Cheney’s Future, Reconsidered

Today on TAP: Why she’ll run in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries, but not in the general election as an independent candidate

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In yesterday’s On TAP, my colleague Bob Kuttner voiced his concerns that if Liz Cheney ran an independent general-election campaign for president against Donald Trump in 2024, she could split the anti-Trump vote with the Democratic nominee and thereby hand the White House to the Donaldissimo.

I share Bob’s fears that this would be a very dangerous course of action should Cheney take it, but I don’t think she will.

Anyone who understands politics as well as Cheney clearly does also understands politics’ arithmetic, which means she gets the implications of splitting the vote of the anti-Trumpists. It’s far more likely she’ll fall in line with such other neocons as Never Trumper Bill Kristol and end up supporting the Democrat. Not before, however, she runs for president in the Republican primaries.

Cheney, after all, has two distinct goals: preserving electoral democracy, which is under attack from the Trumpists; and re-establishing, to the degree that it’s possible, the Republican Party’s support for electoral democracy. In the context of a general, rather than primary, election, however, only the former of those two goals pertains.

Consider, then, what she said in her Tuesday night speech:

We have candidates for Secretary of State who may refuse to report the actual results of the popular vote in future elections … No American should support election deniers for any position of genuine responsibility, where their refusal to follow the rule of law will corrupt our future.

She’s calling, that is, for voters—in particular, Republican voters—to support the Democratic opponents of the election-denying Republican nominees for secretary of state, attorney general, and governor who’ll appear on a number of states’ ballots in the midterms. That’s the strategic course of the Republicans behind the Lincoln Project, and that’s the strategic course that will almost certainly dictate Cheney’s course of action in 2024.

Or, as Bob would say, let’s hope.

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