Fate of Trump Targets in Tuesday’s Elections: Cheney Loses and Murkowski Survives

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), targeted for ousting from office by former President Donald Trump, survived her Aug. 16 primary election against 18 challengers, but will still face a Trump-endorsee in the general election come November.

But another Congressional colleague facing Trump’s ire heard a sobering pronouncement from voters in Wyoming.

Constituents resoundingly agreed it was time for Rep. Liz Cheney to pack her bags and head home from Washington, D.C. after three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) speaks to reporters in Washington on May 18, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Meanwhile, in Alaska, Trump opponent Murkowski managed to survive her reelection bid for her U.S. Senate seat, for now.

Her survival can be credited solely to new rules in the state that allow the top four finishers to advance to the fall general election, said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia. Voters in Alaska approved the change to the process, called ranked-choice voting.

And if “she had been running in a situation like Lisa Murkowski,” Cheney might have been “able to survive,” too, Bullock said.

Twelve years ago, Murkowski almost was tripped up in a reelection bid, and had to find an unconventional path to victory.

“She lost the Republican nomination, but then she won her seat by running as a write-in candidate. So she got the Republican votes who’d voted for the minority Republicans back in that Republican primary. But then she also picked up a chunk of Independents” and Democrats, Bullock said.

“She is the only incumbent U.S. Senator ever reelected with a write-in, and only the second person ever elected to the Senate, at all, with a write-in,” noted Bullock, an elections historian. “The first one was [South Carolina Democrat] Strom Thurmond back in 1954.”

Now, the

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