Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement of current Vice President Kamala Harris for president is clearly extraordinary. Never in modern American political history has such a high-profile political figure crossed party lines to endorse a presidential candidate.
Considering how much Cheney and the Democratic Party detested each other from 2001 until just a few years ago, it’s also a sign that many former or still conservative political leaders have come to see the 2024 election between Harris and her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, as the referendum on democracy itself, as liberals like to call it.
“In our country’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who has posed a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney wrote in a statement on Friday, 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 through lies and violence to keep himself in power after voters rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”
But is it really helpful to Harris’s efforts to win an election where the margins appear painfully small?
Cheney ended his term as a deeply unpopular figure, associated with the George W. Bush administration’s pro-corporate policies and its erosion of civil liberties. Only about 1 in 3 Americans approved of his job performance. Since then, the policy with which he is most associated, the invasion of Iraq, has been almost universally viewed as a senseless and deadly folly, and has been the subject of a devastating, Oscar-nominated Hollywood film.
Republicans are clearly skeptical. Asked if there were any voters who would be convinced by Cheney’s endorsement, GOP pollster Neil Newhouse said, “Nobody who’s not related to him, no.”
For Democrats, the answer is a tentative maybe. Don’t expect Harris’ campaign to blanket national TV screens with ads touting the endorsement, though it could appear in some ads aimed at older, conservative-leaning voters. More importantly for the party, it’s part of a steady drip-drip-drip of prominent Republicans breaking with Trump, giving rank-and-file party members and conservative-leaning independent voters a “permission structure” to do the same, a repeat of a strategy the party used successfully in the 2022 midterms to defeat Trump-like candidates.
“I think there are certainly Republican and Republican-leaning voters who are struggling with what to do in this race ― and it’s important to know that there’s company in numbers,” said Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic consultant. “Remember, this election is completely on the margins.”
Sarah Longwell, a former GOP strategist who leads the group Republican Voters Against Trump, noted that a prominent figure like Cheney (and former Rep. Liz Cheney, his daughter) taking the step of formally endorsing Harris rather than simply rejecting Trump could embolden other Trump-skeptical members of the GOP to do the same. Many other leading Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, have instead remained neutral in the race.
“Both Cheneys have done something important and specific: They’ve not only said they’re not going to support Donald Trump, they’ve said they’re going to strongly support Kamala Harris. And that’s exactly the decision that a lot of these voters are struggling with,” Longwell said. “For many of them, it’s easy not to vote for Trump; it’s much harder to actively support Harris. But Dick Cheney is a signal to them that Donald Trump is such a malign force in our politics that it’s not enough to just sit on the sidelines.”
Ever since 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 withdrew from the primary, as evidence that there are votes to be won by recruiting Republicans disaffected with Trump. They noted that the number of voters in Haley’s Georgia and Michigan primaries was larger than Biden’s margin of victory in those states in 2020.
The campaign has long targeted these voters, hiring former Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s chief of staff — 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 appealing to anti-Trump Republican voices since Harris took over as the Democratic nominee. The spot, which will air 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 does not feature any figures who explicitly supported Harris.
“Trump is a danger to our troops and our democracy,” the ad’s narrator says. “We cannot let him lead our country again.”
Reaching those voters, however, may require a more personal approach than Dick Cheney can offer. Democrats are likely to field cross-party endorsers from their hometowns, such as former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Mesa, Arizona, Mayor John Giles. Former Trump official Olivia Troye could be asked to speak to Republican-leaning women in the suburbs.
There are Democratic skeptics, too. Evan Roth Smith, a pollster for the Democratic messaging group Blueprint, said it was unlikely that swing voters, who tend to disdain the entire political system, would find Cheney’s endorsement ― or the endorsement of any other Republican ― particularly meaningful.
“It’s not just because it’s Cheney. Partisan crossover endorsements are only new or attractive to strong party members, but swing voters don’t see it as particularly noteworthy to cross party lines,” Roth Smith said. “They do it all the time and have little respect for either side!”
And of course, some progressives feel the campaign is wasting its time trying to reach GOP voters too enamored of MAGA to ever break with Trump. The presence of former Trump officials and GOP leaders onstage at last month’s Democratic convention, where no Palestinian Americans were allowed to speak, was galling to many.
Republicans hope Trump can exploit this grievance. One top GOP adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity because speaking to HuffPost would be “off brand,” suggested that Trump could bring up the Dick Cheney recommendation regularly because it would “drive every pro-Palestinian Democrat crazy.”
The consultant’s suggestion reflects how both Democrats and Republicans see Cheney’s endorsement as a reinforcement of their own aspirations for how the race will go from here. Rather than the democracy-versus-authoritarianism frame that Democrats favor, they see Cheney’s endorsement as evidence of a battle between corrupt insiders and outsiders. (Republicans find it easy to dismiss Trump’s own documented history of corruption.)
“The America Last Establishment in both political parties hates 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 proof that Kamala Harris is the ruling class uniparty’s candidate of choice.”
There are signs that Trump-friendly Republicans may be underestimating the Cheneys. In 2022, Liz Cheney’s PAC paid for ads endorsing Democratic candidates for governor and attorney general in Arizona. At the time, GOP candidate for governor Kari Lake dismissed Cheney for her “anti-endorsement.”
“My team says your ad should add another 10 points to our lead! I guess that’s why they call the Cheney anti-recommendation the gift that keeps on giving,” Lake wrote in a letter to Liz Cheney.
A week later, Lake lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by just 17,000 votes, in part because Hobbs received 9% of the Republican vote.
