Harris’s campaign is seeking to expand its base by highlighting support from prominent Republicans who oppose Trump ahead of the November election.
On Wednesday, Harris received her biggest Republican endorsement to date, when former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said she would vote for Harris. Multiple Harris campaign officials shared the remarks with X, and the campaign said it was “proud to have received the endorsement.” On Friday, Cheney said her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, also plans to vote for Harris.
The Harris campaign also touted the endorsements of more than 200 former GOP staffers for the past four GOP presidential candidates, after several prominent anti-Trump Republicans, including former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois), gave keynote speeches at the Democratic National Convention.
Democratic and anti-Trump Republican groups say they don’t expect a major shift among Republicans, but they will use the “permission structure” to show moderate Republicans and center-right independents that they don’t have to be a liberal or a Democrat to vote for a Democratic candidate.
“There’s a very real sense of party identity,” said Olivia Troy, a former national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence and a Republican running for Harris.
“It says something about where you’re coming from,” she said. “Yes, I know it’s hard to leave your party, especially at this moment. But if we all come together… if we take a stand together, that’s how we can make a difference within our own party.”
Polls suggest Democrats may have a chance to appeal to moderate Republicans.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week found that 24% of Republicans said they had a “positive view” of Harris’s campaign, compared with 56% of independents. Thirty-eight% of independents and 13% of Democrats said the same about Trump’s campaign.
“The center-right voters that our campaign is targeting are curious about Kamala. They are open to what she has to say,” said John Conway, strategy director for the anti-Trump group Republicans Against Trump.
“For our voters, the choice about Donald Trump is going to be a top priority,” he continued. “These are voters who are motivated to get out and vote in November because of the danger that Donald Trump poses to the country, and I think Kamala Harris is reintroducing herself to those voters.”
The group launched an $11.5 million ad buy earlier this week targeting Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District.
“Some voters have a little bit of Trump amnesia. They’ve forgotten all the reasons they couldn’t stand Donald Trump in 2020,” Conway said. “We have to do everything we can to remind voters of the reasons they couldn’t support Donald Trump in 2020.”
Several other anti-Trump groups, including the Lincoln Project, are also active in key states.
“We’ve identified 1.3 million voters spread across four states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona,” said Jeff Timmer, executive director of the Lincoln Project. “They’re former Republicans who can’t support Donald Trump,” he said, describing the group’s target voters. “It took them a while to vote Democrat, and they may not be there yet, but now is the time, and we’re creating that message and that infrastructure. That’s what this whole effort is about.”
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans specifically point to Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his connection to and response to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and his past comments about foreign adversaries, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But other anti-Trump Republicans are pushing back against the “Trump amnesia” theory, pointing to the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, said the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump’s denial of the 2020 election results and the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade require a more focused message.
“The messaging coming out of the Republican group was wrong, and we need to be much more focused on direct advocacy, especially against extremists,” Madrid said. “All three of these issues are new to 2020. They weren’t the reason we doubled or tripled in 2016.”
Madrid also opposed the use of “permission structures” to appeal to center-right and conservative voters who have turned against Trump, saying they “no longer really make sense.”
“They seem to be stuck in this old model that we call the permitting structure,” Madrid said. “We’re showing a voter that, ‘I’m a Republican, I’m doing it, and you can do it, too.’”
Trump-supporting Republicans dismiss the Never Trump movement’s strength and ability to engage voters, calling it a “vanity project.”
“They’re just doing this to get in the media conversation,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell, calling the group “a bunch of charlatans.”
The Trump campaign said in a statement to The Hill that Harris’ team was “desperately trying to rip and rip” off Republicans.
“No conservative in their right mind is going to vote for Kamala Harris, a soft-on-crime, open-borders, high-tax radical Marxist,” said Caroline Leavitt, Trump’s national press secretary.
But Democrats say there are cracks in the GOP coalition that go back to this year’s presidential primaries. Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley garnered significant protest votes during the primary, even after dropping out of the race in March. Haley won more than 26 percent of the GOP primary vote in Michigan. She also won more than 100,000 votes in both key battleground states, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
“She mobilized the anti-Trump coalition because she was running against Donald Trump directly,” Conway said. “She talked about why he was unfit for office, why he was responsible for January 6, all the issues that really resonated with Trump-skeptical, center-right voters.”
Before President Biden dropped out of the race, his campaign targeted Haley voters. In June, the Biden campaign announced it had hired Austin Weatherford, a former senior adviser to Kinzinger, as its national Republican engagement director. And in April, the campaign released an ad titled “Save America, Join Us” targeting Haley voters.
But there’s no guarantee that these voters will turn out for Harris’ campaign.
“People who didn’t vote for Trump will come home,” O’Connell said. “People who are Democrats will go back to being Democrats, and some of them may not vote at all.”
