Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement of the current vice president, Kamala Harris, for president is clearly extraordinary. Never in modern American political history has such a high-ranking political figure crossed party lines to endorse a presidential candidate.
Considering how much Cheney and the Democratic Party mutually loathed each other from 2001 until just a few years ago, it’s also a display of how many formerly or still conservative political leaders have come to see the 2024 election between Harris her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, as the referendum on democracy itself that liberals are fond of framing it as.
“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney wrote in a Friday statement, referring to Trump’s use of lies about election fraud and his incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”
But is it actually, you know, useful to Harris’ efforts to win an election in which the margins appear excruciatingly narrow?
After all, Cheney ended his tenure in office as a deeply unpopular figure, associated with the George W. Bush administration’s big business-friendly policies and corrosion of civil liberties. Just around 1 in 3 Americans approved of his job performance. Since then, the policy he’s most associated with, the invasion of Iraq, has come to be near-universally seen as a pointless and deadly folly, and he’s been the subject of a scathing, Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie.
Republicans are obviously skeptical. Asked if there were any voters who could be persuaded by Cheney’s endorsement, GOP pollster Neil Newhouse responded: “No one who isn’t related to him, no.”
For Democrats, the answer is a tentative maybe. Don’t expect Harris’ campaign to plaster the nation’s television screens with ads touting the endorsement, though it could show up in some ads targeting older, conservative-leaning voters. More important for the party, it’s part of a steady drip, drip, drip of high-profile Republicans breaking with Trump, giving rank-and-file members of the party and conservative-leaning independent voters a “permission structure” to do the same, repeating a strategy the party used successfully in the 2022 midterms to defeat Trump-esque candidates.
“I think there are definitely Republican and Republican-leaning voters who struggle with what to do in this race ― and knowing there is company in numbers does matter,” said Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic consultant. “Remember, this election is entirely in the margins.”
Sarah Longwell, a former GOP strategist who runs the group Republican Voters Against Trump, noted that a high-profile figure like Cheney (and former Rep. Liz Cheney, his daughter) taking the step of formally endorsing Harris rather than just disowning Trump could encourage other Trump-skeptical members of the GOP to do the same. Many other leading Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah have instead stayed neutral in the race.
“Both Cheneys have done something important and specific: They not only say they refuse to support Donald Trump, but they are affirmatively endorsing Kamala Harris. That’s the very decision many of these voters are struggling with,” Longwell said. “For many of them, not voting for Trump is easy; actively supporting Harris is a bit harder. But Dick Cheney is a signal to them that Donald Trump is such a malevolent force in our politics that simply sitting on the sidelines is not enough.”
Dating back to when President Joe Biden was in the race, the Democratic campaign has pointed to the number of GOP primary voters who continued to vote for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley even after she dropped out of the primary as evidence there are votes to be gained by soliciting Republicans discontented with Trump, noting that the number of Haley primary voters in Georgia and Michigan was greater than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in those states.
The campaign has long focused on these voters, hiring the former chief of staff to Rep. Adam Kinzinger ― like Cheney, a Republican who broke with Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection ― to serve as national Republican engagement director.
And on Monday, the campaign released its first ad explicitly deploying Republican anti-Trump voices since Harris took over as the Democratic nominee. The spot, which is running on local television in Philadelphia and Trump’s home market of Palm Beach, Florida, and on national cable networks, features former Vice President Mike Pence, former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper and others bashing the Republican, though it did not include those figures explicitly endorsing Harris.
“Trump is a danger to our troops and our democracy,” the narrator says in the ad. “We can’t let him lead our country again.”
Reaching out to those voters, though, may require a more personalized touch than Dick Cheney can provide. Democrats are likely to feature hometown cross-party endorsers, like former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan in Georgia and Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona. Former Trump official Olivia Troye could be called on to speak to Republican-leaning women in the suburbs.
There are Democratic skeptics as well. Evan Roth Smith, the pollster for the Democratic messaging group Blueprint, said it was unlikely swing voters, who tend to hold the entire political system in contempt, would find Cheney’s endorsement ― or the backing of any other Republican ― particularly meaningful.
“Not just because it’s Cheney. Partisan crossover endorsements are only novel or compelling to strong partisans, but swing voters don’t see it as particularly remarkable to cross party lines,” Roth Smith said. “They do that all the time and have low regard for both sides!”
And, of course, some progressives feel the campaign is wasting its time reaching out to GOP voters too enamored of MAGA to ever break with Trump ― the prevalence of former Trump officials and GOP leaders on the Democratic convention stage last month, when no Palestinian American was allowed to speak, was galling to many of them.
Republicans are hopeful Trump can exploit this grievance. One high-profile GOP consultant, who requested anonymity because speaking to HuffPost would be “off brand,” suggested Trump could regularly bring up the Dick Cheney endorsement because it would “drive every pro-Palestinian Democrat flipping nuts.”
The consultant’s suggestion reflects how both Democrats and Republicans see the Cheney endorsement as reinforcing their own wishes for how the race will go from here. Rather than the democracy versus authoritarianism frame favored by Democrats, they see Cheney’s endorsement as evidence of a contest pitting corrupt insiders against outsiders. (Republicans find it easy to brush Trump’s own documented history of corruption aside.)
“The America Last establishment in both political parties hate Trump because he is a threat to their entire corrupt system,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on social media after Cheney’s endorsement. “This is just more evidence that Kamala Harris is the candidate of choice for the ruling class uniparty.”
There is evidence Trump-friendly Republicans can underestimate the Cheneys. In 2022, Liz Cheney’s PAC paid for advertisements featuring her endorsements of Democratic candidates for governor and attorney general in Arizona. At the time, GOP candidate for governor Kari Lake dismissively thanked Cheney for her “anti-endorsement.”
“My team telIs me your commercial should add another 10 points to our lead! I guess that’s why they call the Cheney anti-endorsement the gift that keeps on giving,” Lake wrote in a letter to Liz Cheney.
Lake went on to lose to Democrat Katie Hobbs a week later by just 17,000 votes, in part because Hobbs won 9% of Republican votes.
