Liz Cheney’s Consultants Are Given an Ultimatum: Drop Her, or Be Dropped

The message, delivered by a lobbyist close to the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has already led one Republican firm to cut ties.

...The Morning Group, a fund-raising firm she hired to help prepare for a primary next year against a challenger endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, informed her last month they could no longer work on her campaign, according to Republicans familiar with the matter.

...

Ms. Cheney has not suffered financially for her outspoken criticism of Mr. Trump and Mr. McCarthy. Through the end of September, she had raised over $5 million and had more than $3.6 million on hand.

She has retained support from an array of leading Republicans, including Mr. Bush; Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader; and the former House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan.

She has, however, emerged as perhaps Mr. Trump’s top priority to defeat. After meeting with a series of would-be challengers, Mr. Trump in September endorsed Harriet Hageman, a Cheyenne attorney who had taken part in a failed, last-ditch effort to strip him of the 2016 Republican presidential nomination two months after he had clinched it.

Ms. Hageman, who was once a Cheney family friend and served as an adviser to Ms. Cheney’s short-lived 2014 Senate campaign, raised just over $300,000 for the quarter, but she only filed her candidacy on Sept 9.

In a political party that financial disparity would make Hageman a sacrificial lamb. In a personality cult, it doesn't. When I first read of the size of Cheney's war chest I thought "That's a lot for a congressional race." And then I thought, Cheney's the only Rep. in Wyoming, right?" and looked it up and she is. Why do you need money to be competitive in American politics? To build name recognition. Normally, you're nobody. Nobody knows you and you have to get you name and face out there. There is nobody, not one single Wyomingite, who does not know Liz Cheney. Know how many congressmen Wyoming has? 1. Liz Cheney. Wyoming is the least populous state in the Union, only 578,000 people. Know what the average size of a CD is? 710,000. So everybody in Wyoming knows who Liz Cheney is. Money can buy you a lot of things, in politics it can buy you name recognition, but it can't buy you love. I take that $5M she has raised--$23.90 per Wyoming Republican!--as a bad sign sign for her.

Mr. Trump has endorsed a handful of other Republicans challenging the lawmakers who voted to impeach him and was exultant last month when Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, who cast one of the 10 Republican votes to impeach, said he would retire from Congress rather than run against a former Trump White House official.

“1 Down, 9 To Go!” the former president said in a statement at the time.