Routed in her bid to retain her Wyoming House seat, Rep. Liz Cheney made clear this is only the start of her battle to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House in 2024.
As an initial step, she announced Wednesday that she is renaming her campaign committee “The Great Task” and plans to launch a nationwide effort to ensure that “people all around this country understand the stakes.”
She made clear that could include an election challenge to Trump in 2024, either as a Republican or an independent. “It is something I am thinking about” and will decide “in the coming months,” she said in an interview on NBC’s Today show,
Either course would be fraught with difficulty and prone to unanticipated consequences. But unless she formally runs, she may have difficulty remaining part of the debate once the 2024 race formally starts.
The Wyoming Republican got less than one-third of the vote against GOP rival Harriet Hegeman, an inevitable result in Trump’s best 2020 state after she became the most prominent GOP critic of the former president’s unproven allegations that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and he really won.
“Now, the real work begins,” said Cheney, who will remain in the spotlight for the rest of this year as vice chair of the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump riot at the Capitol.
Beyond that, she has these three options:
1. Seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
Though Trump remains the GOP 2024 front-runner, the large prospective field already includes several leading Republicans: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
All strongly supported Trump’s presidency, though some criticized his actions before and during the Jan. 6 riot.
The GOP field will inevitably include at least one outspoken Trump critic; besides Cheney, outgoing Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has mulled opposing Trump. After all, polls show that up to half of all Republicans and GOP-leaning independents don’t want him to run again. Either Cheney or Hogan could provide a strong anti-Trump voice in the campaign debate.
Still, the GOP’s mostly winner-take-all primaries mean the leading candidate can garner most of a state’s delegates with a modest plurality of votes, as Trump did in 2016. Even if an anti-Trump candidate attracted substantial votes, that might not produce many delegates.
2. Mounting an independent presidential candidacy.
An independent effort seeking to peel off a significant portion of Republican voters from the GOP nominee might be appealing to anti-Trump GOP hopefuls like Cheney or Hogan. But independent candidacies are very tricky.
They require a lot of money and creation of a campaign structure to get on the ballot in enough states to have a chance of winning and qualify for the televised general election debates – assuming there are any. Cheney has shown substantial fundraising appeal, raising $15 million this year, but she’d need many times that for a national campaign.
The last significant independent who made all 50 state ballots was billionaire Dallas businessman Ross Perot, who primarily self-funded campaigns in both 1992 and 1996. However, though he polled nearly 20 million votes in 1992, or 19%, post-election analyses concluded he had not changed the outcome in a single state. His second effort had even less impact.
Ironically, the two most recent instances in which independent efforts impacted general election results were the less publicized Green Party candidacies of consumer activist Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016.
Both helped defeat Democratic nominees. Since 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore lost the decisive state of Florida by fewer than 600 votes, one can argue Nader’s 97,421 votes there cost him the presidency. And in 2016, Stein polled more votes in Michigan and Wisconsin than Trump’s winning margins over Hillary Clinton.
One possible complication: While an independent Cheney candidacy would mainly appeal to anti-Trump Republicans, it could help Trump by draining off votes that would otherwise go Democratic in a two-way race.
3. Continue to mobilize anti-Trump support to help the strongest alternative to Trump, presumably the Democratic nominee.
Of all the options, that would probably have the least impact. In both 2016 and 2020, some prominent Republicans including former elected officeholders and ex-national security officials considered Trump unqualified and formed committees to help his Democratic rivals. But they probably did not switch many votes.
Network exit polls show Joe Biden got just 6% of the Republicans who voted, while Trump got 5% of the Democrats. Those statistics indicate that, while such efforts often attract substantial publicity, they have little ultimate impact.
Running for president may be the best way for Cheney to continue to attract attention, once she loses her platform as a member of Congress at the end of the year and multiple candidates announce for the presidency.
Still, any effort to draw conclusions from the current political landscape about what might happen in 2024 is almost certainly premature. Intervening events could change things substantially, especially the various legal charges pending against Trump.
Perhaps the former president was right in his statement Tuesday night that Cheney now “can finally disappear into the depths of political oblivion.”
But she will certainly do what she can to ensure that doesn’t happen.
