Former Vice President Dick Cheneys endorsement of the current vice president, Kamala Harris, for president is clearly extraordinary. Never in modern American political history has such a high-ranking political figure crossed party lines to endorse a presidential candidate.
Considering how much Cheney and the Democratic Party mutually loathed each other from 2001 until just a few years ago, its also a display of how many formerly or still conservative political leaders have come to see the 2024 election between Harris her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, as the referendum on democracy itself that liberals are fond of framing it as.
In our nations 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump, Dick Cheney wrote in a Friday statement, referring to Trumps use of lies about election fraud and his incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.
But is it actually, you know, useful to Harris efforts to win an election in which the margins appear excruciatingly narrow?
After all, Cheney ended his tenure in office as a deeply unpopular figure, associated with the George W. Bush administrations big business-friendly policies and corrosion of civil liberties. Just around 1 in 3 Americans approved of his job performance. Since then, the policy hes most associated with, the invasion of Iraq, has come to be near-universally seen as a pointless and deadly folly, and hes been the subject of a scathing, Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie.
Republicans are obviously skeptical. Asked if there were any voters who could be persuaded by Cheneys endorsement, GOP pollster Neil Newhouse responded: No one who isnt related to him, no.
For Democrats, the answer is a tentative maybe. Dont expect Harris campaign to plaster the nations television screens with ads touting the endorsement, though it could show up in some ads targeting older, conservative-leaning voters. More important for the party, its part of a steady drip, drip, drip of high-profile Republicans breaking with Trump, giving rank-and-file members of the party and conservative-leaning independent voters a permission structure to do the same, repeating a strategy the party used successfully in the 2022 midterms to defeat Trump-esque candidates.
I think there are definitely Republican and Republican-leaning voters who struggle with what to do in this race and knowing there is company in numbers does matter, said Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic consultant. Remember, this election is entirely in the margins.
Sarah Longwell, a former GOP strategist who runs the group Republican Voters Against Trump, noted that a high-profile figure like Cheney (and former Rep. Liz Cheney, his daughter) taking the step of formally endorsing Harris rather than just disowning Trump could encourage other Trump-skeptical members of the GOP to do the same. Many other leading Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah have instead stayed neutral in the race.
Both Cheneys have done something important and specific: They not only say they refuse to support Donald Trump, but they are affirmatively endorsing Kamala Harris. Thats the very decision many of these voters are struggling with, Longwell said. For many of them, not voting for Trump is easy; actively supporting Harris is a bit harder. But Dick Cheney is a signal to them that Donald Trump is such a malevolent force in our politics that simply sitting on the sidelines is not enough.
Dating back to when President Joe Biden was in the race, the Democratic campaign has pointed to the number of GOP primary voters who continued to vote for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley even after she dropped out of the primary as evidence there are votes to be gained by soliciting Republicans discontented with Trump, noting that the number of Haley primary voters in Georgia and Michigan was greater than Bidens 2020 margin of victory in those states.
The campaign has long focused on these voters, hiring the former chief of staff to Rep. Adam Kinzinger like Cheney, a Republican who broke with Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection to serve as national Republican engagement director.
And on Monday, the campaign released its first ad explicitly deploying Republican anti-Trump voices since Harris took over as the Democratic nominee. The spot, which is running on local television in Philadelphia and Trumps home market of Palm Beach, Florida, and on national cable networks, features former Vice President Mike Pence, former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper and others bashing the Republican, though it did not include those figures explicitly endorsing Harris.
Trump is a danger to our troops and our democracy, the narrator says in the ad. We cant let him lead our country again.
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