(NewsNation) — Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said she’d consider a 2024 presidential campaign, hours after she lost her reelection primary to Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman.
In a pointed address Tuesday night, the three-term congresswoman vowed to continue her fight to make sure Trump is never again elected president.
“Our work is far from over,” she said from her campaign headquarters in Jackson, Wyoming. “This is not a game.”
Cheney told NBC’s “Today” show early Wednesday that running for president is a decision she’ll make in the coming months: “I’m not gonna make any announcements here this morning. But it is something that I am thinking about.”
Political commentator Chris Whipple told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield on Wednesday that Cheney is “a force of nature,” and that she’s laser-focused on doing whatever it takes to keep Trump as far away as possible from the Oval Office.
He said that Liz really is “her father’s daughter,” sharing an ideology of being “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.”
Chances are, however, low that Cheney would make it through a Republican primary, though she’d certainly generate some interest, according to Whipple.
“There are many folks inside the Republican Party that are looking for a vessel to express their outrage against Trump taking over the party, to have somebody who’s going to be out there holding Trump accountable,” Whipple said.
Political Analyst Kevin Madden, the former adviser to Mitt Romney, said “there’s absolutely zero chance” Cheney will run as a Democrat, if she runs.
“There are so many candidates that would be able to run against Liz Cheney in any Democratic primary and be victorious. So there’s no chance, that she would ever run as a Democrat,” Madden said.
Cheney could also run as a third-party candidate, sneaking up the middle presumably to pull Republican votes away from Trump, if he became the nominee.
It’s an unlikely scenario, but it’s been done before.
After all, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein all ran for president and then were accused of siphoning off votes from a more popular candidate.
There has been some debate about whether candidates George H.W. Bush, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton would have won their races if Perot, Nader and Stein hadn’t run.
“George Bush went to his grave convinced that Ross Perot cost him the election against Bill Clinton,” Whipple added.
Ross Perot, the feisty Texas technology billionaire, rattled U.S. politics with two independent presidential campaigns in the 1990s that struck a chord with disgruntled voters.
Perot leaped into the 1992 presidential race as an independent and quickly found a lode of Americans turned off by the Republican and Democratic parties. His overarching issue was curbing the government’s deficit spending — an issue he referred to as the “crazy aunt in the basement” who no one wanted to talk about. He pulled in 19 percent of vote in ‘92 presidential race.
Ralph Nader, blamed by many Democrats for their loss of the White House in the 2000 election, launched an independent campaign for the presidency in 2000.
Nader called Washington “corporate occupied territory” that turns the government against the interests of the people. “In that context, I have decided to run for president,” he said.
Nader stirred controversy over allegations that his campaign helped Republican candidate George W. Bush win a close election against Democratic candidate Al Gore.
Jill Stein was the Green Party’s nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 and 2016 elections.
Andrew Yang was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries before dropping out. He went on to announce a new national political third party called the “Forward Party.”
The new party, called Forward, will initially be co-chaired by Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. They hope the party will become a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties that dominate U.S. politics, founding members told Reuters.
Reuters contributed to this report.
