Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming touted her role as the top Republican on the committee Jan. 6 in the final ad for her near-doomed re-election campaign as polls show her trailing Trump-backed opponent Harriet Hageman. just five days before the primaries.
But the nearly two-and-a-half-minute ad, released online Thursday, appeared to be aimed both at a national audience and at Republican primary voters in Wyoming, who will decide the fate of Ms. Cheney, the state’s only House member.
“The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious,” Ms. Cheney said at the start of the ad. “It persecutes those who love their country. This is a door that Donald Trump has opened to manipulate Americans into abandoning their principles, sacrificing their freedom, justifying violence, ignoring the decisions of our courts and the rule of law.
Ms. Cheney, who was vilified by former President Donald J. Trump and many of his supporters have defended the work of a special House committee investigating the 2021 attack on the Capitol and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Ms. Cheney, the committee’s vice chairman since Jan. 6, acknowledged her political peril. A poll released Thursday by the University of Wyoming Center for Wyoming Research and Analysis showed Ms. Cheney trailing Ms. Hageman by nearly 30 points.
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She is the last of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Mr. Trump, who faced voters in this year’s primaries. Three lost: Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, Tom Rice of South Carolina and Peter Meijer of Michigan. Two others survived the primaries, and four declined to run for re-election.
Entitled “The Great Task,” the ad is being promoted on social media but not on television, according to Jeremy Adler, a spokesman for Ms. Cheney’s campaign.
In the ad, Ms. Cheney described Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud as his legacy and said the nation had an obligation to hold those responsible for inciting violence.
“History has shown us time and time again how these kinds of poisonous lies destroy free nations,” Ms. Cheney said of those who insist Mr. Trump won the election. “No one who understands the laws of our nation, no one with an honest, honorable, true commitment to our Constitution, would say that. It is a cancer that threatens our great republic.
Ms. Cheney did not mention Ms. Hageman by name in her ad, but drew a comparison between her opponents in Wyoming and candidates who are denying the election nationwide. Last week, Ms. Hageman repeated Mr. Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged.
Tim Murtaugh, an adviser on Ms. Hageman’s campaign, accused Ms. Cheney of abandoning Wyoming. “This video is basically an audition tape for CNN or MSNBC,” he said.
Ms. Cheney’s rejection of Mr. Trump — and her impeachment vote last year — already has a political cost. The Wyoming Republican Party condemned her in February 2021, a month after the vote to impeach Ms. Cheney. House Republicans later ousted Ms. Cheney as the chamber’s No. 3 party leader, replacing her with Representative Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist from New York.
As the ad ended, Ms Cheney said she would always seek to preserve peaceful transitions of power, “not violent confrontations, intimidation and thuggery”, adding “where we are being led by people who love this country more than themselves . “
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