She threw away her career in an act of noble self-sacrifice that descended into monomania and bad political judgment.
She threw away her career in an act of noble self-sacrifice that descended into monomania and bad political judgment.
L iz Cheney’s political career came to a dramatic and self-inflicted end last night with her loss to Republican primary challenger Harriet Hageman by a whopping 37-point margin. At this writing, Cheney got just 29 percent of the vote as a three-term incumbent who won her last primary, in 2020, with 73 percent. It was a steep fall for the former chair of the House Republican Conference. It was due to the choices she made. Was the sacrifice worth it?
There is a legitimate and respectable case to be made both for and against Cheney’s choices.
First, the pro-Cheney case starts with the fact that she lost her job entirely for telling the truth. Sure, there are other critiques of Cheney, but she won a nine-way primary race by 18 points in 2016 and has romped over primary and general-election challengers ever since. She voted with Donald Trump during his presidency more often than Elise Stefanik did, and voted against impeaching him over Ukraine. The main reasons why her support collapsed so dramatically were (1) that she voted to impeach Trump, (2) that she served on the January 6 committee, and (3) how she handled those controversies.
Along the way, she has told many truths that Trump supporters did not want to hear, and that even many Trump-skeptical Republicans did not want to speak. It is true that Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, and that his defeat was not caused by fraud or misconduct by his opponents. It is true that Trump’s course of conduct from Election Day 2020 through January 6 amply justified his removal from office and warranted the political and moral judgment that he should never hold public office again. It is true that Trump’s efforts to overturn the popular vote in multiple states was an assault on American democracy, that Trump tried improperly and without legal justification to pressure Mike Pence and others to violate their oaths of office and their consciences, that January 6 was an unprecedented effort to use mob violence to intimidate the United States Congress, and that the ultimate responsibility for bringing about the events of January 6 belongs squarely at the feet of Donald Trump. It is additionally true that Trump behaved shamefully on that day as the events were unfolding. It is true that all of this ought to be recorded for posterity. Cheney’s relentless telling of these truths, and where and how she has chosen to tell them, is why she will be out of a job in January.
Second, Liz Cheney didn’t have to do this. For some blue-state and blue-district Republicans — such as Adam Kinzinger — a sharply adversarial posture toward Trump was popular enough in their states or districts that it was helpful or even necessary for their reelection in November. A politician who angers his primary-voting base in order to save his skin with general-election voters, or vice versa, is making a fundamentally political calculation even if the choice he makes is also a principled and honorable one. But this was all downside for Cheney. She didn’t have to do this. Wyoming voters weren’t clamoring for it, and as we saw last night, they didn’t like it. Her choices cost her a career that was otherwise in no danger.
Nor was this the act of some obscure backbencher looking to make a name in order to land a cable-TV gig. Before January 2021, Liz Cheney was a member of House leadership, with the prospect of moving up — maybe not to the speakership, but at least with options for higher offices still. At 56, she is still young enough to have had a long tenure in the House ahead of her. She would clearly prefer to exercise political power than be a pundit, and there is no reason to think that she is in need of cashing in financially — if she were, she could just have retired to go work as a defense-contractor lobbyist or something. She was where she wanted to be, and she sacrificed all of that for what she felt to be a worthy cause. That, by itself, is a noble thing and one that demands our admiration even if we question her political judgments.
Third, even in the House — where the case is strongest for members to act truly as representatives of their voters — there is a point at which we expect some degree of statesmanship, in which the members exercise their best judgment and follow their conscience, and then submit themselves to the verdict of the voters. We expect members of the House to sometimes be willing to sacrifice their careers. We rightly scorn those members who always put career above all other things.
That’s the pro-Cheney case. But there is also a case against Cheney.
First, of course, representatives are supposed to represent their constituents. Cheney plainly failed at doing so, as the lopsided result shows. She was rejected by the same voters who had previously supported her, dropping off from over 78,000 votes in the 2020 primary to just 49,000 last night. It is all too easy to dismiss those voters as “stop the steal” radicals. To understand how she alienated them, it is useful to consider how she went about her business the past year and a half.
