Liz Cheney Praises Voters For Pulling Country Away From ‘The Edge,’ Warns ‘We Have a Long Battle Ahead’

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and Alicia Menendez discussed the role Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) may have played in helping Democrats to minimize the “red wave” during Tuesday’s midterm election results.

Wallace began the discussion by saying, “I want to show you what Liz Cheney had to say about the results and about the climate that, as far as you’re saying, endures.”

“I look at what happened on Tuesday night, and while it certainly is not the end of this battle, we have a long battle ahead. I do think it was the American people generally sending a message. They want to pull us back from the brink,” Cheney says in a clip from her addressing the Anti-Defamation League summit on Thursday.

“They don’t want this nation to go over the edge, to go into the abyss. And we have to make sure that that, you know, the incentives are there to elect the kind of people who who are going to make sure that they’re part of the solution,” Cheney concluded.

“I have never believed that Liz Cheney had an outsized impact on the elections,” Wallace said after the clip, adding:

But I do believe that when the backdrop was the public hearings of the January 6th committee, and we learned for the very first time Donald Trump’s role in orchestrating a coup against his own government and trying to kill Mike Pence.

You know, some of the most harrowing testimony was at the very end of the summer. You take that and you add that a conservative Republican, the last name Cheney, was saying the same thing as the Democratic candidates. I think her impact was more than nothing. What do you think about Cheney carrying the democracy message?

“I think it is an element of the story,” replied Menendez, adding:

One of things that I found interesting when I was standing in grocery stores, like holding people’s rotisserie chickens and talking with them about an election that’s really was it.

So they may not have used the language that we use at the New York Times or MSNBC. They may not talk about the Chips Act or the IRA. They may not talk about the January 6th hearings. They may not talk about even abortion in the context of bodily autonomy. They’re just sort of like, I don’t want the government in my business.

“What I heard from voters over and over again is this everything that kind of it’s too out there. They’re too out there. And that sort of sense of extremity is what I think voters were rejecting, even if they weren’t specifically talking about January 6th, even if they weren’t specifically talking about attacks on democracy, it was this sense of this person is beyond the pale. Because I think you can ask about, you know, the impact that Liz Cheney had,” Menendez continued, concluding:

You can also ask what is the impact of a candidate who, given the option not to lean in to election denialism, chooses to run and wins a primary that way? Right. If you look at these races in Arizona, Nevada, that’s how they get Donald Trump’s endorsement. And then they’re in a general carrying that water. What is interesting to me about these races, they really do believe it, right? It’s not even just about having gotten, because they had the opportunity to pivot off of it. And they didn’t. They stayed with it.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC