Liz Cheney Presidential Run DOA – A presidential run by former Congresswoman Liz Cheney seems highly unlikely at this point.
Mainstream news outlets speculated that Cheney would run against Trump for the GOP nomination after she lost the Republican primary against now Rep. Harriet Hageman.
However, she recently accepted a teaching job at the University of Virginia.
“With democracy under fire in this country and elsewhere around the world, Liz Cheney serves as a model of political courage and leadership,” Larry J. Sabato, director of the UVA Center for Politics, said in a press release announcing her joining the faculty.
“Liz will send a compelling message to students about integrity. She’s a true profile in courage, and she was willing to pay the price for her principles and democracy itself.”
Liz Cheney for President: We Might Have a New Clue
Months back, the UVA Center for Politics would not comment, however, on Cheney’s plans when asked by 19FortyFive, only referring to a clause in the press release that says, “The appointment is effective immediately and will run through the end of the 2023 fall semester with an option to renew.”
Her chances to attract Republican voters in a party that has moved farther to the right under Donald Trump’s leadership is highly unlikely
While the party’s corporate establishment still controls many important positions and levers of power in the GOP, the party’s base changed profoundly under Trump. Today’s Republican Party is more blue-collar and isolationist than the party her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, was a leading force in before Trump rode the escalator at Trump Tower to victory starting in 2015.
“The Republican Party is a lot more diverse than it’s given credit for, and there will be some number of people who find her, and her message, appealing, but that is far from saying that there would be a warm reception, or a large reception,” Micah Caskey, a Republican state representative in South Carolina, told the Associated Press in August. “I don’t see a Liz Cheney candidacy as being viable.”
The most recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March could be described as “Trumpstock.” Images of the former president and his MAGA gear were everywhere.
It wasn’t that long ago, 2010 to be exact, that Cheney herself roasted Barack Obama for his rollback of the Bush administration’s waterboarding of terrorists and rumors that CIA officers who participated could be prosecuted, at CPAC. She introduced her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who received a standing ovation at CPAC that year.
Times have changed.
What the GOP Thinks of Cheney
Liz Cheney angered many conservatives with her leadership of the January 6 committee and her vote to impeach Trump the second time around.
Her chances to pick up enough votes in GOP primaries or caucuses would be limited. There are not enough moderate to liberal Republicans left in the party to stop the Trump juggernaut.
“We like Trump. She tried to impeach Trump,” Cheyenne voter Chester Barkell told PBS in August. “I don’t trust Liz Cheney.”
Former Pennsylvania GOP state chairman Alan Novak summed up the problems for candidates like Cheney last fall in an interview with Newsmax. He also served as county party chairman in Chester County, a once reliably Republican county in the Philadelphia suburbs, that has gone Democratic since Trump’s rise. Many other suburban counties followed the same trend.
“When I came to Chester County to be party chair and to the state party, there were a lot of what I could call moderate Republican women in party leadership positions,” Novak said. “They were true party front-line workers, and they kind of had a moderating influence.
Liz Cheney on ABC This Week.
“And I don’t think that [former Gov.] Tom Ridge could get through the state party or the Chester County party today.”
Ridge like Cheney, represented a Centrist segment of the GOP that might have blunted a Trump candidacy 30 years ago, but those days are over. Ridge himself voted for Joe Biden in 2020.