Four years after Harriet Hageman took Liz Cheney’s seat in Congress with then-former President Donald Trump’s backing, Wyoming voters are sending her to the U.S. Senate. The Republican congresswoman defeated Democrat James Byrd on November 3rd to succeed retiring Senator Cynthia Lummis. One commentator who celebrated the win on election night had a different Wyoming Republican on his mind.
The contest pitted Hageman, who is finishing her second term as Wyoming’s only member of the U.S. House, against a former state legislator who represented Cheyenne for a decade. Lummis had decided to step down after one term in the Senate. Trump backed Hageman for the open seat in December 2025, shortly after she announced she would run.
The last time Trump helped Hageman move up, he had to go through a member of his own party. Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, had risen to chair the House Republican Conference. Hageman had helped her get to Congress in the first place. When Cheney ran for the House in 2016, Hageman stood before fellow Wyoming Republicans and urged them to vote for her.
Gunther Eagleman recalled how that alliance ended in an election-night post on X. “Harriet Hageman is headed to the U.S. Senate,” he wrote above a portrait of the congresswoman. “The woman who BURIED Liz Cheney in 2022 just got promoted.” He had a few words for the cable network, too. “Cry harder, MSNBC. The Cowboy State stays RED.”
Cheney’s break with Trump came during his first term. She was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach him on January 13th, 2021, a week after the attack on the Capitol. Her Republican colleagues removed her as conference chair that May. She went on to serve as vice chair of the House committee investigating January 6th, while Trump endorsed Hageman to challenge her in the Republican primary.
When Trump came to Casper to campaign for Hageman in May 2022, Cheney had a welcome waiting on the billboards. One showed the two women together and quoted Hageman’s own description of Cheney as a “proven, courageous, constitutional conservative,” as Cowboy State Daily reported. Another urged visitors in town for the rally to spend money with local businesses. Inside, Hageman made her pitch to the crowd. “I know Wyoming, I love Wyoming, I am Wyoming,” she said, according to Wyoming Public Radio.
Wyoming Republicans settled the contest on August 16th. The secretary of state’s official tally gave Hageman 113,079 votes to Cheney’s 49,339. In Park County, which includes the city of Cody, Hageman drew more than three votes for every one Cheney received, winning the county 8,672 to 2,821. Teton County went the other way, giving Cheney 5,955 votes to Hageman’s 1,928.
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Cheney took her fight against Trump to Wisconsin two years later. On October 3rd, 2024, she appeared alongside Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Ripon, the city that claims the birthplace of the Republican Party. Footage from FOX6 News Milwaukee shows the former House Republican Conference chair taking the microphone at a campaign event for the sitting Democratic vice president. Trump went on to win Wisconsin and return to the White House.
Watch Cheney campaign for Harris in Wisconsin here:
Back in Wyoming on Tuesday, the Associated Press called the Senate race for Hageman as polls closed at 7 p.m. In a statement that evening, Hageman pointed to the fights ahead over energy, immigration and taxes. She also had a message for the voters who had first sent her to Congress four years earlier. “The people of Wyoming have hired me to do a new job,” she said in the statement, which WyoFile quoted. “I am grateful, and I will not let you down.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.