GOP Sen. Mike Enzi announced Saturday that he won’t seek a fifth term, causing more than a handful of Wyoming Republicans to evaluate their political ambitions.
Only seven men (and zero women) have represented The Equality State in the Senate in the last 50 years, and this is Wyoming’s first open Senate seat in more than 20 years. Statewide office as a Republican in Wyoming is as close to a lifetime appointment as it gets in electoral politics these days.
News of Enzi’s retirement started to leak on Friday when Matt Herdman, who managed Democrat Mary Throne’s 2018 campaign for governor, wrote about the rumor on Twitter. Then the Casper Tribune officially broke the story the next day.
Wyoming normally eases into its campaigns with summer filing deadline. But Enzi’s retirement and the potential for two open seats is pushing the state into an electoral sprint much earlier.
Do Democrats Have a Chance?
Open seats can create takeover opportunities for the party out of power, and Wyoming voters elected a Democratic governor as recently as 2006. But it’s unlikely Democrats have much of a chance here this cycle.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s performance was dreadful. She fell short of 22 percent in her loss to Donald Trump. Wyoming is the most Republican state in the country, according to our Baseline metric, which accounts for all statewide offices over the most recent four election cycles. The GOP has a 68-26 percent Baseline performance advantage. And that 41-point margin is 7 points greater than the next nearest state (Utah).
Even if Wyoming’s former two-term Democratic governor, Dave Freudenthal, decides to run for Enzi’s seat, former two-term Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee proved last cycle how difficult a comeback can be. Bredeson lost an open seat race by 11 points to GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn.
The last Democratic senator from Wyoming was Gale McGee, who lost re-election in 1976. So most of the action is likely to be on the Republican side.
Potential Republicans for Senate
Initially, all eyes are on At-Large Rep. Liz Cheney. She clearly has Senate ambitions since she challenged Enzi in 2014, even though she dropped out before the primary.
Two years later, GOP Rep. Cynthia Lummis decided not to run for re-election and Cheney ran for the open seat. She won the primary with 39 percent against eight other candidates and won the general election with 62 percent. In 2018, the congresswoman was re-elected with 64 percent.
There is a possibility that Cheney could forego a Senate bid to continue a family legacy in the House. Her father, Vice President Dick Cheney, represented Wyoming in the House from 1979-1989, when she was a teenager. And even though she’s only in her second term, Cheney is the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference.
She...