Vice President Harris’s campaign is seeking to highlight support from prominent anti-Trump Republicans ahead of November as she looks to expand her base of support.
On Wednesday, Harris gained her biggest backing of a Republican to date when former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said that she would vote for Harris. Multiple Harris campaign officials shared the remarks on X, with the campaign saying it was “proud to have earned” the endorsement. On Friday, Cheney said that her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, also planned to vote for Harris.
The Harris campaign has also touted support from over 200 former GOP staffers for the past four Republican presidential nominees, following several high-profile anti-Trump Republicans, including former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), taking prominent speaking roles at the Democratic Convention.
Democrats and anti-Trump GOP groups say they are not expecting to make major inroads among Republicans but rather use a “permission structure” to let moderate Republicans and center-right independents show that someone does not have to be a liberal or even a Democrat to vote for a Democratic candidate.
“There is a sense of party identity that is very real,” said Olivia Troye, a former national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence and Republicans for Harris surrogate.
“It’s saying, I understand where you’re coming from,” she said. “Yes, I know it’s hard to walk away from your party, especially in this moment, but maybe if we all band together … you take a stand together and maybe that’s how you will impact change even within our own party.”
Polling suggests there could be an opportunity for Democrats to appeal to moderate Republicans.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week found that 24 percent of Republicans said they had a “positive view” of Harris’s campaign, while 56 of independents said the same. Thirty-eight percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats said the same about Trump’s campaign.
“For our center-right swing voters that our campaign is targeting, they’re Kamala curious. They are open to the pitch that she is making,” said John Conway, director of strategy of the anti-Trump group Republicans Against Trump.
“For our voters, this is going to be a choice for them about Donald Trump first most and foremost,” he continued. “These are voters that are primarily motivated to go out and vote in November because of the dangers that Donald Trump represents to the country, and I think Kamala Harris is reintroducing herself to the voters.”
The group launched an $11.5 million ad buy earlier this week, targeting Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District.
“There’s a little bit of Trump amnesia with some voters, where they’ve forgotten all the reasons why they couldn’t stand Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 election,” Conway said. “We have to do our best to remind voters why they couldn’t support Donald Trump in 2020.”]
A number of other anti-Trump groups, including the Lincoln Project, are also deploying their efforts into swing states.
“We’ve identified 1.3 million of these voters spread across four states that we’re keying in on: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona,” said Jeff Timmer, executive director of the Lincoln Project. “They’re former Republicans, they can’t support Donald Trump,” he said, describing the group’s targeted voters. “It took them a while to vote for a Democrat, maybe they haven’t yet but this is the time to do it and we create that messaging and infrastructure. That’s what all of these efforts do.”
Democrats and Never Trump Republicans point specifically to Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his connection and response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and his past comments about foreign adversaries, particularly Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But other anti-Trump Republicans push back on the theory that there is “Trump amnesia,” pointing to post-2020 election developments.
Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who co-founded the Lincoln Project, said there needed to be more of a focused message on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump’s denial of the 2020 election results, and the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“The messaging has not been right from the Republican groups. It needs to be much more focused on direct advocacy, especially on the extreme elements,” Madrid said. “Everyone of those three issues is new since 2020. These were not reasons that you were doubling down on or tripling down on in 2016.”
Madrid also pushed back on the use of a “permission structure” to appeal to center-right and conservative voters who have been turned off by Trump, saying it “isn’t really relevant anymore.”
“They seem to be caught in this old model of what they call a permission structure,” Madrid said. “We show one voter saying, ‘I’m a Republican and I’m doing it, you can do it, too.”
Pro-Trump Republicans brush off the strength of the Never Trump movement and its ability to appeal to swing voters, calling it “a vanity project.”
“They’re only doing this to be included in the media conversation,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell, referring to the group as “just a bunch of grifters.”
In a statement to The Hill, the Trump campaign said the Harris team “is desperately grasping at straws” in trying to appeal to Republicans.
“No conservative in their right mind will be voting for radical Marxist, weak-on-crime, open border, high tax Kamala Harris,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s national press secretary.
But Democrats point to what they say is a crack in the GOP coalition going back to this year’s presidential primaries. Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley drew a significant number of protest votes during the primary season, even after she dropped out of the race in March. Haley picked up over 26 percent of the GOP primary vote in Michigan. She also picked up over 100,000 votes in each of the two key battleground states of Arizona and Pennsylvania.
“She was mobilizing the anti-Trump coalition because she was running directly at Donald Trump,” Conway said. “She was talking about why he was unfit for office, why he was responsible for Jan. 6, all of the issues that for these center right Trump-skeptical voters really resonate.”
Prior to President Biden dropping out of the race, his campaign sought to target Haley’s voters. In June, the-then Biden campaign announced it hired Kinzinger’s former chief of staff, Austin Weatherford, as its national Republican engagement director. And in April, the campaign rolled out an ad targeting Haley voters, titled “Save America, Join Us.”
Still, there is no guarantee that these voters are sure bets for the Harris campaign.
“Those people that didn’t [vote for Trump], they’re going to come home,” O’Connell said. “The ones that are Democrats, are going to go back to being Democrats and some of them just might not vote at all.”
