Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday urged women to “vote your conscience” for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election given strict abortion bans in some states — and even though it goes against how the men in their lives think they should vote.
Referring to Republicans like her who have publicly supported Harris, Cheney said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan“that” there are also a lot of Republicans and independents who say ‘look, you know, I don’t want to draw the wrath of… Donald Trump and JD Vance, so I’m going to vote my conscience, I’m not going to talk about it.'”
“You know, obviously we encourage you to vote by secret ballot,” Cheney continued. “You should do what you think is right. And I think you’re going to have, frankly, a lot of men and women who will go into the voting booth and vote their conscience and vote for Vice President Harris. They can I will never say anything publicly, but the results will speak for themselves.”
The comments echo what Michelle Obama told Harris rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Saturday evening. The former first lady told the crowd that “if you are a woman who lives in a household of men who don’t listen to you and don’t value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter. whatever your partner’s political views are, it’s up to you.”
Cheney’s comments come as CBS News poll released Sunday widened the gender gap among voters. Harris has a 10-point lead over former President Donald Trump, according to polls, and four in 10 women think Trump’s campaign is paying too much attention to men.
Cheney, a Harris campaign surrogate, said the campaign saw an “unprecedented coalition” of women who support abortion rights and those who oppose them came together to support Harris.
CBS News
“That’s because we’ve seen some of the draconian laws passed in places like Texas and North Carolina that prevent women from getting health care that could save their lives, that prevent women from getting medical care that, you know, will ensure that if they miscarry, that they can have babies again, which is basically a set of circumstances that cannot be maintained,” Cheney continued.
Cheney said she didn’t think the gathering of these groups was about “putting beliefs aside” but rather “looking at the reality on the ground, what has happened since Roe was overturned “.
“The idea that, you know, these kinds of policies and state laws are being put in place really mobilizes women to say, look, you know, you don’t have to give up your position pro-life, but this kind of circumstance, this kind of really heinous situation where women can’t get the medical care that they need, it just can’t continue,” Cheney said.
In September, Cheney called Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, “misogynistic pigs.” In a separate interview Sunday, Brennan asked Vance about that comment.
Instead of responding directly, Vance instead called Cheney “a person whose father is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Arabs and tens of thousands of innocent American soldiers, and said, in effect, that if you elect, I will have the foreign policy of Dick and Liz Cheney.
In response to those comments, Cheney said Vance is “doing everything he can to try to distract from the fact that the people who know Donald Trump best, including retired four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly, who is a gold star father, came out and said very clearly and very directly to the American people that Donald Trump is not in good shape, that Donald Trump himself, standing by the graves of our fallen soldiers fights, says things like they are idiots and losers. “
Cheney added that she was “confident” that the American people could “see through” this argument.
Cheney was the third-highest ranking Republican in the House before she was ousted following her vote to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Harris will attend a rally on Tuesday at the Ellipse – the same location where Trump told his supporters to go to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“This is the first presidential election after January 6, and so you know, you have, in fact, many of the same people who were promising a red wave in 2022 doing the same thing now, we’re not going to do that .” see it now,” Cheney said. “We didn’t see it then. And what Vice President Harris did, I saw her do. I was sitting next to her on stage while she did it. She talks about a whole range of issues. She talks about food prices, she talks about women’s health care, she talks about, you know, Donald Trump’s tariff policies, which are massively inflationary, and at the same time, she reminds everyone that we must have a president who obeys the rule of law.”
