What’s Liz Cheney thinking about 2024?

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has said that her priority now will be “doing whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.” Here’s one way she could do that: become the Ralph Nader of the 2024 presidential election. She could run for president as an independent, split the Republican vote in key swing states and throw the election to the Democrat.

That’s what Nader did in 2000 when Florida cast the deciding vote in the presidential election. The official vote count in Florida showed Republican George W. Bush ahead of Democrat Al Gore by 537 votes. Nader, the Green Party candidate, got 97,488 votes in Florida. Asked to choose between Bush and Gore, about half of Nader voters in Florida said they wouldn’t vote for either major party candidate. Most of the rest said they would have voted for Gore — enough to give Gore Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency.

By voting for a third party or independent candidate who has no chance to win, you are actually taking away votes from your second-choice candidate and helping elect your least favorite contender (in 2000, that meant Nader voters electing Bush, which is exactly what they did).

Cheney, whose voting record is staunchly conservative, has become the leader of anti-Trump Republicans. She would presumably take more votes away from Trump than from the Democrat (likely President Joe Biden). She could do that by running only in a few large swing states like Florida and Wisconsin.

But she would have to give up any dream of actually winning the election by carrying enough states to get 270 electoral votes. Still, her avowed purpose, at least right now, is simply to keep Trump from winning.

Hers would be an unprecedented campaign: “Vote for me, even though I don’t have a real chance of winning, simply to make sure Trump doesn’t win.” That might work. Nearly 60 percent of voters say they don’t want Trump to run again.

The risk is that a Cheney-for-president campaign could take more votes from the Democrat than from Trump:  30 percent of Democrats say they don’t want Biden to run for re-election. The number one reason: his age (Biden will turn 82 in November 2024).

It is unlikely that Cheney could win either party’s nomination. Biden has disappointed a lot of progressives by failing to deliver on some of the things he promised in 2020 like immigration reform, child care, student loan debt and statutory protection for abortion rights. But that would not be likely to deliver many progressive votes to Cheney, who voted with President Trump more than 90 percent of the time during her congressional career.

An independent or third-party presidential campaign would cost a lot of money. It would be difficult just to get on the ballot in states where Republican officials would do everything possible to keep Cheney’s name off the ballot. Cheney raised a lot of money from Democrats in her Republican primary campaign this year, but there was no Democrat on the ballot to compete with her for contributions.

Independent candidates are highly dependent on polls.  Voters are usually reluctant to support a candidate who, according to the polls, has no real chance of winning. In the spring of 1992, independent Ross Perot was running ahead of both Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton. Perot dropped out of the race in July 1992, but then got back in — in time to participate in the presidential debates and getting 19 percent of the November vote, the highest vote for a third party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt, a former president, in 1912.

One big thing Cheney would have going for her: the weakness of popular support for the two most likely major party candidates. Right now, Trump is rated 55 to 41 percent unfavorable by the voters. President Biden’s job approval numbers? Exactly the same – 55 to 41 percent negative.

If we end up with a race between two unpopular contenders, anything could happen. That’s what Liz Cheney may be counting on.

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable” (Simon & Schuster).