Jason Zengerle is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.

Liz Cheney just wanted to enjoy her milkshake. It was a Friday afternoon in early November, and the shadows were growing longer over the flat expanse of eastern Wyoming as a hard week dragged on. There had been hundreds of miles to cover and just as many hands to shake before Cheney, who was traversing the state in a road-worn SUV, sank into a booth across from me at a McDonald’s just off Interstate 25, in the town of Douglas (population: 6,280). Now, she was relishing a chocolate milkshake as she gladly held forth on her family’s new home, her father’s new heart and her own new career as a politician. In her black jeans and black sweater, with no campaign aide to monitor the interview or fend off intrusive questions, the 47-year-old Cheney seemed less an aspiring senator than a soccer mom happily juggling five kids and a tough new job. But then I asked Cheney about gay marriage, and she visibly stiffened. A frown came over her face, and she began jabbing her straw into her chocolate shake, which would go untouched for the rest of our conversation.

Clearly, the issue was a political problem for Cheney; how could it not be for a Republican primary challenger in a deeply red state whose sister, Mary, is a lesbian who married her longtime partner last year? This summer, someone had called around Wyoming under the guise of a poll asserting that Cheney “aggressively promotes gay marriage,” a claim soon followed by a TV ad on the same theme. The attacks had forced Liz’s hand, and she had promptly issued a statement opposing gay marriage. More than two months later, she was still seething about the way she had been pushed into it. And she knew just whom to blame: Mike Enzi, the three-term Republican senator and former family friend she is seeking to unseat. “I think if Senator Enzi had any self-respect, he’d stand up and renounce it, he’d say this doesn’t have any place in Wyoming, he’d say that it’s despicable,” Cheney told me. “This is certainly being done by friends of his, by supporters of his. … And I think the combination of the ad and the push poll is clearly an effort on their part to use that issue and to do it in a way that I think is beneath the dignity of the office of a United States Senator.”


But there was more to Cheney’s anger. Unbeknownst even to some of her closest friends and advisers, her newly announced opposition to gay marriage had caused a major rift in the famously close Cheney family, and she and Mary were no longer on speaking terms. Days after we talked it all became public, when, in a series of Facebook posts as devastating as they were surprising, Mary blasted her sister’s stance against marriage equality. “Liz’s position is to treat my family as second class citizens,” Mary wrote. “This isn't like a disagreement over grazing fees or what to do about Iran.” The public rebuke was the first communication between the sisters since August, and soon their parents, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, found themselves dragged into the imbroglio, issuing a statement defending Liz.

But Mary wasn’t done speaking out. In a series of emails to me this week, as the news of her break with her sister spread, Mary wrote, “I’m not supporting Liz’s candidacy.” She later clarified: “By supporting, I mean not working, not contributing, and not voting for (I’m registered in Virginia not Wyoming).” The best she could say of the sister who was once her close friend and confidante was a final postscript: “I am not saying I hope she loses to Enzi.”

For a family renowned for its togetherness and discipline—“It’s very un-Cheney-like for one arm of the family to do something the other part doesn’t know about in the political sphere and cause any degree of heartburn,” says one former adviser to Dick Cheney—the public squabbling has been a shock. And what began as a race that seemed certain to tear apart the Republican Party in Wyoming has been transformed into something that once seemed unfathomable: the race that’s torn apart the Cheney family.

***

From its earliest days, the Cheney political operation has been a family affair. In 1978, when Dick, who’d been Gerald Ford’s White House wunderkind chief of staff while still in his 30s, was making his first run for Congress back in Wyoming, 12-year-old Liz and 9-year-old Mary traveled with their dad across the state, handing out buttons and candy and generally serving as cute campaign props. “They were just very outgoing, personable children who displayed confidence and energy,” recalls Maggie Scarlett, a longtime Cheney family friend. “They were great assets.”

