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The Wyoming Republican, once a member of House leadership, lost her post and then her seat after she voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Former Representative Liz Cheney, the once high-ranking Republican from Wyoming who torpedoed her political career by breaking forcefully with former President Donald J. Trump, said on Wednesday she would be voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
During an event at Duke University, Ms. Cheney told students that it was not enough for her to simply oppose the former president, if she intended to do whatever was necessary to prevent Mr. Trump from winning the White House again, as she has long said she would.
“I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Ms. Cheney said, speaking to students in the hotly contested state of North Carolina. “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.”
The room erupted in cheers after she made her unexpected announcement.
The decision by Ms. Cheney, whose endorsement Ms. Harris’s campaign had been courting for weeks, to shift from condemning Mr. Trump to backing the Democratic presidential nominee was a striking one even from a leader who has established herself as one of the most vocally anti-Trump Republicans in the country.
In an interview with Fox News in August of 2020, after President Biden selected Ms. Harris as his running mate, Ms. Cheney described his pick as someone “whose voting record in the Senate is to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.” She added: “It’s very clear, she is a radical liberal.”
Ms. Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is a member of a private and deeply conservative political family. She is pro-gun and anti-abortion and favors a stronger national defense.
Ms. Harris’s top aides had said they were not certain whether Ms. Cheney, who shares few policy positions with the vice president, would go a step further and make an outright endorsement of the vice president, or simply spend the time between now and Election Day laying out the case against Mr. Trump.
That is the route that some other prominent Republicans have chosen. On Tuesday, Pat Toomey, the ultraconservative former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said he would not be supporting Mr. Trump in the fall, but he said he could not vote for Ms. Harris, either.
“When you lose an election and you try to overturn the results so that you can stay in power, you lose me — you lose me at that point,” Mr. Toomey told CNBC. “It is an acceptable position for me to say that neither of these candidates can be my choice for president.”
Conservative voices like Mr. Toomey’s could encourage some Republican voters to simply write in a candidate or refrain from voting rather than feeling obligated to vote for their party’s nominee, hurting Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
But Ms. Cheney explicitly rejected Mr. Toomey’s approach, potentially creating a model for deeply conservative voters reluctant to back Mr. Trump to pull the lever for a Democrat for the first time in their lives.
It was her latest break with the Republican Party after losing her leadership position and then her seat for condemning Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and voting to impeach him for inciting insurrection. She spent her final months in Congress serving on the special House committee that investigated the assault, and has continued to speak out forcefully against Mr. Trump and make the case publicly that he is a threat to the republic.
Her endorsement was an important show of support for Ms. Harris, who has been pouring tens of millions of dollars into a paid media campaign targeting anti-Trump Republicans. Her campaign has hired a full-time national Republican engagement director and featured Republicans onstage at the nominating convention last month.
But Ms. Cheney had remained silent until now. She chose not to speak at the Democratic National Convention, making the decision to wait for a stand-alone moment in September, closer to when early voting was set to begin.
It was a strategic choice to ensure her voice would not be lost in a sea of convention speeches, according to people familiar with her thinking.
In a series of upcoming appearances in key states, Ms. Cheney plans to make plain the practical implications of a second Trump term, talking with specificity about his abuse of the intelligence community and his attempt to corrupt the Justice Department.
The former Wyoming congresswoman plans to talk about Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign against his vice president to throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Students in the audience on Wednesday night were excited to be in the room where her announcement happened.
“I was conservative when I was younger,” said Ari Miller, who serves as the co-president of Duke Democrats. “I celebrated Trump’s win in 2016 in sixth grade. My first presidential ballot this November will be cast for Harris.”
She said Ms. Cheney’s surprise announcement hit home for her. “I commend Liz Cheney for saying what many Republican leaders won’t. I hope Kamala Harris will consider her for a cabinet position when she is elected in November.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership. More about Annie Karni
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