Harris Intensifies Pitch to Disaffected Republicans

With less than three weeks until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is ramping up her pitch to a core group of voters who could help flip a coin-toss election: anti-Trump Republicans.

In a speech backed by Republican supporters on Wednesday and an interview on Fox News that evening, Harris made a bid to invite disaffected conservatives into her coalition. Speaking in Bucks County, Penn., not far from where George Washington crossed the Delaware River, the Democratic nominee urged them to put country over party, and to unify against an opponent who has demonstrated a disregard for the U.S. Constitution.

"At stake in this race are the democratic ideals that our founders, and generations of Americans, have fought for. At stake in this election is the Constitution itself," Harris said, joined by more than 100 Republicans from Pennsylvania and other swing states.

Donald Trump "considers any American who doesn’t support him, or bend to this will, an enemy of our country," Harris said. "It is clear: Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged and seeking unchecked power."

Ever since Trump was elected in 2016, Democrats have hoped that Republicans would abandon a politician who has trampled many of their party's core ideals. It hasn't happened—at least not in significant numbers. Yet Harris believes there are enough conservatives who have serious doubts about Trump that winning them over could be enough to swing a tight election.

Read More: What Kind of President Would Kamala Harris Be?

There's some evidence the strategy could work. More than 150,000 Republican voters voted for Nikki Haley in the Pennsylvania GOP primary, weeks after she dropped out of the race. President Biden won the state in 2020 by only about half that number. According to Haley Voters for Harris, a SuperPAC that is seeking to convince center-right voters to vote for Harris, the number of people who voted for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP primary, both before and after she exited the race, is enough to swing battleground states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona. "The number of folks who voted for Haley after she dropped out of the primaries, particularly in places like Pennsylvania, is a potentially decisive number of votes," says Craig Snyder, a former GOP Congressional Chief of Staff who now runs Haley Voters for Harris.

Haley herself has since endorsed Trump. But according to a Blueprint poll, a significant portion of her voters are holding out against him: only 45% of Haley voters now say they'll vote for Trump, while 36% say they'll vote for Harris. Nearly 20% remain undecided, and those are the voters Harris appears to be speaking to now. "This is real erosion of Trump’s support within the party," Snyder says. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, Harris is winning 9% of Republican voters; Snyder says he thinks if she can crack 10%, it would win her the electoral college.

To reach those voters, Harris is also going to Trump's home turf: Fox News. She sat for a 25-minute interview with Fox's Bret Baier on Wednesday evening, during which she emphasized the number of Republicans who are supporting her. "It is clear to me, and certainly the Republicans who were on stage with me," she said, "that he is unfit to serve, that he is unstable, that he is dangerous, and that people are exhausted."

Harris again brought up Trump's use of the phrase "enemy within" to refer to his opponents. "This is a democracy, and in a democracy, the President of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he'd lock people up," she said.

The escalating pitch to waffling conservatives comes after stints of campaigning with Trump's Republican critics. Former Rep. Liz Cheney endorsed Harris at an event earlier this month. Some former Trump officials have come out in support of Harris. One Harris-Walz ad uses the words of Trump's own Vice President, Defense Secretary, National Security Adviser, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to argue that Trump is not fit to be President again.

Read More: The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris.

Rob Gleason, who was the Republican state party chair in Pennsylvania when Trump won it in 2016, said that Harris appears to be trying to grow her vote share in the suburbs to counteract large expected losses in rural areas. "At the end of the day, what’s this election about: Do you like Trump or not?" says Gleason. "It’s not about Kamala Harris."

On Thursday, Republican Voters Against Trump will start a swing-state bus tour throughout Pennsylvania and Michigan, designed to create a so-called "permission structure" for Republicans to break from the former President. Each stop—in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Detroit—will feature former Trump voters who are now supporting Harris. The group will also be spending more than $4 million in a new Pennsylvania ad campaign, including 55 new billboards featuring erstwhile Trump supporters explaining why they can't support him anymore. Republican Voters Against Trump is on track to spend a total of $32 million on ads featuring former Trump supporters.

While it's nearly certain that the vast majority of Republicans will support their nominee, in a razor-thin race, even small defections can make the difference. "When it’s as close as it is here," says Gleason, "every vote counts."

Correction appended, Oct. 18: An earlier version of this story misstated the group that conducted a poll of Nikki Haley voters. It was Blueprint, not Haley Voters for Harris.