What the Pundits Aren't Telling You About a Liz Cheney Independent Run
Know-it-all Pundits Are Blowing Hot Air About The Potential Strength of a Liz Cheney Independent Run
If you want to talk to someone who really knows all, pray to God. If you want to talk to someone who thinks they know everything, talk to a political pundit.
Since Liz Cheney was defeated by the Trumpist cult that dominates the Wyoming Republican Primary, there have been many takes on her running for President with many bizarre comparisons even by usually reliable pundits like Ed Morrissey and Jim Geraghty.
Professional pundits are like weathermen. They have specialized knowledge of politics. They’ve studied it and followed more than most. They know history, they know what’s worked and they know what hasn’t. They use that knowledge to make predictions.
The problem? They’re very bad at dealing with the unpreceded, the unknown, and the unusual. However, they’re used with tones of absolute certitude.
When it comes to third-party and Independent bids, there is very little history at the national level of competitive third parties and most have drawn overbroad conclusions: Third Party and Independent campaigns don’t work and there’s little demand for them.
Over at Hot Air, Morrissey writes, “And if she expects to run as an independent, Liz Cheney’s combined draw from disaffected Democrats and Republicans will make Evan McMullin 2016 bid look like an electoral juggernaut.”
I’ve been reading Morrissey since he had his own solo blog and this is probably the silliest thing he ever wrote. Evan McMullin got 720,000 votes and appeared on eleven state ballots after launching his campaign three months prior to the election.
Jim Geraghty is a little more generous:
But I think the number of ballots cast for the Libertarian candidate gives us a sense of the portion of the electorate that was intractably anti-Biden, and simultaneously found Trump unacceptable. In 2020, Libertarian Jo Jorgenson got 1.18 percent nationwide; that ranged from 2.6 percent in North Dakota to .6 percent in Mississippi. As much as people complained about the options of Trump and Biden, 98.17 percent of Americans who voted opted for one of the two.
Geraghty prefaced this the remark by saying the comparison because Cheney would “\be better known, probably better funded, and hold different positions on several issues.” But then decided to make the comparison anyway and offer less than 2 percent as a ceiling for an Independent candidacy
The way Geraghty writes, it wouldn’t matter if Liz Cheney raised half a billion dollars and were able to garner earned media out the wa-zoo, she couldn’t beat Jo Jorgensen’s numbers because 98% of the country is going to choose a major party candidate.
The assumption of much right-wing punditry is that Independent candidates don’t succeed because they’re not part of the two parties. While that does hurt due to the organizational advantages the two parties enjoy, most third-party candidates end up also-rans for three reasons: 1) lack of name recognition, 2) lack of money, 3) no one could take them seriously as a potential president.
If you voted for Jo Jorgensen in 2020, you were either a Libertarian activist, someone who found her online, or someone who was so disgusted with the major parties that you just cast a protest vote without knowing who she was. Many voters didn’t know they had a choice.
And voters may want a choice quite desperately in 2024. The vast majority of Americans don’t want Biden or Trump to run again. The share of Americans holding unfavorable views of both parties is higher than its been in decades at 27% and 71% wish there were more political parties.
This is an unprecedented level of discontent that has gotten worse since Biden was president. “Last War” political prognostication is only so helpful.
Of course, the cynics will say, “People will say they want other choices, but they end up voting for major party candidates anyway.” Voters want other choices, but they want serious choices, not protest votes.
The numbers put up by no-name candidates who never held office like Evan McMullin and Jo Jorgensen or spaced out and obscure former Governor Gary Johnson are actually quite high. Imagine if voters were given a choice that was actually capable of governing.
Imagine a Cheney 2024 campaign, raising money, running a professional operation, and working with principled and experienced political people who dropped out of the Republican Party. It would be a very different proposition than Evan McMullin’s three-month sprint.
That’s not to say Cheney would win. The system makes it very difficult for an Independent to win the White House and I doubt any candidate or party could crack the code in a single go, but she could be competitive.
Of course, there are a lot of factors starting with whether she would even run. She’s a Cheney and the idea that third parties are bad is practically in her DNA.
If she does run, how well she does would depend on a lot of factors including what type of message she ran. If she runs a campaign to simply attack Trump on January 6th, that’s going to have a limited appeal.
On the other hand, she could run against the Biden-Trump Afghanistan withdrawal that went so disastrously for the American people. She could also embrace free trade, once common ground between the two parties and now utterly abandoned. She could point out how the Trump tariffs (which the Biden Administration has left in place) are hurting American consumers and making inflation worse.
She could play strongly towards the exhausted majority. Maybe she could put a Democrat who got shunned by his party such as former Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) on her ticket.
If she ran a campaign that offered people a chance to vote for someone whose principled, not crazy and doesn’t look like they have one foot in the grave, who knows what Cheney could do?
