Liz’s Long Game
Liz Cheney will lose her house seat in 2022. No doubt about it.
Trump took 70% of Wyoming’s overall vote total, with 8/23 counties going 80%+ Trump. Wyoming is as “Trump Country” as it gets and Liz’s staunch opposition to the country’s MAGA scourge is not going to play well next election cycle.
She knows it, and is willing to be a martyr given her highly publicized demotion within the caucus. At this point it’s trite, but it bears repeating: she is one of (if not the) most conservative member of congress voting with Trump ~93% of the time. Unfortunately, MAGA mania does not care about policy and as punishment for defending due process of the Capitol Attack on January 6th, she’ll be forced into an early retirement come 2022.
Biden’s ability to win re-election remains a toss-up. On the one hand, he tempered COVID (for the time being), is slated to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill and looks to be getting a number of meaningful programs across the line that will directly impact lower and middle class Americans. A byproduct of which will be very beneficial to many of the “disenfranchised” folks currently swept up in the in the MAGA revolution.
On the other hand, he’s not dealt well with Afghanistan and the border. Even if those issues have been blown out of proportion by right-wing media, the optics look really, really bad. His image as the establishment antidote to his chaos predecessor is being questioned, if not unraveling.
Nonetheless, 2024 (like all elections) will live and die by the health of the economy. Democrats will most likely lose both the House and Senate in 2022, making it virtually impossible for Biden to pass anything meaningful in his final two years, and he knows it. Infrastructure and budget reconciliation is a bet on long-term economic tailwinds that will have a major effect on “good” employment for the lower and middle-class. If former auto, steel and agriculture workers in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and even Ohio are able to attain high-paying, steady jobs building bridges, roads and broadband across the US, those states could firm up or flip blue in 2024. Put another way, the voting bloc responsible for shocking the 2016 election, will have great jobs supplied by a Democratic government, and will vote in-kind.
That is the bull case for the Democrats but here is the most likely scenario; the middle-class benefit to the infrastructure and reconciliation bills will not happen quick enough to sway key voting blocs away from the MAGA mania. Not good for Biden, and not good for the goal of stamping out the Trump plague.
Cheney, however, will be the dark horse of the 2024 election. No, she certainly won’t win, but there will be enough desire in the Republican party to get back to normal that she will split the vote between her and Trump, effectively giving re-election to Biden by default. Over and over again, she has said her one, single objective is to keep Trump from never ever entering the White House again. And by proving herself as a politician that votes on principle, unafraid to put country above party (and self), and upholding the constitution, she will reestablish herself as the force behind bringing the Republican party’s return to traditional conservative values. Between her 2024 loss and 2028, she will continue to build momentum while the infrastructure bill’s tailwinds finally extinguish the MAGA flames.
Her and her coalition built around low taxes, bearing arms and free enterprise will coast to victory as most of the country will grow sick of the identity-politics of the Democratic party, with everyone being cancelled in some form or fashion by that point. Ironically, she will be the first woman president too.
This is all dependent on a major third-party candidate sitting on the sidelines for the 2024 election cycle. The country is clamoring for a legitimate, non-political, independent candidate: read Mark Cuban 2024.