Their usefulness in the family trade grew as they did—and Liz, especially, was trusted with ever more substantive political assignments. So much so that in the 2000 campaign, when George W. Bush tapped Cheney to run his vice presidential search, Cheney turned to his older daughter—who by then was a lawyer with a J.D. from the University of Chicago—to help draw up the nearly 200-item questionnaire he gave to potential veeps. And when Bush wound up picking his veep vetter as his veep (despite the fact that the vetter himself never answered that vetting questionnaire), Dick brought Liz onto the campaign, tasking her with running his debate prep team. After the election, and during the Florida recount that followed, it was Dick, Liz and two other Cheney aides who essentially built the Bush administration from scratch. Since the federal government wouldn’t hand over the traditional space for a transition office until the recount was settled, the group ran the operation from the kitchen table of the soon-to-be-vice president’s McLean, Va., townhouse, using an old beige Princess dial phone from Liz’s teenage years.

During the first six years of the Bush administration, Liz held senior State Department posts dealing with the Middle East. But some of her Foggy Bottom colleagues believed her real job was to be the vice president’s proxy in his increasingly poisonous bureaucratic battles with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice, both of whom favored a more diplomatic and less unilateral approach to the sweeping post-9/11 “war on terror” that both Cheneys strenuously advocated. “My strong suspicion is that she was a spy for her father,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell’s chief of staff. “She was also less capable and less knowledgeable than she purported to be.”

Liz Cheney with her father, Vice President Dick Cheney, at Andrews Air Force Base, May 8, 2007. | Gerald Herbert/AP Photo

But among the vice president’s allies, Liz was viewed far more favorably. “If you spend a lot of time around politicians’ families, and particularly their kids, you come to the conclusion that most of them ought to be in cages,” says Steve Schmidt, the Republican operative who served as a senior adviser to the vice president. “But Liz wasn’t looked on by the staff as a politician’s kid meddling. She was accepted as a true colleague, and she was just a great addition, really politically savvy and smart.”

After her father left office, with an approval rating of just 13 percent, Liz became his most crucial adviser. Although Dick said he planned to go fishing and retire from public life, Liz helped persuade him to take high-profile stands against the Obama administration on foreign policy issues and convinced him to write a political memoir, ultimately serving as his co-author on In My Time. “I was definitely, as a daughter, frustrated during moments of the Bush administration when he was being so heavily criticized and he wouldn’t speak out,” she says now. “So I thought it was very good once the administration was over for him to be out there defending the policies, because they needed to be defended.” In the process, the former vice president reinvented himself into something of a folk hero, at least to those on the right. When he made a surprise appearance at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., he was greeted with cheers of “Run, Dick, run!”

In a series of emails to me this week, Mary Cheney wrote, “I’m not supporting Liz’s candidacy.”

It was Liz, though, who had her eyes on elected office, and as she went about helping her dad rebuild his reputation, she also worked to construct her own. She founded the political action group Keep America Safe, which fought, successfully as it turned out, to keep the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay open. She became a cable news fixture, often going further than her father in attacking President Barack Obama—once she even accused him of finding it “fashionable” to “side with the terrorists.” Eventually she signed on as a contributor to Fox News, where she occasionally filled in for Sean Hannity. Most importantly, she started turning up more frequently in the family’s ancestral home of Wyoming, no longer just visiting her parents’ place in Jackson during the holidays and the summers, but hitting the Lincoln Day dinner circuit all over the state as she helped raise money for the state GOP. It wasn’t long before she started dropping her G’s and referring to Wyoming as “ God’s Country.”

Her sister, Mary, by contrast, was happy to stay out of the public eye. Although she wrote a memoir, Now It’s My Turn, in 2006, her role in the Cheney political operation had always been more behind-the-scenes. She served as her father’s personal aide during the 2000 campaign and as the director of vice presidential operations during the 2004 run, but never took a job in the Bush administration. After her father left office, while her sister waged war on Obama and got ready to toss her own hat into the ring, Mary focused on a family of her own with her longtime partner, Heather Poe, and their two young children. In June 2012, she and Poe were married by a federal judge in Washington. Dick and Lynne publicly announced their daughter's union in a celebratory statement.

