If Liz Cheney (R-WY) wants to run for president in order to keep Donald Trump from regaining the office, her only viable path to success, of a sort, is to run as an independent/third-party candidate.
Cheney, the Republican who lost renomination Tuesday for her House seat in Wyoming, has no discernible path to the Republican presidential nomination unless the party’s grassroots voters massively turn not just away from, but also angrily against, Trump. Indeed, her presence in the GOP field would likely help Trump by taking political oxygen from, and splitting the non-Trump votes with, other contenders.
Run the arithmetic again and again, and combine it with the inability of Cheney or anyone else so far to dent Trump’s emotional hold on the GOP voting base, and a GOP primary run always adds up to a lost cause. If Cheney understood how to craft a message to turn much of that base away from Trump, she already would have deployed it. (This is no knock on Cheney, by the way: Nobody else, including me, has been able to do so.)
On the other hand, by organizing early to run a campaign outside the two major parties, Cheney could well succeed in blocking Trump from the White House — and she would have a chance, albeit a slim one, of winning it herself.
Cheney could block Trump by taking more than 10 million of the 74 million votes Trump won in 2020. Exit polls showed that about 22% of Trump voters, some 16 million, were motivated more against eventual winner Joe Biden than for Trump. It is from that universe of “hold your nose for Trump” voters from which Cheney could draw, although she certainly wouldn’t attract all of them.
At first glance, Cheney would have even larger hunting grounds among Biden voters, since 44% of his 81 million ballots were motivated more against Trump than for Biden. Yet while their admiration for her may be high, most of those voters would probably balk at her conservative philosophy. She would need to do some fancy footwork to convince the bulk of them to put considerations of character above those of the policy approach they favor. It wouldn’t be impossible for her, but she would face awfully long odds.
If keeping the dangerous and increasingly deranged Trump from office again is Cheney’s main motivator, her outsider run would thus pose more of a threat to him (if he is the Republican nominee) than to Democrats. In fact, that might be part of her message: Nominate Trump, and she stays on the ballot and hands victory to Democrats; nominate someone else, and she drops out. Such a threat might motivate just enough GOP primary voters to consolidate around another GOP contender to provide that contender a fighting chance against Trump.
All of which assumes, of course, that the political lay of the land doesn’t shift profoundly in the next two years.
Then again, there are, it is true, some rare politicians — Ronald Reagan, for example — who can actually shift the political terrain, building massive majorities for a governing approach the cognoscenti have dismissed. Cheney, of course, would try to be such a figure, not just a spoiler, and there are those of us who would support her all the way. A principled conservatism still married to, rather than notoriously divorced from, character and personal decency, is for some of us an abiding lodestar and a still-achievable quest.
Today’s Trumpublican Party, alas, has negligible room for such a principled conservatism. That’s why Cheney’s only hope is to make use of the electoral system’s “play in the joints” — the flexibility that allows for an outsider candidate to thrive temporarily, as Ross Perot did before imploding in 1992 — by qualifying for state-by-state ballots without alignment with either major party. She could stymie Trump that way — and perhaps, just perhaps, actually win the presidency.
