Republican Liz Cheney says she will vote for Kamala Harris this election

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Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming, broke with the Republican Party on Wednesday to say she plans to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November.

“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this,” Cheney said at an event hosted by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy in North Carolina. “And because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

With her promise of support for Harris, the former congresswoman becomes the latest on a growing list of Republicans who have come out against voting for Trump this fall. Democrats have embraced the GOP defectors, putting several Republican speakers on the Democratic National Convention stage last month – including former lawmaker Adam Kinzinger, who along with Cheney served on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Representatives for the Trump and Harris campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Once the No. 3 Republican in the House, Cheney voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, saying at the time that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Republicans subsequently ousted her from her role as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference in May 2021 because she continued to challenge Trump over his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, was appointed in 2021 to the House select committee, where she served as vice chair. In May 2021, Cheney told ABC News that she regretted voting for Trump in 2020, acknowledging in the interview that “at this moment, the majority of the Republican Party is not where I am.”

She was defeated in a primary by a Trump-endorsed Republican challenger the following year, losing her reelection bid by a wide margin.

Trump has been critical of Cheney for years, with tensions forming after she criticized some of his actions as president. In his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, on the National Mall in Washington, before he urged his supporters to march to the Capitol, Trump said of Cheney, “We got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world.”

In March, he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, that Cheney and the other members of the select committee should go to jail. And in July, he shared another user’s post asserting that Cheney was guilty of treason. “RETRUTH IF YOU WANT TELEVISED MILITARY TRIBUNALS,” the post read.

Cheney, who weighed a third-party presidential run earlier this election cycle, emphasized on Wednesday in the battleground state of North Carolina that she does not believe voters have the “luxury” of supporting write-in candidates to protest Trump.

“Because we are here in North Carolina, I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I’ve just said about the danger that Trump poses, something that should prevent people from voting for him,” she said. “But I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states.”