest men in the back.

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney’s political future had long been in
jeopardy. From voting to impeach then-President Donald Trump
after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to repeatedly
refuting his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen
from him, Cheney has been one of Trump’s harshest critics. Now
that outspokenness has come with a price.

The daughter of one of America’s most powerful vice presidents
lost to her main primary challenger, attorney Harriet Hageman,
by around 20 points, based on incomplete returns as of 10:30
p.m. Eastern. Hageman’s path to victory was pretty
straightforward. She entered the race against Cheney with
Trump’s endorsement and consolidated support among most anti-
Cheney primary voters.

But while Cheney’s loss is particularly high-profile, it is not
surprising. Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach
Trump, only two advanced to the general election, four lost
their primaries and four didn’t even try to seek reelection,
retiring instead.

Most pro-impeachment Republicans lost
The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President
Donald Trump, including whether they sought reelection, whether
they had a Trump-endorsed primary challenger, their primary
result and the partisan lean of their district

IN PRIMARY …
REPRESENTATIVE DISTRICT SOUGHT REELECTION? TRUMP-ENDORSED
OPPONENT? WON? PARTISAN LEAN
David Valadao CA-22 ? ? D+10.1
Peter Meijer MI-03 ? ? D+2.5
Jaime Herrera Beutler WA-03 ? ? R+11.2
Dan Newhouse WA-04 ? ? ? R+24.6
Tom Rice SC-07 ? ? R+25.8
Liz Cheney WY-AL ? ? R+49.7
Fred Upton MI-04 ? R+8.9
Anthony Gonzalez* — ? –
John Katko* — –
Adam Kinzinger* — –
*Did not specify which district they might have run in if they
had sought reelection.

A check mark for “Won?” means the candidate advanced to the
general election.

SOURCES: NEWS REPORTS, U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

A question we had going into this primary cycle was just how
many pro-impeachment Republicans would still be in the House in
2023. The answer we now know is two at most. Republicans may say
in polls that the GOP should accept elected Republicans who
disagree with the party, but there is clearly little appetite
for those who have rebuked Trump in this way.

Moreover, in analyzing why these representatives lost — or
narrowly prevailed, in the case of Reps. David Valadao of
California and Dan Newhouse of Washington — there are few clear
patterns. The electoral impact of the impeachment vote ranged
across the ideological spectrum, from districts that lean
Democratic to those that are solidly Republican. For instance,
Valadao hailed from the bluest seat of this group, while
Newhouse survived in a considerably red district.

That said, it’s probably not a coincidence that both Valadao and
Newhouse won in states that use a top-two primary system. In
that format, all voters can cast a ballot that includes every
candidate, regardless of party, whereas party primaries mostly
involve voters who are either registered with that party or
generally back it and who are voting only for candidates from
one party. Still, Valadao, the only pro-impeachment Republican
running who didn’t face a Trump-endorsed challenger, barely
edged out fellow Republican Chris Mathys, an ardent Trump
supporter, 26 percent to 23 percent for second place in his top-
two primary.1 Newhouse didn’t do much better, essentially tying
with the lone Democrat in the race with 25 percent.

Are Democrats really going to win in Ohio and Wisconsin? |
FiveThirtyEight

ALL VIDEOS
YOUTUBE
In fact, not a single pro-impeachment Republican captured a
majority of the GOP primary vote. This amounts to an especially
weak set of performances for incumbents, who in most cases
easily win their primaries.

No pro-impeachment Republican won a majority
The six House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President
Donald Trump and ran for reelection, by their primary system,
number of Republican opponents, share of the Republican primary
vote and primary result

INCUMBENT DISTRICT PRIMARY SYSTEM GOP OPPONENTS % OF GOP
VOTES WON?
David Valadao CA-22 Top-Two 2 46.7% ?
Dan Newhouse WA-04 Top-Two 6 34.1 ?
Peter Meijer MI-03 Party 1 48.2
Liz Cheney WY-AL Party 4 38.0
Jaime Herrera Beutler WA-03 Top-Two 4 34.4
Tom Rice SC-07 Party 6 24.6
“% of GOP votes” is the share of primary votes won by the
incumbent out of the total votes won by Republican candidates,
as top-two primaries have candidates from all parties running
together.

