Hageman captures Cheney’s Wyoming House seat

Wyoming attorney Harriet Hageman was projected to win the state’s at-large House seat, officially securing her place as the successor to outgoing Rep. Liz Cheney (R).

The Associated Press called the race at 11 p.m. ET.

Hageman, a constitutional and natural resource attorney, secured the Republican nomination over the summer, soundly defeating Cheney in the GOP primary by more than 30 percentage points.

Former President Trump endorsed Hageman shortly after she announced her bid, making good on his promise to help oust Cheney after she opposed his claims of election fraud and voted to impeach him following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The 2020 presidential election was a common theme throughout the Wyoming race. Cheney largely centered her campaign on the notion that claims of election fraud are a threat to U.S. democracy and that Trump — the lead advocate of those assertions — poses a danger to the country. Hageman, on the other hand, has said the 2020 race was “rigged” against Trump.

The race between Hageman and Cheney was viewed as a microcosm of the current state of the Republican Party, which is becoming more and more fractured based on allegiance to Trump.

While Trump and his loyalists, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), threw their support behind Hageman, several establishment, anti-Trump Republicans — such as former President George W. Bush and ex-GOP Speakers Paul Ryan (Wis.) and John Boehner (Ohio) — ran to Cheney’s defense.

In that sense, Hageman’s victory marks a win for Trump and his movement and solidifies the end of Cheney’s congressional career, which brought her to the highest echelons of House GOP power as conference chairwoman and ended with her becoming an outlier in the party her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, once helped lead.

Hageman called for “regulating the administrative state” on the campaign trail, saying at a at a luncheon in August, “I think we need to make the federal government largely irrelevant to our everyday lives.” She has also advocated for controlling government spending, protecting the life of the unborn child and opposing the “radical Biden agenda,” according to her campaign website.