Cheney 2024: All Mimsey were the Borogroves

Dave Wasserman seems like a generally acute observer of things electoral, but I don’t understand the second claim in this tweet at all:

This is comparing two things that seem radically incommensurable to me. It’s very true that the idea that Cheney could be competitive in a 2024 GOP primary is farcical. Indeed the idea that there are even going to be GOP primaries in 2024 if or rather when Trump runs is also farcical, although quite a few LGM commenters continue to harbor this to me deeply weird belief that DeSantis is both going to fight Trump for the nomination and win it.

But an independent run for the presidency? How is this not a good idea? Liz Cheney said last night that she would do anything — I assume she means anything legal – to stop Trump from becoming president again. It seems to me that the most obvious thing she could do is to run a third-party campaign for president.

Now not many people would vote for her, it’s true. But the American presidential election system is now so perverse that it’s both perfectly possible that Biden might get ten million more votes than Trump in 2024 and still need to squeak out razor-thin victories in a handful of states in order to win the idiotic Electoral College, since that’s exactly what happened in 2020, except it was “only” seven million votes (Seriously, I’ve mentioned this before, but I remember when I was a kid in the very distant past aka the 1970s it was an absolute truism that somebody getting elected via the Electoral College while losing the popular vote would be a Crisis of Legitimacy. Now we’re at a point that a presidential candidate losing the vote by millions and millions of ballots and winning the presidency is just one of those things that you have to accept because it’s In the Constitution. How did this happen? I suspect it wouldn’t have happened if one of Those People had won that way if you know what I mean and I think you do).

Liz Cheney could easily strip away a percentage point or two of votes in each of various swing states that would otherwise almost all go to Trump. Yes I realize that makes no sense on any rational level but have you been out lately? And I realize that Tom Friedman is going to vote for Cheney and write several columns about it but that’s a price we’re just going to have to be willing to pay.

It’s so simple it’s brilliant, and I can’t believe nobody is talking about this (yet). She just needs a mavericky campaign manager, who is willing to sacrifice a year of his life for nothing more than a couple of million dollars in salary . . . Can such a person be found? Omigod it’s going to be David Brooks isn’t it? I mean we’re clearly reaching the A Very Special Episode stage of the program now.

But I’m not kidding. Run Liz run.