A check mark for “Won?” means the candidate advanced to the
general election.

Results for Cheney’s primary based on 33 percent of the expected
vote reporting at 10:30 p.m. Eastern on Aug. 16.

SOURCES: ABC NEWS, STATE ELECTION OFFICES

It also suggests that Valadao and Newhouse’s survival involved
at least a little luck. The fact that Valadao faced two pro-
Trump opponents, neither of whom landed the former president’s
endorsement, likely made it easier for him to squeak out a
victory compared with someone like Rep. Peter Meijer of
Michigan’s 3rd District, who faced one Trump-backed challenger
and narrowly lost 52 percent to 48 percent. Similarly, had
Newhouse faced just one pro-Trump challenger instead of several,
he may have been doomed, as collectively his Republican
opponents won nearly half of the top-two primary vote — about
twice what Newhouse garnered. But instead, they split the anti-
Newhouse vote, and he survived.

Factors besides Trump, though, played at least some role in
these primaries. For instance, in the two bluest seats on this
list — those contested by Valadao and Meijer — primary meddling
by Democratic-aligned groups may have had an effect on the
outcome. Take Mathys. He didn’t have Trump’s endorsement, but
outside spending by House Majority PAC, an important campaign
arm for House Democrats, ran ads touting Mathys’s support for
Trump. And in Michigan’s 3rd District, the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee spent nearly $450,000 running
ads attacking Gibbs as “too conservative for west Michigan” at a
time when he had almost no outside help to combat Meijer’s huge
spending edge.

Mandela Barnes may be Democrats’ best hope for flipping a Senate
seat

ALL VIDEOS
YOUTUBE
Outside forces aside from Trump also likely influenced the four
Republicans who said they wouldn’t seek reelection. Ohio Rep.
Anthony Gonzalez faced a serious primary challenge from former
Trump aide Max Miller, but he also faced redistricting
uncertainty, reflected in the initial plan drawn by Ohio
Republicans that split Gonzalez’s old seat into four different
districts (it was later thrown out by the state judiciary and
replaced). Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger was in a similar boat,
as his district was dismantled by Illinois Democrats. The same
was true of New York Rep. John Katko: New York Democrats sought
to draw him into a bluer district, although the eventual map was
invalidated and replaced with one drawn by a court-appointed
expert. And longtime Michigan Rep. Fred Upton considered running
again for a while, even though redistricting threw him together
with more conservative Rep. Bill Huizenga, who Trump ultimately
backed.

Yet of the six incumbents who ultimately sought reelection, they
didn’t necessarily enter their races as underdogs. All outspent
their top primary opponents, and they usually had more outside
help, too. It just wasn’t enough to overcome the anger within
the GOP base over their impeachment votes. Tellingly, all six
had faced some sort of official censure by a local and/or state
party committee following their vote against Trump.

Looking ahead to November, it’s possible the rebuke continues as
only one House Republican out of the 10 who voted to impeach
Trump is currently favored to make it to the next Congress.
Given the red hue of Newhouse’s seat and the fact that he faces
a Democrat in the general, the FiveThirtyEight 2022 election
forecast puts him as very likely to win reelection. But Valadao
is in a tougher reelection fight, which FiveThirtyEight’s
forecast currently rates as a pure toss-up.

It’s likely Cheney as well as the nine other Republicans who
voted to impeach Trump knew their vote was a potentially risky
move for their political careers. But in January 2021, few would
have predicted that only two would survive their primaries.

Geoffrey Skelley is a senior elections analyst at
FiveThirtyEight. @geoffreyvs

<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/with-cheneys-loss-just-2-
house-republicans-who-voted-to-impeach-trump-are-on-the-ballot-
in-november/>

[Biden Idiocy]

<***@gmail.com> wrote:
X-Invalid: >
X-Invalid: > Obama and Biden are both idiots. They flunked math.
X-Invalid: >
Message-ID: <***@dizum.com>

President Joe Biden’s plan to have the federal government pay
off hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans has
received blistering criticism, all of it deserved.

