Back at the Laramie house party, a young woman—a recent University of Wyoming graduate, voice hushed and earnest—was urging Cheney to keep fighting. She implored her not to be deterred by what keeps happening to her fellow Republican Trump-resisters in other states. The night before, Representative Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach the defeated president, had lost his primary in Michigan, as had Rusty Bowers, the Republican House speaker in Arizona, who gave some of the most damning testimony against Trump before the January 6 committee. I asked Cheney how dispiriting it was for her to see them go down in defeat. “It just makes me more determined,” Cheney said. “We have a lot of work to do. It’s not just this election cycle.”

Alan Simpson, the 92-year-old former Republican senator from Wyoming and a longtime friend of the Cheneys, placed her congressional race in the context of American heroes doing unpopular things—routed, perhaps, in the short term, but vindicated by history. “Look, she’s going to go on into eternity, or as long as is necessary” to stop Trump, Simpson told me. “She’s going to keep doing everything she can to bring down this oafish man, who’s filled with revenge and hatred and total disregard for the laws of the United States.”

As a preamble to brief remarks Cheney made, another local supporter, Laura Lewis, shared a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that she said applied to the trailing candidate. “A statesman is he who thinks in the future generations,” read Lewis. “And a politician is he who thinks in the upcoming elections.”