In the wake of a thumping primary loss in Wyoming on Tuesday, Rep. Liz Cheney, speaking to a group of supporters in Jackson, said that the path to a thumping win had been abundantly clear to her: Toe the party line on the outcome of the 2020 election – and worse – and succeed.
Defeated resoundingly in Tuesday’s primary, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., is converting her very flush campaign into a new political action committee called The Great Task, a name borrowed from a portion of the Gettysburg Address. She has confirmed she is considering a run for president in 2024. Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
“That was a path I could not and would not take,” she said. The decision led to a loss by more than 35 percentage points to a Donald Trump-backed challenger, ranching industry attorney Harriet Hageman.
Immediately mocked by Trump and his supporters for having lost, Cheney delivered a rousing concession speech with a national flavor – invoking the courage of both Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln – to a crestfallen local crowd.
“The great and original champion of our party was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all,” she said. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”
Cheney followed her forward-looking message with a further Lincoln-inspired tribute, on Wednesday converting her very flush campaign into a new political action committee called The Great Task, a name borrowed from a portion of the Gettysburg Address. She has confirmed she is considering a run for president in 2024.
In 2022, it is hard for a rallying cry based on the experience of the nation’s 16th president to register as anything other than romantic whimsy. Cheney, doubling down on a steep uphill struggle, joins three Republicans who lost elections having voted for Trump’s impeachment. Four more have gone into retirement; just two of the 10 won their primaries.
While Cheney may indeed have known how to win her seat in Wyoming, the same cannot be said of any path to the presidency available to her.
Although public discontent with the two-party system is running at a high, it is hardly high enough for the first third-party candidate in history to mount a successful presidential run. In the style of H. Ross Perot, perhaps siphoning votes from Trump would be victory enough for Cheney – if such a maneuver could be guaranteed, which it simply can’t.
It seems unlikely that Lincoln and Cheney will ever have more than electoral defeat in common. But the “depths of political oblivion,” as hailed by Trump, seem unlikely to await her either. Even a spectacular demise like this one does not rule out the ability to participate or to frustrate.
The efforts of Cheney and other so-called “Republicans in name only” may be helpful in determining whether their party’s swing to the far right will again hold up nationally, and how few of its number are meaningfully unhappy with the onerous conditions of the Trump age.
If anti-Trump Republicans choose to rally around her and others, that would be interesting – and politically instructive. Right now, however, it’s a very, very big “if.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