Second, Cheney’s participation in the January 6 committee was widely seen as giving her blessing to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in all the various ways that the committee has excluded the right of Republican leaders to select committee members and generally proceeded by press leaks and one-sided presentation of testimony, some of which has not held up well under scrutiny. Cheney’s increasing identification with the committee and its methods, and her seeming unwillingness to publicly break with its Democrats and their naked partisan agenda, inevitably made it harder for her to continue marketing herself politically as a Republican. That was a choice, too, and not a necessary one.
That leads us to the third and fundamental problem: monomania. Cheney allowed her public profile to become one in which she was seen and heard doing nothing else besides attacking Donald Trump. That was not the case when she first joined the January 6 committee, but her focus on the committee’s activities overwhelmed her interest in talking about any other subject, with the exception of the Ukraine war — hardly a major priority by now for Republican-base voters. Telling truths is important, but we rightly regard people who only ever tell the same one truth all the time as fanatics who have lost perspective. Jim Crow, Soviet communism, Japanese-American internment and wartime inflation were all important issues in 1942, but voters at the time would rightly have been skeptical of a congressman who only ever wanted to talk about one of those. We may not be in a global war today, but there is a lot going on that concerns the voters Cheney represents, and they concluded that she had lost interest in the rest of her job.
Worse, it became a self-defeating cycle. As it became clearer that Cheney could not win her primary with the support of the same Republican voters who put her in office, she worked harder to court the state’s Democrats, increasingly signaling her distance from Republican voters on the social-issue concerns that animate much of the party these days, leading people to forget her voting record and doubt whether she would remain as solidly conservative in the future. Maybe Cheney was doomed from the outset — four of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump retired, and four of the other six lost their primaries — but had she committed herself to a vigorous and vocal defense of conservative social values and economic policies and showed voters that she was as worried about Joe Biden as about Donald Trump, the result surely would not have been as lopsided.
Cheney’s poor political judgment was emblematized by a recent interview in which she expressed unwillingness to support Ron DeSantis if he ran for president in 2024. A DeSantis 2024 campaign is, as even David Frum has acknowledged, something of an acid test of the sincerity of people who argue that Trump is a figure of uniquely bad character, uniquely bad for our democratic system. Even acknowledging the legitimate reasons why DeSantis may not be the first choice of a lot of Republicans and conservatives, there is no reason why someone with a 90-plus percent pro-Trump voting record in the House should be ruling out supporting him, unless they are either checked out of the Republican Party or decided on a presidential run of their own that demands an unrealistic level of anti-Trump purity. In more practical terms, if Trump is to be defeated in a primary in 2024, it will require those who wish his defeat to unite behind the most plausible alternative, rather than splinter into a constellation of vanity campaigns that, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, “fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Cheney last night compared herself to Abraham Lincoln, noting that Lincoln lost races for the House and Senate before becoming president. She might have considered Lincoln’s example more thoroughly. Lincoln in 1844 lost the Whig nomination for a House seat to Edward Baker; after that defeat, Lincoln and Baker became close personal friends and political allies, and Baker deferred to Lincoln when Lincoln ran for, and won, the same House seat in 1846. In 1854, Lincoln surrendered a seat in the Illinois House to run for the Senate, which at the time was voted on by the state senate. Lincoln led in the early balloting, but it became clear that there were Democratic senators who would not vote for Lincoln, but would vote for a Democrat who opposed the pro-slavery Kansas-Nebraska bill. Rather than put his own ambitions first, Lincoln stepped aside for the good of the cause, allowing “anti-Nebraska” Democrat Lyman Trumbull to claim the seat. As bitter a pill as this was for Lincoln, it won him goodwill within the new Republican Party that ensured his nomination in 1858, and Trumbull went on to join the Republicans and become a key supporter not only of Lincoln’s 1860 presidential nomination but also of his agenda as a co-author of the 13th Amendment.
Lincoln never lost sight of the fact that political parties exist to advance causes, and that politics must be played as a team sport in order to accomplish those causes. That means meeting your voters and the members of your coalition where they are. If he were alive today, he would surely admire Liz Cheney’s courage, integrity, and sacrifice in telling the truth about Donald Trump, just as Lincoln himself told unpopular truths about the origins of the Mexican War during his single term in the House. But he would probably also question the wisdom of cutting herself off so far from a political team that she will no longer be in a position to advance any cause she believes in.