Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., has said for more than a year that she will do whatever it takes to keep former President Donald Trump from getting back into the White House.
That includes a potential run for president. And even if Cheney loses her congressional primary Tuesday to a Trump-backed challenger, as expected — or even if she pulls off a surprising win — a run for the nation’s highest office is likely to be her next mission.
But many questions would confront the Wyoming Republican — vice chair of the committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, stalwart Trump critic and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney — if she did run for president. Would she do so as a Republican? As an independent? Or even as a Democrat?
And how would running for president in a Republican primary stop Trump? If the contest were run today, she would lose handily, given Trump’s enduring popularity with a sizable plurality of Republican voters.
Cheney herself is not talking about such speculation, but Republican political operatives who hail from the anti-Trump wing of the party told Yahoo News that a Cheney presidential run could have a two-stage strategy.
First, run in the GOP primary as the candidate for Republican voters who cannot stomach Trump and who want to vote their conscience. And then, run as a conservative independent in the general election, and try to hold on to as many of those voters as possible to deny Trump the votes he needs to defeat a Democrat.
“It’s a spoiler candidacy in that it’s designed to prevent Trump from becoming president. It’s designed to take from the GOP base and make it mathematically impossible for Trump to win,” Mike Madrid, a California Republican consultant, told Yahoo News.
“The purpose of a [presidential] primary is to build an operation to do just that,” he said.
Madrid said Cheney’s closing messages in the Wyoming congressional primary are the first step toward such a confrontation. Ads like the one she has run on Fox News recently, featuring her father, are “not an attempt to win Wyoming,” Madrid said.
“This is about a full frontal assault on the national Republican Party,” he said.
In the ad, Dick Cheney says that “in our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election and he lost big. I know it, he knows it and, deep down, I think most Republicans know it,” the former vice president says. “There is nothing more important [Liz] will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.”
A Cheney ally who asked to speak on the condition they not be named said the Wyoming primary is “the first battle in a much larger and longer war that she is going to win because the future of the country depends on it.”
“Regardless of what happens, she is going to be leading a broad coalition going forward to defend freedom and restore the principles that Donald Trump continues to undermine,” the Cheney ally told Yahoo News.
But the bigger question, again, is how.
Even if Cheney did mount a credible challenge to Trump in a Republican primary, gaining 10% or even 20% of the vote, how would she run in the general election as an independent without losing most of those voters back to Trump? Cheney’s biggest foes would be structural and psychological: a two-party system in which each side views the other as an existential threat.
The number of Americans who see members of the opposing political party as “more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent than other Americans” has increased significantly over the past several years,…
Read More: What would a Liz Cheney run for president look like?