The best historical parallel to a Cheney 2024 run would be Rep. John Anderson (Ill.) who left the Republican Party to run as an Independent in 1980 due to his disagreements with Ronald Reagan. Anderson was actually a predecessor of Cheney’s as Republican Conference Chair. He got 7% of the popular vote, well more than most pundits think Cheney could get.
However, it should be noted that voter discontent with both parties and the national situation was not nearly as high in 1980 and that Trump is nowhere near as popular as was Reagan. Who knows many votes Cheney could get in 2024?
I don’t know. I’ll admit that because there are far too many variables to make an intelligent guess, and hot takes that don’t take these variables into account are pretty well worthless.
The Problem with Playing on Team Democrat
Former Congressman Joe Walsh had thoughts on the direction that Congresswoman Cheney should take:
“What Liz Cheney is going to find is this is a difficult road because, if you play this road out all the way, you have to do what I do, which is temporarily be on Team Democrat, which is weird for a Tea Party guy like me.
“I know Liz believes the Republican party right now is a threat to our democracy. If you believe that then you have to support people who will defeat Republicans and right now the only people who will defeat Republicans are Democrats. I think Liz is getting close to that point.”
And she might be, at least for the 2022 elections and only to an extent:
"I think that they – we've got election deniers that have been nominated for really important positions all across the country," she said. "And I'm going to work against those people, I'm going to work to support their opponents; I think it matters that much."
If you’re one of the election-denying republican nominees for Governor like Kari Lake (AZ), Doug Mastriano (PA), Tudor Dixon (MI), Joe Lombardo (NV), or an election denying Senate candidate like Adam Laxalt (NV) or Herschel Walker (GA), Cheney should be coming for you. If you’re quivering fear of speaking the truth but not denying the election like Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and Nancy Mace (R-SC), she’ll leave you to hide under your desk and avoid offending the MAGA hoard without embracing insanity.
This strategy won’t work long-term. Andrew Yang called it accurately when he pointed out that the Democratic rhetoric adds up to the idea that Democracy can only be saved if Democrats never win another election again.
As much as Walsh or Cheney would like voters to make support for the constitution and rejection of election denial a top issue…that’s mostly wishcasting at this point. Voters vote on issues that are a lot closer to them and the Democrats’ radicalism is strengthening the hand of the far right.
This can be seen in the massive shift from Democrats to the Republicans in the Hispanic community. Some of this may be tied to Democratic extremism on social issues such as the transgender issue or abortion on demand up until the baby’s in the birth canal, and woke language policing. It can also be attributed to the shift in economic policies as most national Democrats have given up on balancing of environmental concerns with jobs. Ideas like, “The Green New Deal,” might as well be called, “A Declaration of War on the Working Class.”
If the future of America depends on the Democrats winning every election, the future is very dim indeed.
The other problem with playing on Team Democrat is that it’s generally not a good idea to try and play for a team that doesn’t want you.
I have news for Congressman Walsh: The Democrats don’t want you on their team. The Democrats don’t want your advice. Joe Walsh’s support for Democrats has netted them one vote in Illinois statewide elections, two if we convinced his wife to go along.
The Democrats efforts to boost election-deniers in GOP primaries shows they aren’t serious about boosting democracy. The far-left progressives driving the Democratic Party would be fine with the country having a dictatorship as long it allowed abortion on demand, and every meeting began with people stating their pronouns and declaring they were meeting on land stolen from the local Native American tribes.
As a short-term political project, I can understand why Congresswoman Cheney might pursue this project because election deniers are dangerous to our country. That said, there are some problems.
First of all, I think she’s unlikely to have a major impact at this point. Even with $7 million from her campaign, that’s not much of a war chest. So why do it? Second, her website Great Task uses Lincoln iconography, which is sure to get Cheney’s effort confused with the thoroughly discredited Lincoln Project whose co-founder John Weaver was found to be a sexual predator and pulled idiotic stunts like the Tiki Torch protest. Third, I think there can be a question of moral hazard in some elections. If Cheney were to oppose Doug Mastriano for Pennsylvania Governor or John Gibbs for Congress in Michigan Third District after Democrats spent money to get these candidates nominated, it’d be a situation where Democrats got rewarded for boosting anti-democracy candidates.
I think many “pro-Democracy” Republicans and Ex-Republicans like Walsh are under the false impression that you can save democracy by lecturing people about the importance of democracy. For a democratic republic to survive, voters have to believe that the issues and concerns they have can be addressed and redressed through the democratic process. If you don’t offer candidates who do that, and the only ones who do that are parties and candidates that believe in situational ethics and will violate any norm to get what they want, we’ll lose our republic one way or another.
I hope come 2024 that Liz Cheney or someone else will rise up to address people’s concerns with character and integrity. That will be a true Great Task and greater than any effort to just mitigate the dangers posed by nuts in the GOP.