With less than three weeks before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is intensifying her efforts to appeal to a key group of voters who could determine the outcome of a close election: Republicans who oppose former President Donald Trump.
In a speech delivered on Wednesday, with the backing of Republican supporters, and in an interview on Fox News that same evening, Harris sought to attract disenchanted conservatives to her coalition. Speaking in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, not far from where George Washington crossed the Delaware River, the Democratic nominee urged them to prioritize the country over their political party and to unite against a candidate who has shown 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 stated, joined by over 100 Republicans from Pennsylvania and other swing states.
Donald Trump “considers any American who doesn’t support him, or bend to his will, an enemy of our country,” Harris asserted. “It is clear: Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged and seeking unchecked power.”
Since Trump’s election in 2016, Democrats have hoped that Republicans would abandon a politician who has undermined many of their party’s core principles. This hasn’t materialized—at least not in significant numbers. However, Harris believes there are enough conservatives who have serious doubts about Trump that winning them over could be enough to swing a close election.
There is some evidence that this strategy could be effective. More than weeks after she dropped out of the race. President Biden won the state in 2020 by only about half that number. According to 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 poll conducted by Haley Voters for Harris, 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 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 wavering conservatives comes after stints of campaigning with Trump’s Republican critics. Former Rep. Liz Cheney endorsed Harris at an event earlier this month. Some have come out in support of Harris. 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.
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 ” 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.”