It’s a constitutional offense: Congress is supposed to authorize
sweeping spending programs, not the president acting on his own.
It’s economically risky, given our persistent high inflation.
It’s perverse distributionally: A lawyer-doctor couple making
$249,000 together will be able to walk away from debts.

It solves none of the structural problems of higher education
and its financing and may make them worse . It is socially
destructive, too, threatening to exacerbate the growing divide
between Americans who have college degrees and those who do not.

To top it all off, it may not even pay the political dividends
the Joe Biden administration seeks. A significant number of
Democrats in tough races this fall have already repudiated
Biden’s giveaway. Sometimes harshly: Tim Ryan, running for the
Senate from Ohio, says that “waiving debt for those already on a
trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message to
millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to
make ends meet.”

Ryan and the others are implicitly betting that Biden’s action
will cost the Democrats votes, at least where they live. It’s a
judgment that reflects a hard lesson many Democrats learned in
previous decades.

During the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins
reportedly set forth the party’s basic political strategy: “We
will spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect.” Biden’s
student-loan gambit omits the second step, but otherwise the
political rationale is the same: Help out millions of people,
and they can be expected to be grateful — and to vote on their
gratitude.

It seemed to work for decades. But the New Deal majority started
to show cracks in the 1960s and broke apart altogether by the
end of the 1980s. Many, many books try to explain why. A common
theme: The Democrats and big government ceased to be identified
with middle-class values and interests. They were out of step
with public sentiment on work and welfare, on racial politics
and crime policy, on religion and patriotism.

That’s why Bill Clinton, seeking to reclaim the presidency for
the Democrats after they suffered three defeats in a row,
carefully broadcast a different message. He made a show of
supporting the death penalty for violent criminals. He promised
to end welfare as we know it. And he chided a minor celebrity
who had spoken glibly about murders committed by black people.
At the same time, he stuck with the party’s core commitment to
use federal power to help those who, in his words, “work hard
and play by the rules.”

At a low point in his presidency, he told a columnist the lesson
he had drawn. He had run into trouble, he said, by forgetting:
“Values matter most.”

Clinton’s makeover was successful, so much so that in the
decades since his presidency both parties have become friendlier
to federal activism. But Democrats may have gotten so carried
away by rising tolerance for big government that they have
misunderstood why it happened in the first place.

The most serious political vulnerability of Biden’s debt write-
off is not that it will increase the deficit, although it will.
It’s that it contradicts widely held values. Instead of helping
people who are down on their luck or rewarding them for working
— as government programs from the earned-income credit and
Social Security do — it undoes part of a freely made bargain.

The lawyer can still earn a handsome living from his degree, but
he no longer has to meet the obligations he accepted in return
for the expense of getting it. Millions of people who work hard
and play by the rules, as Clinton put it, are made into suckers:
the people who paid their debts or made sacrifices to avoid
borrowing so much in the first place.

Americans who never attended college at all but have other
debts, from mortgages to car loans, will get no relief from
Biden’s edict. But they may have to pay for it, through higher
inflation or higher taxes, even though a lot of the
beneficiaries are better off than they are. That’s going to
strike many voters, even ones who favor expansive government
programs, as unfair, because it is.

Contemporary Democrats are already paying a price for the
perception that they think Americans with college degrees are
better than everyone else. Funneling hundreds of billions to
Americans who have attended college — invoking something called
the “Heroes Act,” no less — will reinforce that perception.

Conservatives have often deluded themselves into thinking that
big government as such is unpopular, and had many occasions to
learn otherwise. But it’s popular only to the extent it aligns
with voters’ values. Democrats might be about to get a sharp
reminder of the point.

To contact the author of this story:
Ramesh Ponnuru at ***@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Katy Roberts at ***@bloomberg.net

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-27/biden-s-
student-loan-scheme-may-backfire-on-democrats