How Progressives Learned to Love Dick Cheney

For more than two decades, the most popular nickname liberals had for Dick Cheney was “Darth Vader.” And even that was practically a term of endearment compared with the runner-up: “war criminal.” So when Kamala Harris touted Cheney’s endorsement of her campaign during Tuesday’s debate, not all progressives were nodding in approval.

“I cringed,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of the left-wing group Our Revolution, told me. “At the end of the day, I’m not sure progressives want Democrats to be that big-tent.”

The 83-year-old former vice president and his daughter Liz Cheney, the former representative from Wyoming, are now the most prominent of more than 200 former GOP officials to back the Democratic nominee. (Another Bush-era bogeyman of Democrats, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, joined them on Thursday.) In his statement last week saying he would vote for Harris, Dick Cheney described her opponent in even graver terms than he once used against Democrats. Donald Trump, the elder Cheney said, “can never be trusted with power again.”

On one level, this clearly helps Harris. During the debate, she was able to use the Cheney endorsements as part of a broader effort to rebut Republican attacks that she’s too far left for moderate voters. (Her pledges to support fracking and boost small businesses came in the same vein.) But backing from the GOP could make another one of her campaign objectives harder to pull off.

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Despite being the incumbent vice president, Harris has tried to establish herself as the change candidate, repeatedly urging voters during the debate to “turn the page” on the Trump era. Yet she has embraced many of the same establishment figures—including Democrats such as the Clintons, and Republicans such as the Cheneys—that Trump has long used as foils to make himself look like the agent of change.

For Harris, the trade-off was apparent in a New York Times/Siena poll taken after last month’s Democratic National Convention. In the survey, more than 60 percent of likely voters said they wanted a candidate that represented a major change; most said that Trump represented that change, but just 25 percent said the same of Harris. “He positions himself as not part of the establishment that has controlled politics for most of my life,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, a 28-year-old spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, a progressive group focused on climate change. “The more that Harris associates herself with people in that political establishment, the easier Trump’s job is.”

Trump backers have tried to use the Cheney endorsement to appeal to disaffected Democrats. “Dick Cheney has just made the choice very clear: A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney, the architect of everything that has gone wrong in the Middle East for the last few decades,” Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii who is now supporting Trump, said last week during an event with Tucker Carlson. Another dark lord of Republican politics, Roger Stone, asked on X: “I guess Kamala is pursuing the warmonger vote?”

On the left, however, the Cheneys’ endorsement of Harris won the approval of no less an anti-war progressive than Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who applauded the father-daughter duo on Meet the Press for “their courage in defending democracy.” But for Geevarghese, whose organization grew out of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, Harris’s name-dropping of the Cheneys represented a rare discordant note in an otherwise encouraging debate.

[Read: The world Dick Cheney built]

On Thursday morning, in an effort to sound an alarm among Democrats who were mostly jubilant about Harris’s performance, Our Revolution released the results of a survey it had conducted with more than 10,000 of its members after the debate. The survey found that although a large majority of respondents believed that Harris had won the night, sizable minorities said they did not fully trust her or believe she would sufficiently take on corporate power as president.

Among the progressives I spoke with, Geevarghese was an outlier in questioning her Cheney shoutout. Most were fine with Harris promoting the endorsement, even if they were taken aback by a Democrat linking arms with a man they’ve long reviled for his role in orchestrating the Iraq War and defending the use of torture against suspected terrorists. “I mean, it’s weird,” Markos Moulitsas, the Daily Kos founder, who was one of Cheney’s loudest critics in the early 2000s, told me. “I didn’t put on my bingo card of life that I would be on the same side as Dick Cheney.”

Svante Myrick, the president of the progressive group People for the American Way and a former mayor of Ithaca, New York, seemed okay with it too, even though he considers Cheney and former President George W. Bush “war criminals and war profiteers and genuinely the worst people to lead our country not named Donald Trump.” But for Myrick, Harris’s acceptance of Cheney’s endorsement would be a problem only if she had given up something in return. “Kamala Harris hasn’t changed any of her views to appeal to Dick Cheney,” Myrick told me. “The support seems to have come about honestly. They disagree on taxes and foreign affairs and the military-industrial complex and almost everything except the fact that we should have elections in this country and the winner should hold office.”

To Cheney’s fiercest opponents still in Congress, his alliance with Harris is not a liability for the vice president but a testament to Trump’s unfitness. Representative Barbara Lee of California is a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who co-sponsored resolutions to impeach both Bush and Cheney. “I thought they were terrible for the country,” Lee told me. But she had no problem with Harris accepting Cheney’s endorsement. “It shows,” she said, “just how horrible it would be and how destructive it would be to put this man back into the White House.”

O’Hanlon, the Sunrise spokesperson, was not as effusive in praising Harris’s debate performance as other progressives I interviewed. But her criticism centered on Harris’s support for fracking, not her mention of Cheney. “It’s a generational thing,” she told me. “Young voters don’t have a strong opinion of Cheney, or even care who he is.”

Progressives from an older generation, like Moulitsas, seemed comfortable with Harris recruiting Republicans to help her win. “I don't think that is controversial at all on the left,” Moulitsas said. He was also okay with Harris’s pledge to name a Republican to her Cabinet. That leeway did have limits, however. Liz Cheney as defense secretary? “Yeah,” he replied, “that would be problematic for me.”