Drake: Gov. Mark Gordon may be the biggest winner of Cheney’s race

Cheney has at least eight primary opponents for 2022 and her arch-nemesis, former President Donald Trump, is interviewing even more. Trump wants to pummel her at the polls for voting to impeach him in January.

By contrast, only Rex Rammell, a perennial candidate who garnered 3% of the vote when he ran against Gordon in 2018, has entered the gubernatorial contest. Unless some of Cheney’s rivals drop out and take on the governor instead, Gordon may not face any serious competition.

That’s amazing, considering the attention the GOP has given to “correcting” what happened in 2018, when Gordon won the primary with one-third of the vote. He’s never been embraced by the party’s extremist leaders as a “true conservative.”

Two candidates more to their liking, Foster Friess and Harriet Hageman, split the right-wing vote in 2018, capturing 47% between them. That paved the way for Gordon, the pragmatic former state treasurer, to win.

Party leadership blamed Democrats who changed parties to vote for Gordon in the primary.

It was a specious argument. Gordon defeated Friess by more than 9,000 votes, while it’s estimated that fewer than 5,300 Democrats changed parties to vote in the Republican primary.

Even before Gordon was sworn in as governor, Sen. Bo Biteman, R-Ranchester, pre-filed a bill to ban “crossover voting” after May 1, the first day anyone can file for office.

Biteman’s bill was the top priority of the Wyoming Republican Party for the 2019 legislative session. Ranking below it were such time-honored Republican favorites as no tax increases, no medical marijuana and no LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws.

Biteman’s bill died in the Senate Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee. In a rare move by Senate leadership, Biteman was allowed to reintroduce a nearly identical measure that was turned over to the friendlier Senate Agriculture Committee. The zombie passed the full Senate, 20-10.

But House Corporations didn’t even take a vote, killing it for the session. In 2020, a watered-down House bill co-sponsored by Biteman failed in the Senate.

I fully expected party leaders to focus on ousting Gordon in favor of a “real conservative.”

It hasn’t happened. Cheney’s impeachment vote has diverted the party’s ire in a state where Trump won nearly 70% of the votes.

Sen. Anthony Bouchard, R-Cheyenne, was the first to announce he’d take on Cheney in the 2022 primary. Rep. Chuck Gray, R-Casper, followed, along with Cheyenne attorney Darin Smith and five lesser-known candidates.

The state GOP voted to censure Cheney and demanded she appear before the executive committee to apologize. She rightfully ignored them.

More recently, several GOP county committees, including Fremont, Park and Carbon, ridiculously voted to no longer recognize Cheney as their representative in Congress.

When Friess – who won Trump’s inconsequential endorsement in 2018 – died in May, it should have opened the door to other serious contenders.

Hageman has reportedly been lobbied to enter the contest to oust Cheney by Trump himself.

It would be a strange political decision, because Hageman worked on Cheney’s brief bid to unseat Sen. Mike Enzi in 2014 and later contributed to her congressional campaigns. But how could she turn it down if she’s assured of Trump’s endorsement?

Trump has made it clear he wants one and only one candidate to run against Cheney, so the large field doesn’t split the vote and hand her the nomination.

I simply don’t see a lot of the congressional contenders admitting defeat and peeling away from the pack to run for governor. That greatly works in Gordon’s favor. He is not the vulnerable officeholder that state party leaders thought they could easily beat before Cheney upended Wyoming politics.

Trump has also interviewed Biteman, an ambitious hardcore conservative cast in his mold. Biteman hasn’t announced his intentions, but he hasn’t been able to accomplish much in the Wyoming Senate, where he is a leading voice in an extreme-right coalition that doesn’t get many of its major bills passed.

I am leery of even mentioning Biteman as a candidate for higher office. I well remember when former Casper Star-Tribune columnist Hugh Jackson suggested that Barbara Cubin, who also had a fairly lackluster state legislative career, was a possible replacement for Rep. Craig Thomas when he moved on to the Senate.

Jackson meant it as a joke. I don’t know if his backhanded encouragement had any role in Cubin deciding to run, but she won and served as Wyoming’s representative in D.C. for the next 14 years.

Let me be crystal clear: I don’t want to see Biteman, whom I disagree with on just about every issue, either in Congress or living at the governor’s mansion. Since he’s shown a willingness to carry the water for his party’s leaders, he’d probably do it again.

In a year when hardly anyone but Gordon really wants the job, it may be the ticket Biteman is looking to punch.