Liz Cheney mulling third-party bid; will decide in next few months

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is mulling a third-party presidential bid, with plans to make a decision about whether or not to get in the 2024 White House race in the next few months.

“Several years ago, I would not have contemplated a third-party run,” Cheney told The Washington Post. But “democracy is at risk” both at home and abroad, she said, citing former President Trump’s “continued grip on the Republican Party.” 

“We face threats that could be existential to the United States, and we need a candidate who is going to be able to deal with and address and confront all of those challenges,” Cheney told the Post. “That will all be part of my calculation as we go into the early months of 2024.”

Cheney served as vice chair of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and has been a vocal critic of Trump — who’s the GOP presidential front-runner in this year’s race as he campaigns to get back to the Oval Office. 

Cheney lost her House seat to a Trump-backed challenger in 2022, and speculation has since swirled that she could get in the 2024 ring as an independent candidate.

The former Wyoming lawmaker has been staunch in her warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term. Earlier this week, she sounded alarms that a vote for Trump in 2024 “may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in” and argued the nation is close to “sleepwalking into dictatorship.”  

Cheney said in October that she wasn’t ruling out a White House bid. She also said in her recent interview with the Post that she hasn’t ruled out voting for President Biden, a Democrat, if he’s the 2024 nominee.

Cheney, whose father is former Vice President Dick Cheney, has been making the media rounds as she releases a book Tuesday titled “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” diving into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and cautioning the modern Republican Party.