Until this week’s very public disagreement, the Cheneys had succeeded for years in keeping the political and the personal in delicate balance when it came to the issue of Mary’s sexuality. Granted, that wasn’t always easy. When she came out to her parents as a high school junior, as she tells the story in Now It’s My Turn, her mother burst into tears and said, “Your life will be so hard.” (Dick, for his part, told her, “You’re my daughter and I love you and I just want you to be happy.”) By the time Bush offered Dick the vice presidency in 2000, one of his biggest hesitations, Mary writes, was about what such a move would mean for her. “Personally, I’d rather not be known as the vice president’s lesbian daughter,” Mary told him. “But, if you’re going to run, I think the country would be lucky to have you. I want to do whatever I can to help out on the campaign.” Help she did, along with Liz, and over the next eight years of the Bush administration, the two sisters, who were already close, grew even closer. To the extent Mary’s sexuality intruded into the world of politics, it only seemed to draw the sisters tighter together.

Never more so than in 2004. That year began with Mary contemplating quitting her job on the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign because of the president’s support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which proposed to ban same-sex marriage. As Mary recalls in her memoir, when she asked to discuss the matter with her father at the White House, Lynne and Liz joined them, and all three urged her to remain on the campaign—noting that they themselves disagreed with Bush on the issue. But they also told her they would understand and support her decision if she did resign. Mary chose to stay on and, later in that campaign, when Democratic nominee John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, each separately raised the issue of her sexuality during the debates, the Cheneys were furious. Lynne declared Kerry was “not a good man” and denounced his “cheap and tawdry political trick.” When Edwards debated their father, Liz and Lynne went so far as to stick their tongues out at him, while Mary glared at the Democrat and, borrowing one of her father’s famous expressions, silently mouthed the words “Go fuck yourself.”

By the time Dick left office, it seemed clear that the Cheneys had navigated a complicated issue with no negative political consequences—and family solidarity intact. And, in the years since, it appeared the family's balancing act would only get easier: While the Republican Party remained solidly against gay marriage, public opinion—even inside the GOP—was shifting rapidly toward more friendly views about homosexuality. The rest of the country looked like it was catching up with the Cheneys.

But living in Washington is different from living in Wyoming, a fact that Liz Cheney may not have fully reckoned with when she announced in July that she would take on Enzi in next year’s Republican primary. When Cheney jumped into the race, the assumption among the political cognoscenti was that the incumbent was in trouble. The low-key, at times lumbering 69-year-old former CPA—a politician so square and old-fashioned that he carries a briefcase onto the Senate floor, where he seldom utters a word—was presumed to be no match for the young, media-savvy, slashing-and-burning daughter of the former vice president. It was an impression Enzi himself reinforced when, upon hearing the news of Cheney’s entrance into the race, he lamented to reporters, “I thought we were friends.”

Few, if any of the early accounts of Cheney’s candidacy even mentioned the matter of her sister, and at first it seemed her biggest problem would be dismissing the carpetbagger label. Although Cheney claims to be a fourth-generation Wyomingite, she did not live in the state—save for two years as a young girl—until 2012, when she moved her family from northern Virginia into a $1.6 million home in the tony resort town of Jackson Hole.

Predictably, Enzi’s political operation has done everything it can to portray Cheney as an out-of-touch immigrant from the Beltway. His supporters mutter darkly about the fact that she has not sold her old home in Virginia and speculate that she will immediately move her family back once the campaign is over. One Enzi backer, a GOP political operative named Rob Jennings, even investigated Cheney’s Wyoming fishing license for irregularities—a genuine fishing expedition. He got a bite: Cheney had applied for a resident’s license, which requires the holder to have lived in the state for the previous 365 days, when Cheney had only been there for the previous 75.The information soon found its way to the Casper Star-Tribune and eventually made national headlines. “I owe you a beer if not a fee,” Jennings wrote in a thank you email to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department employee who unearthed the information.

Even one of the Cheney children’s newfound love of barrel riding has come under attack. Since moving to Wyoming, Liz's 13-year-old, Gracie, has successfully taken up the rodeo sport, and her exploits have been featured by her mother’s Senate campaign, which is using rodeo footage of Gracie in its first television ad as a testament to the family’s Wyoming bona fides. Enzi’s backers quickly set out to dispel the rodeo feats as nothing more than “image-making,” as one put it, and some even insisted that Gracie’s horse was a rental. “If you’re going back to Virginia, of course you’re going to rent it,” one said.

