First, she lost the post in the House Republican leadership that had positioned her to rise to House speaker someday, or even higher. Then she suffered a staggering defeat in her bid for reelection in Wyoming’s sole congressional district — the biggest primary loss, by some measures, of any incumbent in the 21st century.
Yet she persevered and insisted as vice chair of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, over the objections of some on its staff, that the panel keep its focus on Trump, leading to its recommendation that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against him.
Now, Cheney is again standing up to warn that the country might be “sleepwalking into dictatorship” by putting Trump back in the White House. Which is why it is perturbing that she is considering a move that would make it easier for him to get there.
In an interview with my colleague Maeve Reston to promote her new book, Cheney dangled the possibility of her running for president as a third-party candidate.
“I happen to think democracy is at risk at home, obviously, as a result of Donald Trump’s continued grip on the Republican Party,” Cheney said. “And I think democracy is at risk internationally as well.”
Yes, that is true. And there is no scenario in which a third-party candidate does not increase that risk.
Even getting on the ballot across the country is a cumbersome and daunting process for third-party candidates. Not since George Wallace in 1968 has a candidate running outside the two parties carried a single state. (The segregationist former governor of Alabama won five in the Deep South, picking up nearly 50 electoral votes.) Meanwhile, the arguments over whether Ross Perot cost George H.W. Bush his reelection in 1992 and Ralph Nader handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 will never be settled.
Assuming that both Trump and President Biden are their parties’ nominees, it is impossible to think of a state that Cheney — or any independent candidate — has a reasonable chance of winning. But there are at least half a dozen states where the margins are likely to be close enough that an outsider candidate could play spoiler to Biden’s chances, especially given the country’s sour mood.
That danger already exists, thanks to the efforts of No Labels, the centrist Washington-based organization that is considering putting its own presidential and vice-presidential candidates on the ballot, as well as the ongoing outsider campaigns of conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., activist and scholar Cornel West and the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
Cheney, however, would be in a league by herself as a third-party candidate. Theoretically, as one prominent GOP strategist put it to me, she might offer herself as “a way station to Republicans who can’t bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden.”
But in the real world, it is impossible to imagine this appeal would work. Most Republicans, even those who claim they are appalled by Trump’s tone and antics, have already shown they are capable of rationalizing themselves into pretzels to justify their support for him. And in running, Cheney would put herself in a position of having to make a case not only against Trump but also against Biden and his policies.
Let us hope that, by raising the possibility of running for president, Cheney is just trying to sell some books.
In the epilogue, she wrote: “Every one of us — Republican, Democrat, Independent — must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated. This is the cause of our time.”
If she really believes that — and I think she does — Cheney knows that her only real option is to devote her energies to making sure the next president is a Democrat and that he has a Democratic Congress to work with. And then she can turn to another challenge: seeing whether there is anything left of the Republican Party that remains worth salvaging.