So the Wyoming Republican party has kicked Liz Cheney out.
Can they prevent her from entering the primary for the Wyoming Congressional district in 2022?
If she does run in the 2022 primary and wins it, can the Wyoming Republican party keep her from running as a Republican?
I’m not familiar with Wyoming primary election laws, but generally it’s difficult if not impossible for a party to prevent an individual from participating in a primary if they meet certain minimal requirements (e.g. paying a filing fee). In 2018 a neo-Nazi candidate won the Republican nomination for an Illinois congressional seat despite being denounced by the state and national party. (And before we ha-ha-ha about Republicans being Nazis, he won because he was the only Republican primary candidate in an overwhelmingly Democratic district.) But Illinois Republicans had no way to keep him out of the primary or keep him off the ballot as the Republican candidate in November.
Totally meaningless gesture. Political parties in the US have absolutely no control over their membership. People are members of a political party if they either register as one or, in states that don’t register affiliation, say they are a member. But it makes the rubes* happier. They’ll likely be surprised when she shows up on the primary ballot.
My guess is that there’ll be enough D voters who cross over to the R primary for her to win the nomination. It’ll be close though. If that’s the case, will a Trumpist candidate run a write-in campaign? That could split the R’s and potentially let a D be elected in Wyoming. OK, this is a Democrat fantasy, but we can dream, can’t we?
*Including a certain rube in Florida.
I don’t think the Wyoming Republican Party can stop her from running as a Republican. They can refuse to extend any financial support or resources and publicly disavow her, but you don’t need any sort of Republican Party seal of approval to run as a Republican. Go back to 2015 and ask Trump - or go back further and ask Michael Bloomberg.
It will be interesting to see if the national Republican organizations, like the RNC, support her candidacy or disavow her, though……especially groups with policies favoring the incumbent.
Smith v. Allwright (1944) was a landmark Supreme Court case that severly limited the ability of political parties to set the terms of their own primaries. That case was specifically about banning non-White voters from voting in a party primary, but the reasoning has been extended since then. States can’t delegate their election supervision responsibilities to the parties. If an election restriction would be unlawful or unconstitutional for a state to enact, a political party can’t do it in its own primaries, either.
I can’t track down the specific case law cites, but the upshot is that it’s unconstitutional for political parties to ban eligible voters or candidates from participating in their primaries. Literally anyone who is over 25, has been a citizen of the United States for at least seven years, and is a current resident of Wyoming could run as a candidate in the 2022 Republican primary for Cheney’s seat.
Fascinating. Thanks very much for that cite.
I think it is the other way around.
Sometimes a state party has power over a presidential primary that is run by the state. Stephen Colbert filed to be on the South Carolina Democratic primary ballot in 2008 and was rejected by the state party. But presidential primaries don’t nominate anyone to be a candidate for public office, they just select and/or pledge delegates to the party conventions (and some don’t even do that).
We had what a newspaper reporter called “a perpetual loon” here in Tucson for years who kept running for the US House of Representatives and had a very whacked out platform he was running on. I forget what all but just odd. He tried the Democrats (I think) first and when he got zero support after a few years he switched over to the Republican Party, which also decided he was deserving of zero support. Or vice versa. Anyhow, he kept running until he died.