There’s no reason to doubt that Liz Cheney is sincerely horrified by Donald Trump’s potential return to power. She gave up an extremely promising career in the Republican Party (having quickly risen to the third-ranking position in the House Republican Conference) because she would not bend the knee to the 45th president or whitewash the insurrection he inspired on January 6. And she didn’t change her tune even when it led to a humiliating reelection defeat in Wyoming and full exile from the GOP. Indeed, her performance as vice-chair of the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6 was consistently impressive.
But now Cheney is considering a really bad move that might undo the good she has done in battling Trump, as the Washington Post reports:
Liz Cheney, one of the most vociferous critics of Donald Trump in the Republican Party, says she is weighing whether to mount her own third-party candidacy for the White House, as she vows to do “whatever it takes” to prevent the former president from returning to office …
Cheney, whose father is former vice president Dick Cheney, said she will make a final decision in the next few months. “We face threats that could be existential to the United States and we need a candidate who is going to be able to deal with and address and confront all of those challenges,” Cheney said. “That will all be part of my calculation as we go into the early months of 2024.”
Cheney appears to think that would-be Trump voters might listen to her denunciations of Trump because of her past role as a major GOP insider. Indeed, her new book (cynics will say the imperative to promote sales provides all the explanation anyone needs for her presidential talk) underlines that she enjoyed almost unparalleled access to powerful people while trying to figure out what was going on during the Capitol riot, as Katherine Miller notes in a New York Times essay on Cheney and her book:
There’s a scene in Liz Cheney’s new memoir, “Oath and Honor,” when she was still in Congress, she walks through the Capitol and into the Republican cloakroom, enters a phone booth, closes the door and calls Mitch McConnell …
This is someone who knows Secret Service agents personally, who texted late at night with Paul Ryan about the state of Mike Pence’s mind, whose husband, Philip Perry, is so well acquainted with the former acting U.S. Attorney General Jeff Rosen that when Mr. Rosen was fending off Jeff Clark’s deranged postelection plans at the Justice Department, he called to tell Ms. Cheney and Mr. Perry that Mr. Trump might fire him.
You get the drift. Cheney was a Republican’s Republican, and she might imagine Republicans would listen to her pleas for opposition to Trump if only she had the platform available to presidential candidates.
But her firm rejection by Republicans in Washington and Wyoming has destroyed her credibility on that side of the aisle, except among the Never Trumpers, who aren’t going to vote for the 45th president in any event. It’s been a while since pollsters were interested in Cheney, but a July 2022 Morning Consult survey placed her favorability ratio among Republicans at 14 percent approve to 66 percent disapprove. Since then, of course, Donald Trump has become the overwhelming favorite of Republicans for the 2024 presidential nomination, and more and more of them are embracing his “stolen election” fables about 2020, his account of what happened on January 6, and his dismissal of his many criminal indictments as acts of partisan persecution. Any Republican constituency for a Cheney ’24 bid has likely gotten even smaller.
Conversely, Cheney’s popularity among Trump-hating Democrats would be the major asset she’d bring into a presidential contest. And we are already seeing independent and minor-party candidacies eating into the votes Joe Biden will need for reelection. There are now a decent number of recent polls testing a five-candidate field that includes independents Robert F. Kennedy and Cornel West and Green Party stalwart Jill Stein. Trump leads Biden in these polls by an average of 5.8 percent, per RealClearPolitics, a significantly bigger lead than the 2.0 percent advantage he enjoys in head-to-head comparisons with the incumbent president. Is there any reason to think an even more vocally anti-Trump candidate like Cheney might draw votes from someone other than Biden? That will be the question standing in the way of her theoretical campaign, along with practical issues involving ballot access.
The harsh truth is that the kind of people seriously mulling a vote for Donald Trump don’t know and very likely don’t care about Liz Cheney’s golden résumé and once-tight connections with the ruling class of the GOP Establishment or her sterling conservative voting record in Congress (though these credentials would indeed be used against her by Democrats if she were to run). If she wants to help stop Trump, the only sensible avenue is to sign up with Team Biden in whatever capacity the incumbent can best use her tarnished star power. In the meantime she can sell some books.
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