Liz Cheney wants to be deciding factor against Trump on Election Day

Former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) has jumped head first into the election fight on behalf of her former political rivals, stumping for Vice President Harris and endorsing a handful of downballot Democrats in a bid to keep former President Trump and his congressional allies from winning power next year.

Her impact, however, remains as nebulous as the election results themselves. And the parties are at odds over the breadth of her influence.

Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has national name recognition, model conservative credentials and a network of powerful GOP allies forged over the course of decades. Democrats consider her a potent ally in the late-campaign scramble to attract both independent and traditional Republican voters averse to Trump’s irreverent brand of populist nationalism.

“There are a lot of Republicans out there who feel like their party has just gone off the edge following Donald Trump,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said. “And nobody speaks to them better than Liz Cheney." 

Yet the GOP has changed dramatically in recent decades, shifting from a party championing free trade, immigration, muscular foreign policy and strong support for overseas allies — all ideas promoted by the Reagan and two Bush administrations — into a more isolationist mold embodied by Trump. With that in mind, GOP campaign operatives are brushing off Cheney’s messaging blitz, saying her brand of old-school conservatism is a stale relic of a bygone era — one that’s lost the power to sway voters in any significant numbers.

"We haven't lost a wink of sleep about it,” a House GOP strategist said. “We know it's there, but it's really irrelevant. … Our coalitions have shifted so much. Now we're picking up these blue-collar, working class former Democrats, and they're all in for Trump. And now the Cheneys are known for this war-mongering effort, and that's kind of the Kamala Harris base, you know. They're pro-Ukraine. 

“So it's just a different coalition these days.”

Cheney endorsed Harris in September and has since thrown her weight behind four Democrats in tough races for Congress: Reps. Elissa Slotkin (Mich.) and Colin Allred (Texas), who are both vying for Senate seats in their respective states; Rep. Susan Wild, who’s running for a fifth term in a battleground Pennsylvania district; and John Avlon, a former CNN commentator who’s challenging Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) on Long Island.

Cheney has been similarly selective in deciding where to take her anti-Trump message on the road, opting for a handful of counties with sizable populations of suburban GOP women — a key constituency that Harris is trying to siphon off from Trump — in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, three critical swing states that could make-or-break Harris’s bid for the presidency.

The stops have overlapped with where former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley performed well during the GOP primary, a sign she’s targeting Republican voters with unfavorable views of Trump.

Cheney, for example, has campaigned in Ripon, Wis., Waukesha County, Wis., Chester County, Pa., and Oakland County, Mich., all of which saw more than 10 percent of GOP voters cast primary ballots for Haley. In Oakland County, the second-largest county by population in Michigan as of 2023, per the state Senate, Haley drew 24 percent of GOP voters.

“A very natural voter base for Cheney to target are Nikki Haley voters, in the sense that they probably have conservative views, you know they’re voting for a conservative candidate, but they have some skepticism of Trump because they’ve broken with the rest of the party and actively chose to support a candidate who at times was voicing very anti-Trump and anti-big lie,” said Zachary Donnini, a data scientist at Decision Desk HQ, a nonpartisan election handicapper.

“These are the voters that Cheney thinks she can maybe flip,” he added. “It’s people who might have a positive view of her but haven’t fully defected from the Republican Party yet.”

Whether that effort is effective, however, remains the key question.

Recent polls have found the presidential candidates separated by a razor-thin margin — making it anyone’s game less than a week out from Election Day.

A CNN poll conducted by SSRS released Wednesday found Harris with a 6-point lead in Wisconsin among likely voters, a 5-point edge in Michigan, and a tied race in Pennsylvania, with the two candidates both drawing 48 percent support. The margin of error is 4.8 percentage points for Wisconsin and 4.7 percentage points for Michigan and Pennsylvania, making the states at a near statistical tie.

The close nature of the race opens an opportunity for any voting bloc to tip the scales in one direction or another. Former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent (Pa.) — who revealed earlier this month that he voted for Harris — said Cheney’s impact may be marginal, but that could be enough to make a difference in this race.

“This game is gonna be won or lost on the margins and to the extent that Liz Cheney can help Kamala Harris with certain demographics like college educated, suburban, Republican and Independent women, well that’s all the better for Harris,” Dent, who left Congress in 2018 after more than a dozen years in the House, told The Hill in an interview.

“[Do] I think it will be a dramatic impact? No. But do I think on the margins Liz Cheney helps? Absolutely,” Dent continued. “And again, even a small movement can be enormously consequential. So I think overall it’s a net positive for her.”

The marginal impact may remain silent until Election Day. On the trail, Cheney has reminded Republicans that their ballot is a “secret vote,” a message designed to ease any concerns about retribution for supporting the opposite party.

“I think you're going to have, frankly, a lot of men and women who will go into the voting booth and will vote their conscience, will vote for Vice President Harris,” Cheney said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last month. “They may not ever say anything publicly, but the results will speak for themselves.”

Cheney wasn’t the most predictable figure to launch a crusade against her party’s presidential nominee. During her early years in the House, Cheney was a superstar of the right, rising quickly into the ranks of GOP leadership and siding with Trump on virtually every major policy fight while defending him through his first impeachment in 2019.

The breaking point came after the 2020 election, when Trump refused to concede defeat and fought to remain in the White House by nullifying Joe Biden’s victory. That campaign led directly to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed into the building in a failed effort to block Congress from certifying the election results.

Since then, Cheney has become Trump’s most prominent Republican critic, voting to impeach the president in the days after the rampage and later joining the House investigative committee that found him culpable of fomenting the violence.

The castigations cost Cheney her seat in Congress — replaced by a Trump ally. But with Trump racing for a second term, Cheney has returned to the national stage with warnings that the former president poses a material threat to the country's foundational democratic traditions. Her criticisms have extended to those in her party — including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who are supporting Trump’s reelection bid.

But while Cheney is the most vocal anti-Trump Republican to emerge this campaign cycle, she also represents a much larger universe of conservatives who have declined to support the GOP nominee — not because they support Harris on the issues, but because they see Trump as a threat to democracy. 

Hardly fringe characters, the detractors embody a who's who of GOP leaders stretching back decades, including former President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Mike Pence, who served as vice president in Trump's first term.

Still, a large majority of Republicans on and off Capitol Hill have stuck by Trump amid the internal clash. And many say his appeal to former Democrats more than compensates for the erosion of support from conservative traditionalists. 

"To tell you the truth, I think we've picked up more than we've lost," the GOP campaign strategist said.

Democrats have a different view, pointing to recent polls indicating that there are many more Republicans supporting Harris than there are Democrats supporting Trump. Some say Cheney is influencing that trend.

“I do think there is a subset of suburban Republican voters out there that feel left behind by today’s MAGA-fied Republican Party,” said a Democratic campaign strategist familiar with House races. “So if Republicans for Democrats creates a permission structure for those individuals, then more power to 'em.”