Former Rep. Liz Cheney urges women to “vote your conscience,” even if it’s a “secret vote”

Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday urged women to “vote your conscience” for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election given the strict abortion bans in some states — and even if it is against how the men in their lives think they should vote. 

Referencing the Republicans like herself who have publicly backed Harris, Cheney said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that “there are also many Republicans and independents who are saying ‘look, you know, I don’t want to bring the wrath of … Donald Trump and JD Vance down on me, so I’m going to vote my conscience, I’m not going to talk about it.'”

“We, you know, obviously, encourage that you vote as a secret vote,” Cheney continued. “You should do what you think is right. And I think you’re going to have, frankly, a lot of men and women who will go into the voting booth and will vote their conscience and will vote for Vice President Harris. They may not ever say anything publicly but the results will speak for themselves.”

The comments echo what Michelle Obama said during a Harris rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Saturday night. The former first lady told the crowd that “if you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter. Regardless of the political views of your partner, you get to choose.”

Cheney’s comments come as a CBS News poll released Sunday dug into the gender gap among voters. According to the polls, Harris has a 10-point lead over former President Donald Trump, and four in 10 women think Trump’s campaign is paying too much attention to men.

Cheney, a Harris campaign surrogate, said the campaign has seen an “unprecedented coalition” of women who support abortion rights and those who oppose them coming together to support Harris. 

“That’s because we’ve seen some of the just the draconian laws that have been passed in places like Texas and North Carolina that are preventing women from getting lifesaving health care, preventing women from getting medical care that you know will ensure that, if they have a miscarriage, that they can have babies again, just fundamentally a set of circumstances that can’t be maintained,” Cheney continued. 

Cheney said she didn’t think these groups coming together is about “putting convictions aside” but rather “it’s about looking at the reality on the ground of what’s happened since Roe was overturned.”

“The idea that that, you know, you’ve got those kinds of policies and state laws being put in place is really mobilizing women to say, look, you know, you don’t have to abandon being pro-life, but this kind of circumstance, this kind of really abhorrent situation where women can’t get medical care they need, that just can’t go on,” Cheney said.

In September, Cheney called Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance “misogynistic pigs.” In a separate interview on Sunday, Brennan asked Vance about that comment.

Instead of directly answering, Vance instead called Cheney “the person whose father is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Arabs and tens of thousands of innocent American troops, and saying, effectively, that if you elect me, I’m going to have the foreign policy of Dick and Liz Cheney.”

In response to those comments, Cheney said that Vance is “doing everything they can to try to distract from the fact that the people who know Donald Trump best, including retired four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly, who is a gold star father, have come out and said very clearly and very directly to the American people that Donald Trump is not fit, that Donald Trump himself, standing near the graves of our fallen service members, says things like they are suckers and losers.”

Cheney added that she is “confident” the American people can “see through” that argument.

Cheney was the third-highest ranking Republican in the House before being ousted over her vote to impeach Trump over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Harris will be at a rally on Tuesday at the Ellipse — the same place where Trump told his supporters to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

“This is the first presidential election post-January 6, and so you know, you’ve got, in fact, many of the same people who were promising a red wave in 2022 doing the same thing now, we’re not going to see it now,” Cheney said. “We didn’t see it then. And what Vice President Harris has done, I’ve watched her do it. I’ve sat next to her on the stage as she does it. She talks about a whole range of issues. She talks about grocery prices, she talks about women’s health care, she talks about, you know, Donald Trump’s tariff policies, which are massively inflationary, and at the same time, reminds everybody, you have to have a president who obeys the rule of law.”