WASHINGTON: Republican Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s fiercest critics, lent her support Tuesday to two Democrats battling for key swing seats in the final days of the US midterm elections.
During separate events in the midwest states of Ohio and Michigan, Cheney expressed support for Democratic candidates as a bulwark against her own party’s lurch toward Trump, whom she argues is a threat to democracy.
A daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney – and once seen as the tax-cutting, gun-loving, God-fearing, small-government apotheosis of American conservatism – Liz Cheney has been disowned by her party.
After refusing to accept Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election, she has played a leading role on the congressional committee investigating the former president’s role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
As a result of her advocacy against Trump, she was booted out of the leadership of the party and lost a primary contest in her home state of Wyoming earlier this summer.
With polls now showing Republicans holding strong momentum to take control of at least one chamber of Congress, Cheney is hitting the campaign trail on behalf of several Democratic figures, making it her mission to warn Americans of the dangers of a Trump comeback.
“While we can say, look, the (President Joe) Biden economic policies are not policies we would support, and we believe in limited government, low taxes and a strong national defense, we don’t even get to have those debates if we elect Donald Trump again,” Cheney said at an event Tuesday morning in Cleveland, Ohio.
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“And we don’t get to have that debate if we elect election deniers who embrace what the former president is doing and saying now, and what we know now that he was willing to do, and what we know that he did.”
In Ohio’s Senate race, Cheney said that she preferred Democratic candidate Tim Ryan over Republican J.D. Vance, who once fiercely opposed Trump but has since changed his tune.
Cheney later traveled to Michigan to attend a campaign event with candidate Elissa Slotkin, also a Democrat, whom she had officially endorsed a few days earlier.
“I don’t know that I have ever voted for a Democrat, but if I lived in Arizona, I absolutely would,” Cheney says in a campaign ad that began airing earlier this week in the battleground southwest state.
But the winds of political change are also blowing in the other direction.
Former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who represented her state as a Democrat, but recently declared herself an independent, has been campaigning for Republican nominees in several gubernatorial and Senate races.
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