Dick and Lynne Cheney with Liz, her husband and her children at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, Sept. 1, 2004. | Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Cheney has done her best to parry these attacks. “You hear people saying ‘carpetbagger’ because they don’t want to have to talk about his lack of results,” she told me. “My family’s been here since 1907, and the idea that somehow Mike Enzi gets to decide where my home is, it’s wrong.” The horse, she went on to explain, is a full-fledged Cheney, purchased from a farm in New Mexico. (When I reported this information back to one of the Enzi supporters who’d been pushing the equine issue, the supporter instantly replied, “What, they couldn’t find a Wyoming horse to buy?”) “It’s really offensive to me as a mom and offensive to my daughter,” Cheney continued. “And if they’re stoopin’ low enough to be makin’ that kind of accusation, then they must be pretty scared of my candidacy.”

Scared or not, with the race so heated, it was perhaps inevitable that Enzi’s supporters would come to see the issue of gay marriage as a winning one in a state where 59 percent of residents oppose it. Which is why, over the course of several nights in late August, an unknown number of Wyomingites heard from that mysterious pollster who asked, “Are you aware that Liz Cheney supports abortion and aggressively promotes gay marriage?”

It worked, and if all these attacks have dented Cheney’s reputation, they have, in a strage way, enhanced Enzi’s. As one Republican operative with ties to Cheney told me, “It turns out Enzi’s pretty fucking ruthless.” According to a recent poll conducted for the American Principles Fund—the super PAC that aired the gay marriage ad—Enzi now leads Cheney among likely Republican primary voters 69 to 17 percent. As for the ad itself, the senator has been careful not to hinder the efforts of those who would help keep him in office. When I recently asked him if he was willing to denounce the gay marriage spots, he demurred. “They’re not mine,” Enzi said. “I don’t run negative ads, I don’t ask people to run negative ads.”

***

Despite Enzi’s newfound taste for blood on the campaign trail, Cheney is determined to prove that her opponent just isn’t enough of a warrior to keep representing Wyoming in a Congress that has become more bare-knuckles partisan than ever. “Senator Enzi is a nice man, but he’s not fighting,” she says.

Asked for an example, she points to Obamacare. Enzi, like every other Republican senator, voted against it. He also gave a Senate floor speech in 2010 that warned Obama was not telling the truth when he promised Americans that “if you like your health care, you can keep it”—a speech that recently led Fox News’s Megyn Kelly to hail Enzi as the “ Paul Revere” of the issue. But, according to Cheney, Enzi could have done more. “If you had been effective enough, eloquent enough, enough of a leader, skillful enough, whatever, you could have moved the needle, and you certainly had an obligation to do much more than you did,” she argues. “To be here three years later saying, ‘I told ya’—that to me is what happens when a senator has been there too long, and they think that sayin’ it is the same as doin’ somethin’ about it.” If Cheney gets to the Senate, she promises to be less like Enzi and more like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the Tea Party favorite who relentlessly campaigned for the recent government shutdown as an Obamacare protest. “You can question sort of what issue he chose to fight on,” Cheney says. “But people are really glad that Ted Cruz and [Utah Sen.] Mike Lee, that they fought. And there’s a sense of sort of nobody else standin’ up there.”

Enzi pleads guilty to the charge that he’s not a legislative brawler. “One thing I’ve noticed from watching others is that if you put your finger in somebody’s chest and chew ’em out, it’s a little tough to work with ’em the next day,” he told me on a recent Saturday night in Laramie, where he’d come to watch—and, more importantly, work the crowd at—a University of Wyoming football game. “My demeanor has worked well for getting things done.”

