CNN —
Republican women can vote for Kamala Harris and don’t have to tell anyone.
That was the most impressive takeaway from Monday’s tour of Blue Wall battleground states with Vice President Liz Cheney. Because the hard-line conservative and former congressman has created a system of personal empowerment licenses for suburban Republicans and independent women to disparage Donald Trump and support Democrats. candidate.
The mother of five, who as a lawmaker staunchly opposed abortion and supported the end of Roe v. Wade, said that since the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision, women are no longer able to access the reproductive health care they need. He warned that only Harris had that right. Compassion to deal with problems.
Cheney has repeatedly made it clear that he still opposes abortion, but in Waukesha County, a battleground suburb of Milwaukee, “I’ve seen what’s going on in so many states, and I’m very troubled.” I am deeply troubled.” She went on to say, “As the Vice President said, I am troubled by how many women, in some cases dead, are not getting the care they need because their health care providers are worried about criminal liability.” “I’m here,” he added.
She added: “I think we are facing an unsustainable situation today.”
Ms. Cheney was speaking at her third event of the day with Ms. Harris, including previous trips to Pennsylvania and Michigan, where she was visited by the vice president himself. They often made broader claims against Republican candidates.
Earlier, Cheney had said in a Detroit suburb that some Republicans feared retribution and even violence if they opposed Trump. “I just want to remind people that if you’re at all concerned, vote your conscience and don’t have to tell anyone anything,” Cheney said, sitting alongside Harris. “Millions of Republicans will do so on November 5th.”
Cheney once had a meteoric rise to the top of the Republican Party. But she was ousted as chair of the House Republican Conference after accusing the party of covering up for Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A pro-Trump challenger then won the Wyoming seat in the 2022 primary.
But her appearance alongside Harris shows that losing power doesn’t mean she has given up on principled politics. It also points to one of the most important factors in the final days of the campaign: whether the Democratic vice president can win the support of many Republicans.
The Harris campaign befriended the tyrant by portraying President Trump’s violent and vulgar behavior, the perception of him as a threat to the Constitution, and the way he horrified hawks in the Bush and Reagan administrations, including Cheney’s father and former vice president. It appeals to Republican voters who are dissatisfied with the trend toward President Dick Cheney.
Those voters could include tens of thousands of Republicans who voted for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the failed primary against Trump earlier this year. President Trump has hinted in recent days that he may appear alongside his former rival to appeal to the same voters. But even if Ms. Harris were able to win over a small portion of voters and persuade them not to support Mr. Trump, it could have a decisive impact in close battleground states.
But she can’t do it alone. She needs to be gentle with dissident Republican voters as she asks them to put aside some of their most cherished political positions. That’s why Cheney could be so valuable to Harris. She enjoys tremendous credibility among some voters because of her pristine conservative ideology and defense of what she considers America’s most fundamental principles.
“I’m a conservative, and I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is fidelity to the Constitution,” said House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Inquiry. Mr. Cheney, who was the group’s vice chairman, spoke from Chester County, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. “In this campaign, we have to choose between someone who has been and will continue to be faithful to the Constitution, and President Donald Trump. I am the one predicting how he will act. We weren’t alone. We saw what he did after the last election. We saw what he did on January 6th,” Cheney warned.
Cheney’s concerns about the Constitution were largely well-known. Even more noteworthy were her comments on the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the federal constitutional right to abortion, a conservative majority established by President Trump.
She does not deny that she has opposed abortion throughout her life. But Cheney said the discussion was about the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit seeking the woman’s medical records. She also appears to be scolding conservative Congress and officials whose hard-line policies have led to the withdrawal of critical health services. In some cases, women are denied access to emergency abortions and other vital reproductive health care when their lives are at risk. Democrats announced earlier this year that IVF treatment in Alabama would be closed after the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are human beings and that those who destroy them can be liable for wrongful death. I asked for it to stop. The state’s Republican governor has since signed into law a bill aimed at protecting IVF patients, but Democrats have cited the incident to highlight the chaos and disenfranchisement and directly blame President Trump. It is said that
Mr. Cheney must have been aware that what he said throughout the day would cause a stir, so he actively addressed the topic. In Pennsylvania, for example, she intervened in the debate after Harris spoke on the issue. And she spoke after the vice president promised that if he were president and Congress passed it, he would sign legislation restoring the right to abortion nationwide.
Cheney’s voice on the issue is a clear sign that the Harris campaign believes her value to the vice president goes beyond highlighting Trump’s authoritarian instincts and threat to democracy. It was an expression. Ms. Cheney could have been a bridge to millions of Republican women, especially in the suburbs of key battleground states. They are adamantly opposed to abortion, but may not support policies that could threaten their health.
Cheney’s appearance with Harris comes as the vice president seeks to widen the former president’s large gender gap among female voters. A New York Times/Siena College poll this month showed Ms. Harris leading Mr. Trump among women voters, 56% to 40%. Republican candidates increased by 53% vs. 42% among men.
The former president has struggled to discuss abortion and reach out to women effectively during this campaign. He seeks to take credit for the Supreme Court’s momentous decisions while trying to avoid their political implications. He falsely claims that all the women are happy with the decision. He has made high-handed promises to serve as their “protector” if he regains the White House, and last week, at a town hall with an all-female audience, he bizarrely announced that he was a candidate for in vitro fertilization. He claimed to be his father.
The incident with Ms. Harris and Ms. Cheney has raised questions about how many Republican voters she will reach. A New York Times poll found that 9% of likely Republicans planned to vote for her, but only 3% of Democrats expected to vote for Trump. If that were to happen in the November election, it would pose a serious challenge to Trump’s presidential chances. Still, given the country’s polarization, there remains significant doubt that many Republicans, and even conservative-leaning independents, will support Democratic candidates.
But the Trump campaign appears to understand the risks. The former president said in Philadelphia on Sunday that Haley “wants to be involved” in his campaign. And CNN reported last week that the campaign was in talks with the former South Carolina governor about a first meeting with President Trump. In recent weeks, President Trump has held events aimed at female voters, including with former White House press secretary and Arkansas Gov. Sarah. Huckabee Sanders.
Trump may not have been able to improve his declining approval ratings with female voters and disaffected Republicans over the weekend after his wild antics and vulgar comments about late golfer Arnold Palmer’s anatomy , such rough-and-tumble politics could boost Mr. Trump’s credibility with his many loyal voters.
“If you’re talking about Republicans who feel that Trump’s influence on the party is harmful, you look at this and think, ‘Look, I can’t vote for that person.’ You can’t do that,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told Casey Hunt on “CNN This Morning” Monday. “But at the same time, who doesn’t care about politics at all, but finds these clips from their own lives kind of funny?” They really exist, and they’re part of the Trump coalition. is. ”
Mr. Trump’s team also sought to further dig into Mr. Cheney’s charms in order to discredit him. The former president said her father was the architect of the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which caused severe fatigue with foreign intervention and helped pave the way for her own political rise. he pointed out.
President Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Dick Cheney is an irrelevant RINO along with his daughter” and added Harris to the triumvirate, “endless nonsense” that has wasted lives and cost trillions of dollars. He said he supports the “war”.
Ultimately, the Cheneys’ ostracism from the Trump-era Republican Party signals an extraordinary transformation of the party by the former president. And only one of the divisions in the Republican family will be happy after the election.
