How Dick Cheney’s Groundbreaking Endorsement of Kamala Harris Could Actually Matter

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