this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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U.S. Representative Liz Cheney, an outspoken critic of ex-President Donald Trump, said she is weighing a third-party bid for the White House in 2024.

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[–] hydrospanner 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You're making a lot of opinion statements with nothing at all in the way of reasoning to back it up.

Not saying there isn't reasoning, but in the absence of any of it being shared, it's impossible to even engage such a comment in discourse.

I don't see Cheney pulling many votes from Biden

Okay.

I do.

Difference: I explained why.

Please explain how Cheney's presence won't sway at least some moderate centrist voters who don't like either trump or Biden. I disagree with you, but I'm nonetheless interested to hear why you hold your opinions.

I think there's a lot of Republicans who dislike the Christofascist direction Trump has taken the party in yet are still unwilling to vote Democrat,

I agree with you here.

However, my takeaway from this is: these voters were never going to be Biden voters anyway, so that means they're either going to be non-voters in 2024 based on ideology, or they're going to be Trump voters based on overall party loyalty (that is: "I don't like Trump, but we're still better off with a Republican in the white house...even if it's trump, versus 4 more years of a Democrat"...the inverse of a lot of Biden voters, ironically).

If they were going to be a non-voter, they now become a Cheney voter. Okay great, but it changes literally nothing.

If they were voting for Trump for the party in spite of the man, then Cheney running doesn't change their rationale, and a trump vote, no matter how distasteful, is still the only logical anti-Democrat vote.

Either way, Cheney running isn't meaningfully fracturing the GOP base.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You might be right, I found this article that seems to be supporting your position, that she would help more than hinder Trump, but it relies on extrapolation from a 5-way race with different spoiler candidates. I haven't seen any 2024 polling specifically regarding likely Cheney voters.

[–] hydrospanner 2 points 11 months ago

And you're not likely to find that kind of polling since polling itself is time and labor intensive, and these pollsters have a finite amount of resources, so they're not going to devote much of them to these outlier scenarios, especially this early.

If Cheney is still in the discussion in 6 months, you'll get that polling.

And as much as that source may support my thinking, it's also very much worth noting nymag's left bias.

I'm arguing against myself here, but in the interests of being circumspect on the topic, right now it seems like the Democratic tactic is accepting they have an unpopular candidate and weakly united coalition of voters, with the one big commonality among them being that everybody desperately wants someone in the white house not named Donald Trump.

On one hand, this makes their job easy over in Campaign Strategy. Just confirm that Joe Biden is not, in fact, Donald Trump...and then remind everybody of that.

On the other, it means that the only real effective way to sort of "herd the flock" and keep the coalition together is to avoid doing or saying anything that might offend anyone under the tent...and constantly, constantly fear monger the shit out of them with theories and polls and op-eds and anything else they can come up with to A) make sure they don't forget how awful Trump is, B) remind them that while they may not like Biden, last they checked, he wasn't Donald Trump, and C) stress how much this election is not in the bag and that just like 2020 they need every single goddamned one of us to get to the polls and vote for Joe Biden, or were going to see another Trump presidency.