Many in Wyoming thought Enzi, who’ll be 70 when voters go to the polls for the primary next August, would retire after his third term—which is the main reason that Cheney, according to her friends, began eyeing his seat. But Cheney’s maneuvering backfired. “It released some juices in Mike that might not have been there before,” says one Enzi associate. According to several people close to Enzi, it was only after the senator realized that Cheney’s likely candidacy imperiled the chances of other Wyoming politicians who were interested in filling his seat—“people who have been out there doing a lot of hard work, paying their dues, people who Mike thought deserved a fair shot,” as one of them puts it—that he decided to seek reelection.

And Enzi’s not the only one who’s been spurred into action by Cheney. “I’ve always had a lot of volunteers, but this time I have a lot of passionate volunteers,” Enzi told me, “They’re pushing me for more bumper stickers, more signs.” What explains their passion? I asked. “The opposition,” he replied.

Indeed, just as Cheney’s candidacy has split her family, it’s also wreaked havoc inside the exceedingly insular political community of Wyoming—which, as the saying goes, is not so much a state but “a small town with long streets.” One early casualty is Dick Cheney’s 40-year friendship with Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator. After Simpson announced his support for Enzi, he says he was accosted at a charity reception by Lynne Cheney, who told him to “ shut up.” When the former second lady subsequently denied this, Simpson took to the pages of his local newspaper, the Cody Enterprise, to recount the episode in even more excruciating detail and to accuse Lynne of telling “one damn bald-faced lie.” A week later, when the former vice president and Simpson fulfilled a previously schedule joint appearance at a dinner in Colorado Springs, Colo., Cheney refused to even say so much as hello to his now-erstwhile friend.

Sen. Mike Enzi in Washington, D.C., May 2013. | Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

The Simpson kerfuffle isn’t the only example of a tattered relationship left in the wake of Liz’s campaign. “People are afraid,” says one prominent Wyoming Republican who backs Enzi, but is doing so quietly out of desire not to offend the Cheneys. “They’re just kind of dreading these calls from Dick and from Lynne asking them to support Liz.” In fact, according to one Wyoming political operative, some Wyomingites with sufficient means have decided to stay out of trouble simply by giving campaign contributions to both candidates—while privately pledging their votes to Enzi. “It’s a seismic event,” says Rob Wallace, a prominent lobbyist and Wyoming native who counts both the Cheneys and Enzis as friends. “No matter how it turns out, it’s going to leave scars for quite a while.”

For now, though, it’s Liz Cheney who bears the most battle wounds. On a recent Friday night, she was in the finished basement of a supporter’s home in Casper—the eastern Wyoming city where her parents grew up and where her aunt and uncle still live—for a casual question-and-answer session with some local residents. It was a pretty hard right group, and even the famously conservative Cheney's answers seemed to leave some of them a bit unsatisfied.

“What about the Bilderberg Group?” one woman asked. “How do we stop that?”

“I don’t know very much about the Bilderberg Group,” Cheney conceded, before pivoting to a neocon critique of the United Nations as an institution that hurts the American position in the world by “conveying the idea that no nation’s exceptional … and that the United States is actually evil.”

Next, the event’s hostess—the wife of a local excavation contractor—wanted to know if Cheney was bothered “at all that most of Barack Obama’s cabinet is Muslims?”

“I think actually if you looked at the Cabinet, you would probably find that’s not the case, that they aren’t,” Cheney said gently. “What worries me more is he seems to be unconcerned about the Muslim Brotherhood.”

At one point, Cheney launched into her standard spiel about the need to fight. She was talking, ostensibly, about what she would do if Wyoming sent her (back) to Washington, but the subtext of her pitch seemed clear. In just four months, her campaign has already cost her family some of its closest friends, not to mention blowing up Liz’s relationship with her only sister; with Liz down by more than 50 points in the polls, it seems quite possible that the next nine months will bring even more misery. So, as Cheney spoke about her fight, it was easy to imagine that she was talking not so much about the Senate but about the campaign itself, as she steeled herself against what has already happened and what is likely ahead.

“It’s a fight that’s gonna require bein’ smart, it’s gonna require getting results and it’s gonna require bein’ willin’, frankly, to be criticized,” Cheney said. “If you stand up and start those fights, you’re goin’ to get a lot of negative attention,” she added, “and you have to not care.”

Jason Zengerle is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.