Two Republicans who have been critical of former President Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol will face the voters on Tuesday. While Sen. Lisa Murkowski is likely to advance thanks to a new election system in Alaska, Rep. Liz Cheney appears headed for defeat in Wyoming.
With Trump campaigning aggressively against Republican lawmakers who have been involved in the Jan. 6 investigation or who supported his impeachment, this week’s primaries showcase his ongoing influence over the party.
Read on for the races to watch in Alaska and Wyoming, as well as the recent changes in election law in those states that will affect voters.
Alaska
Alaska will hold a special election for its at-large House of Representatives seat Tuesday, with former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in contention alongside fellow Republican Nicholas Begich and Democrat Mary Peltola.
The special election, called following the death of Republican Rep. Don Young in March, will be the first in Alaska’s history to use ranked-choice voting. Results will not be known until Aug. 31 at the earliest.
Elsewhere in Alaska, Sen. Lisa Murkowski is being challenged by fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. However, both of the candidates are likely to advance to the general election in November under the state’s open primary rules.
In 2020, voters in the state approved a ballot initiative creating a primary system in which candidates from all parties appear on a single ballot. The four candidates with the most votes move on to the general election, which will utilize ranked choice voting. (There are only three candidates in the special election because a fourth dropped out after advancing in the primary earlier this year.)
Murkowski drew anger from Trump after joining six other Republican senators to voting to convict the former president after the House impeached him for inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy is also seeking the nomination for another team, and is competing with nine other candidates for four spots on the general election ballot. Polls show Dunleavy should easily secure one of those places.
Other than the elimination of partisan primaries and the transition to ranked-choice voting, Alaska has done little to change elections over the past few years.
Read more about election changes in Alaska.
South Dakota
No runoff elections will occur in South Dakota on Tuesday, as previously scheduled, because the statewide races were decided on June 7.
Read more about election changes in South Dakota.
Wyoming
The nation will watch as Republican Rep. Liz Cheney fights to keep her seat in Congress against challengers within her own party.
Harriet Hageman leads a slate of Republican challengers to Cheney, whose vote to impeach Trump and subsequent leading role in the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection left her deserted by many of her Republican peers.
Trump has attacked Cheney with vigor, backing Hageman in a state where he won 70 percent of the vote in 2020. Cheney has responded by trying to appeal to moderate Republicans and Democrats (Wyoming runs open primaries), but trails heavily in polls. Recent polling shows Hageman with a 29-point lead heading into Tuesday’s voting.
Wyoming is a staunchly Republican state, with the GOP having held the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature since 2011.
In recent years, Wyoming’s biggest changes to election laws have focused on voter identification. In 2021, the Legislature implemented a full voter ID law, requiring voters to present a valid form of identification before voting on Election Day. Previously, the state only required voters to do so when registering to vote. Under the new law, people without an ID must vote via provisional ballot, which can be used as grounds to challenge the vote.
This year, the state has enacted just one bill related to voting, according to the Voting Rights Lab. That bill allows elections officials to begin processing absentee ballots prior to Election Day, but increases the penalty for releasing the results of such ballots before the polls close.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.