How great the influence of Donald Trump is on the Republican Party should be shown particularly clearly in the primary elections on Tuesday.

It was not just about the victory of the candidate supported by the former president in the state of Wyoming.

There was also the question of how much Republican voters would punish the challenger - a critic of Trump.

Sofia Dreisbach

North American political correspondent based in Washington.

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Liz Cheney, who has represented Wyoming in the House of Representatives since 2016, not only voted to impeach Trump after the storming of the Capitol.

She is also the vice chair of the January 6 investigative committee -- one of two Republicans on the nine-member committee.

In recent months, she has chaired the public sessions in which the committee showed how Trump accepted violence in order to remain in power.

At the latest when looking at the polls, the fifty-six-year-old must have known what to expect in Wyoming.

Even before her defeat was officially confirmed, Cheney appeared on camera late Tuesday night to confirm Harriet Hageman's win -- and to attack Trump.

"Our nation is racing towards crisis"

It was clear how she could have kept her seat in the House of Representatives again, Cheney said - by going along with Trump's "lie about the 2020 election."

Two years ago she had won 73 percent of the votes in the primary;

on Tuesday evening, with a good two-thirds of the votes counted, it was only 32 percent.

No position is more important than "to protect the principles we are all sworn to protect," said the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney in her defeat speech.

"Once again, our nation is racing toward crisis, lawlessness and violence." She is the fourth Republican representative to lose her seat in the House of Representatives in the primary after voting to impeach Trump last year.

Cheney also referred to last week's search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago home.

Trump "specifically and viciously" released the names of FBI officials involved in the searches.

"No patriotic American should condone or be intimidated by these threats," Cheney said.

"Our nation must not be ruled by a mob that was called up via social media." The work is far from done.

She will do "everything" to prevent Trump from returning to the White House.

Cheney's challenger, Harriet Hageman, who will run for the Wyoming Republican district in November's congressional elections, took advantage of the anger of Trump supporters during the campaign and drummed the "stolen election" narrative - apparently successfully .

Hageman is an attorney working for the New Civil Liberties Alliance in Washington, which writes of itself as protecting "constitutional liberties from government abuses of power."

A few days before the election, the 59-year-old Hageman had said in front of voters that one had to "make the federal government largely irrelevant in our everyday life".

Cheney reiterated in her Tuesday night speech that she was a "conservative Republican."

Then, however, she addressed all Americans: "Let us resolve that we will stand together - Republicans, Democrats, Independents - against those who seek to destroy our country."