Liz Cheney endorses Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin over GOP hopeful Tom Barrett in Michigan as part of her crusade to derail 2020 election deniers
- Republican Rep. Liz Cheney has endorsed Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin for reelection.
- Cheney has crossed party lines because Slotkin challenger Tom Barrett is a 2020 election denier.
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney has crossed party lines to endorse Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan's reelection bid over Republican challenger Tom Barrett, an historic snub that underscores Cheney's self-styled campaign to thwart any and all 2020 election deniers.
Cheney's inaugural leap across the aisle the cycle, first reported by the Associated Press, shifts her focus from calling out Trump-backed candidates and MAGA supporters who embraced the embattled former president's baseless claims of election fraud and contributed to the deadly January 6, 2021 siege at the US Capitol to hitting the trail to stop them.
"While Elissa and I have our policy disagreements, at a time when our nation is facing threats at home and abroad, we need serious, responsible, substantive members like Elissa in Congress," Cheney said in a statement released by the Slotkin campaign.
The release also says the Cheney-Slotkin alliance is an outgrowth of the collegiality they've fostered while serving together on the House Armed Services Committee, and that they'll be campaigning together on November 1 near Lansing, Michigan. A source close to Cheney added that her opposition to Barrett flows from his alleged refusal to acknowledge the 2020 election results and his support of Trump's efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's lawful win.
Slotkin, a two-term lawmaker, is facing off against Barrett, a Michigan state senator, this November.
Barrett brushed off the endorsement as grandstanding by "establishment war hawks" with a "senseless thirst for more foreign entanglements."
"Rep. Slotkin has already said she would commit US soldiers to combat with China so it's no surprise the Cheney family would join her," Barrett wrote in an email to Insider, adding, "Slotkin can keep Cheney while I work to keep America out of war."
Cheney, who co-chairs the January 6 select committee and has been ostracized by her party for supporting former President Donald Trump's second impeachment, has been distancing herself from MAGA Republicans every chance she gets.
In August, she called the GOP "very sick" and laundry-listed some of the well-informed Democratic women she'd rather serve with, including Slotkin, than the political bomb-throwers in her own party.
"I would much rather serve with Mikie Sherrill and Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, even though on substance certainly I have big disagreements with the Democratic women I just mentioned," Cheney reportedly said, throwing shade at GOP culture warriors Rep. Greene of Georgia and Rep. Boebert of Colorado.
The distinction between the two groups, Cheney said, is that Democratic Reps. Slotkin, Sherrill of New Jersey and Houlahan of Pennsylvania "love this country," "do their homework," and "are trying to do the right thing" for America, rather than glorifying themselves.
Cheney has subsequently stated that she will not vote for Harriet Hagemen, the Trump-supported candidate who primaried her and is now on the ballot this November, and mapped out plans to campaign against Republican gubernatorial hopefuls Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
"I think we have to do everything we can in '22 to make sure those people don't get elected," Cheney said at the Texas Tribune Festival in late September.
Barrett, who reportedly told the Detroit Free Press he couldn't say who lawfully won the 2020 presidential election because "it's an unknowable thing," seems to fall into that same camp.