Liz Cheney to campaign with Harris at the birthplace of the GOP
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign alongside Liz Cheney, the most prominent Republican to cross party lines and endorse her, on Thursday in Wisconsin at a symbolic location: the birthplace of the Republican Party.
Harris and Cheney plan to appear together in a joint appeal to the sort of Republican voters who may retain conservative positions but are repelled by former President Donald Trump and his politics. Their event will take place in Ripon, Wisconsin, the site of a series of meetings that helped lead to the foundation of the GOP in 1854.
The two women agree on little politically beyond their distaste for Trump. They had next to no relationship when they overlapped in Congress, though they did speak on the phone about Cheney’s endorsement this summer.
The endorsement by Cheney — and that of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — is meant to show the breadth of Harris’ support, a point that her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, made in his debate against Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, on Tuesday night.
“I’m as surprised as anybody of this coalition that Kamala Harris has built, from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift and a whole bunch of folks in between,” said Walz, name-checking the left-wing senator from Vermont and the world’s biggest pop music star. “And they don’t all agree on everything, but they are truly optimistic people.”
Cheney is a Wisconsin native who grew up in Virginia and represented Wyoming in Congress for six years. After Trump tried to overthrow the 2020 election results, she disowned him and participated in the House select committee investigating the Trump-inspired assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She so alienated fellow Wyoming Republicans that she was run out of office by a primary challenger loyal to Trump.
“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,” Cheney told an audience at Duke University in North Carolina last month.
Her appearance for Harris will be especially striking because of the timing: New evidence in the federal criminal case against Trump over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election became public Wednesday in a 165-page brief from special counsel Jack Smith. In the final weeks of the presidential race, the details drew new attention to Trump’s actions surrounding Jan. 6 — a politically advantageous development for Harris at a time when the growing conflict in the Middle East and the dockworkers’ strike have become cause for concern.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has tacked toward the center, trying to shed her reputation as a California liberal by repudiating many of the progressive positions she held when she ran for president in 2020.
This time around, she has described herself as a committed “capitalist,” laid out a hard-line position on border security and embraced fracking to extract natural gas from under Pennsylvania — a position she opposed during her first presidential campaign. Polls have shown that voters are more worried that Harris is too liberal than that Trump — who has proposed a series of radical right-wing policies — is too conservative.
Wisconsin is seen as a must-win state for Harris, along with Michigan, where she will campaign Friday, and Pennsylvania, where she has appeared more than any other battleground. Harris has built a narrow lead in Wisconsin, rapidly recovering from President Joe Biden’s deficit against Trump, according to a New York Times polling average.
A survey from Marquette Law School released Wednesday found that 71% of Wisconsin Democrats were enthusiastic about voting in the presidential election — up from 40% in June, when Biden was still in the race.
Harris has also been endorsed by more than 100 former national security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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