Republican former vice-president Dick Cheney says he will vote for Kamala Harris

WASHINGTON – Former vice-president Dick Cheney, one of the most influential and hawkish conservatives in the modern Republican Party and a figure reviled by the left, said on Sept 6 he would be voting for Vice-President Kamala Harris because he regards former president Donald Trump as a grave danger to the country.

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Mr Cheney, 83, said in a statement.

After Trump’s actions trying to steal the 2020 presidential election and then using “lies and violence” to keep himself in power, Mr Cheney said, “he can never be trusted with power again”.

The former vice-president added: “We have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”

Mr Cheney released his statement after one of his daughters, former representative Liz Cheney, the once high-ranking Republican from Wyoming who sacrificed her political career by breaking forcefully with Trump after the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, said this week that

she would be voting for Ms Harris

.

On Sept 6 during a panel discussion at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Ms Cheney revealed that her father, an unapologetic partisan, would be, too.

“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Ms Cheney said, a remarkable statement that the Cheneys themselves could not have foreseen making even four years ago.

Mr Cheney served as White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, secretary of defence under President George H.W. Bush and vice-president under President George W. Bush, when Mr Cheney was the architect of the US invasion of Iraq. He was viewed by Democrats as such a force of darkness that he earned the nickname Darth Vader.

His announcement on Sept 6 was only the latest reflection of how profoundly the Republican Party has shifted since Mr Cheney was in power.

Back then, his brand of conservatism – which prioritised hawkishness on foreign policy and an unapologetic allegiance to big business and the political establishment – defined the GOP. Trump’s rise has changed all that, pushing the party in a more isolationist and populist direction, making the establishment into a villain and unleashing a new coarseness that now dominates Republican politics.

But it was Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results and his role in instigating the Jan 6 riot that prompted the Cheneys to turn against him.

Mr Cheney has previously called Trump a “threat to our republic” and a “coward” in an advertisement he starred in for his daughter’s final Republican primary, in 2022, which she lost by 37 points to a Trump-backed challenger.

Ms Cheney on Sept 6 tried to frame the joint family decision to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee as something beyond party – one that had to do with country and “duty”. And she lambasted Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, as a pair of “misogynistic pigs”.

Ms Cheney explicitly rejected the idea of not voting at all, as some conservative Republicans have signalled they plan to do. Earlier this week, Mr Pat Toomey, the former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said he would not be supporting Trump in the autumn. But, he said, he could not vote for Ms Harris, either.

The show of support from both Cheneys is significant for the Harris campaign, which has been pouring tens of millions of dollars into a paid media campaign targeting anti-Trump Republicans. It potentially helps create a model for deeply conservative voters reluctant to back Trump to vote for a Democrat for the first time in their lives.

In her panel discussion with The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich, Ms Cheney said she would not be acting as an official surrogate of the Harris campaign and said she had not spoken with Ms Harris since her announcement of support this week.

Ms Cheney also refused to entertain the speculation that she could be

the Republican whom Ms Harris has promised to appoint to her Cabinet

if she is elected.

“I am not focused on that,” she said. NYTIMES