In Wyoming’s primary election — held Aug. 18 on the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage and 150 years after Wyoming was first to grant women the right to vote — voters decided that only women will vie for the state’s two open seats in the U.S. Capitol.
Democrat Merav Ben-David faces Republican Cynthia Lummis in the Senate tilt while incumbent GOP member Liz Cheney faces Democratic challenger Lynnette Grey Bull in the House race.
Lummis, who last served as Wyoming’s U.S. representative where she preferred to be called a congressman, acknowledged the historic occasion. “To be the first woman to secure the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Wyoming on the same day we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment is particularly special,” she wrote in a statement.
Ben-David, a zoology and physiology professor at the University of Wyoming, said she would apply her life’s pursuit of facts to her job if elected to the Senate on Nov. 3.
“I am trained to collect data, not dismiss it,” she wrote in a Wednesday statement. “To listen to opposing viewpoints, not disdain them, and to solve problems, not ignore them.”
Cheney, seeking her third term, touted her association with the current administration. “I know that working with President Trump, we can continue to build on our wide-ranging records of accomplishment and continue to deliver more victories for the people of our state and across the country,” Cheney wrote in a statement.
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Grey Bull, a member of the Northern Arapaho tribe, criticized Cheney’s ties to the president and invited her to a debate on the Wind River Indian Reservation. “She would witness first-hand how COVID-19 has laid bare the structural inequities for minority communities and low-income families across Wyoming,” Grey Bull wrote in a statement.
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