Phil writes that if Liz Cheney had simply condemned Trump over the Capitol riot but then “kept her head down and deflected all questions about Trump by saying something to the effect of ‘what Americans really care about is inflation,’ she likely would have coasted to reelection.”

I think that’s right—if she had stopped short of voting for impeachment on January 13, 2021. But it’s unlikely Cheney would have survived a GOP primary challenge if she had taken that path after voting to impeach Trump for his role in instigating the storming of the Capitol. Just look at South Carolina GOP representative Tom Rice, who voted for impeachment in January 2021, kept his head down, and lost his primary 24.6 percent to 51.1 percent. Trump carried 58 percent of the vote in Rice’s district in the 2020 election, while Trump won 70 percent of the vote in Wyoming.

It’s true that two House Republicans who voted for impeachment — David Valadao of California and Dan Newhouse of Washington — did narrowly survive their jungle primaries. But two other House Republicans who voted for impeachment narrowly lost their primaries: Jaime Herrera-Beutler of Washington lost by less than one percentage point, and Peter Meijer of Michigan lost by 3.6 points.

Republicans who rejected Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election (but did not vote for impeachment) coasted through their primaries: For example, Dan Crenshaw won 74 percent of the vote in his primary, and Chip Roy won 84 percent of the vote in his primary. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger easily won their primaries in Georgia. While a vote for impeachment in 2021 was clearly justified in my view, it was seen as a bridge too far by many GOP primary voters.

Given how Trumpy the Wyoming Republican Party is, Cheney’s impeachment vote alone was enough to make it unlikely that she would prevail in the 2022 GOP primary even if she pivoted to attacking Democrats 100 percent of the time after January 6. Shutting up about Trump, of course, is something Cheney has repeatedly said she could not do in good conscience.

This post has been emended since its initial publication.