Harris betting that Republican voters will help her win against Trump
Kamala Harris is intensifying efforts to persuade Republicans to cross the aisle and back her campaign in a bid to expand her electoral appeal with less than three weeks to Election Day.
The vice president’s campaign has been buoyed by the recent endorsement of former Rep. Liz Cheney and the support of other Republicans opposed to Donald Trump, developments her team sees as bolstering their bid to win over more GOP voters in battleground states than prior Democrats.
Highlighting that push, Harris appeared Wednesday with about 100 Republicans supporting her candidacy — including half a dozen former House members and ex-Trump aides — at Washington Crossing in swing-state Pennsylvania, where disaffected Republicans and independents offer to tip what polls show is a razor-sharp race.
“In a typical election year, you all being here with me might be a bit surprising — dare I say unusual — but not in this election,” Harris said at the event. “At stake in this race are the democratic ideals that our founders and generations of Americans before us have fought for.”
The vice president said her coalition had “room for everybody who is ready to turn the page on the chaos and instability of Donald Trump,” pledging that she would be “a president for all Americans.”
Among those joining Harris was Adam Kinzinger, a former Illinois GOP congressman, who urged fellow voters to “put our country over our party.”
The Democratic nominee on Wednesday is also sitting for her first formal interview with Fox News — a 20-minute session with chief political anchor Bret Baier — in a risky bid to take her message directly to conservative voters.
Harris advisers and allies say the ranks of right-leaning voters determined to prevent Trump from returning to power have grown significantly since the last election.
Many are motivated by his refusal to accept his 2020 election defeat and his repeated vows to dismantle democratic institutions. A smaller number, Harris allies say, are drawn to the vice president because they want to help elect the first woman president or back her positions on the economy, abortion or other issues.
Jeff Timmer, chief operations officer of the Lincoln Project, a political action committee founded by conservatives who oppose Trump, says that less than 100,000 anti-Trump Republican voters in battleground states could make a significant difference. If they decide to sit out, “they would be aiding Trump,” he added.
Nine percent of Republican likely voters said they planned to support Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted last week, up from 5% a month earlier.
“Kamala Harris may surprise at the end of the day with either straight-up Republicans or independents who are essentially Republicans,” David Plouffe, a onetime campaign adviser to former President Barack Obama and now senior adviser to Harris, said on a recent podcast.
Republicans who’ve backed the last two Democratic presidential nominees say Harris’ campaign has made a more concerted effort to center-right voters than either Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton’s operations. The endorsements from high-profile figures in the GOP including Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney have helped.
“It’s creating this permission structure where more and more Republicans are saying, ‘enough – we don’t want this for our country,’” said Olivia Troye, who has been traveling to battlegrounds as a member of Republicans for Harris.
Trump has framed Harris as an extreme liberal, a characterization she has sought to counter by pledging to work with business to grow the economy and by vowing to include a Republican in her cabinet and form a bipartisan policy advisory council.
Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz has also appeared on “Fox News Sunday” for the past two weeks, and the campaign is regularly booking supporters and staffers on the network.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz said the Harris campaign is miscalculating with its emphasis on threats Trump could pose to democracy and should instead focus on economics.
In focus groups, he’s found persuadable GOP voters often living in the suburbs of swing-state cities “don’t like Trump personally” but fear that Harris’ policies could hit them in their wallets.
In a fragmented media environment, these high-income voters don’t have a full grasp of her proposals, and he doesn’t think an interview like the Fox News one will help. “It’s not the social conservatives. It’s not the people who watch Fox News,” Luntz said.
Yet anti-Trump Republicans think her defense of democracy will be enough to win over tens of thousands of GOP voters in each battleground state.
Craig Snyder, a former chief of staff to the late Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, was an early member of the Never Trump movement and said more of his fellow Republicans have adopted his position.
“If I told you a few years ago that there would be a candidate, forget about who the candidate was, but there would be a candidate who had the enthusiastic endorsement of both Dick Cheney and Bernie Sanders, you would have thought it was nuts, right?” Snyder said.
