LIZ CHENEY: SHE'S RUNNING (BUT NOT FOR PRESIDENT)

Liz Cheney has announced her next move:

Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is about to become a professor at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics....

Cheney's employment as a professor of practice at the prominent public university is set to begin immediately and will run through at least the 2023 fall semester....

Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner writes:

Driven from the House for being the GOP’s most vocal anti-Trump vice chairwoman, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has landed a new position at the University of Virginia where she can continue criticizing the former president and threats she sees to democracy.

Bedard adds:

She has been rumored as a 2024 GOP presidential candidate, though she has made few moves to jump in.

That's right. It seems clear that she's laying no groundwork for a presidential run. But a run for some other office? I think that's the plan.

Consider this curious clip from the daily version of Meet the Press. It was January, just before Virginia senator Tim Kaine announced that he'll be seeking reelection in 2024. Former senator Heidi Heitkamp reported some scuttlebutt:

HEITKAMP: Here is a rumor: Liz Cheney runs as an independent in Virginia.

If that happens, it wouldn't be the first time Cheney changed her self-proclaimed home state in pursuit of elective office. After spending most of her life in Virginia, she bought a house in Wyoming in 2012, then a year later announced that she was running for the U.S. Senate seat held by fellow Republican Mike Enzi, who fully intended to run for reelection. This infuriated local Republicans. It didn't help that Cheney announced her candidacy in a Facebook post geotagged to McLean, Virginia, where she'd been living, or that she came off as a phony Westerner. (In The New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote, "At campaign events ... she talked up her Wyoming roots and dressed in boots. But when I chatted with her at one stop, her jeans were so new that her hands were stained blue from touching them.") A poll conducted in the summer of 2013 found that only 31% of state residents considered her a Wyomingite, and 50% thought it would be more appropriate for her to run in Virginia. She quit the race in January 2014, and Enzi went on to win reelection with 72% of the vote.

If Cheney really is planning to run for the Virginia Senate seat as an independent, then she appears to want to muscle out another Republican -- Glenn Youngkin, who's term-limited as governor and who's seen as having the ability to make the race competitive. I don't know what would happen in a three-way race, but we might find out.