Republican Liz Cheney endorses Kamala Harris for president

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Liz Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House, putting her among the most prominent Republicans to throw their weight behind the Democratic vice-president as she seeks to defeat Donald Trump in November.

With just two months to go until election day, Cheney, the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney who was until last year the Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, told an audience at Duke University on Wednesday night that she planned to cast her ballot for Harris.

Cheney said it was “crucially important” for voters to recognise the “danger” of re-electing Trump.

“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the constitution, I have thought deeply about this, 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,” she added.

Cheney, a staunch conservative and foreign policy hawk who was once considered among the leading Republican neoconservatives, was a member of Congress from 2017 to 2023. She rose quickly through the ranks to become chair of the House Republican conference, making her the third highest-ranking party member in the lower chamber of Congress.

But she famously fell out with her party over its response to Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and actions on January 6 2021, when mobs of the former president’s supporters stormed the US Capitol. Cheney supported Trump’s second impeachment and was later removed from House Republican leadership.

She eventually became the leading Republican on a Democrat-led House panel investigating the January 6 attack, and lost in a 2022 Republican primary to a Trump-backed challenger.

Cheney has for years been among the most prominent Republican critics of Trump. But she had held off on endorsing Harris, even as many other prominent anti-Trump Republicans spoke at the Democratic National Convention last month in Chicago. Those speakers included Adam Kinzinger, the former Illinois congressman who was the lone other Republican on the January 6 committee, and Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant-governor of Georgia.