Liz Cheney Drops Senate Bid

Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, will drop her bid to challenge Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) in the Wyoming Republican Senate primary, according to a report from CNN’s Peter Hamby and John King.

UPDATE: 

Cheney cited “health issues” in her family that “have recently arisen” as the main reason why she dropped out even though she neither could get the traction nor the financial advantage she needed to knock off Enzi. 

Though she cited “health issues,” “top Republicans” said that Liz Cheney’s “victory depended on vastly” raising more money than Enzi. Though Cheney “raised more than $1 million for her campaign, largely from elite Republicans close to her father,” Enzi reportedly “came close enough” to that in the first fundraising quarter “that Republicans in D.C. concluded he would win.”

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Cheney uprooted her family from Virginia to Wyoming last summer to challenge Enzi, an incumbent Republican who is popular in Wyoming with the Republican establishment, the base, and the media.  

As CNN noted, polls in addition to her critics “labeled her a carpetbagger.” In addition to her “campaign missteps, Cheney’s election effort, vigorously supported by her father and his allies, often felt out-of-tune with the small-government conservative sentiment that has fueled other Republican primary challengers.” As CNN points out, “Cheney, like her father, is an unapologetic neoconservative” with strong ties to the Washington establishment, which did “not sit well with many grassroots conservatives, particularly in the libertarian-leaning West.”

Wyoming Tea Party voters did not support Cheney, and a Public Policy Polling poll found that only 31% of those in Wyoming thought she was a Wyomingite and 50% thought she should run for Senate in Virginia, where she had lived in a prominent suburb for most of her adult life. 

Cheney had been trying to appeal to her right flank before she officially entered her race, as was made evident when she rushed to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s defense after her father, Dick, took a gratuitous shot at her on national television. But conservatives in Wyoming were not buying it.