Harris focuses on winning over disaffected Republicans as the election draws near

Vice President Kamala Harris is increasingly zeroing in on a group of voters her campaign believes could make a critical difference in several key battleground states: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who can’t get themselves to support former President Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, Harris held an event with many of her leading Republican surrogates in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — a crucial swing area of the key battleground state. In rural western Pennsylvania one day prior, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, held an event at the farm of a former Trump voter.

Those events followed a much-hyped rally in Wisconsin where Harris appeared alongside former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., during which Harris touted support from her and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who left office with notably low approval ratings. On Saturday, the Harris campaign announced a battleground state tour of panels with the younger Cheney.

The Harris campaign — which believes these voters are being undercounted in polling — had them front of mind when scheduling an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, just before her event with Republican supporters.

This voting bloc has also played a big role in the thinking behind her pitch of a bipartisan policy council in her White House and pledge to tap a Republican for her Cabinet, as well as her drift from the left-wing positions she pitched during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

“Unlike Donald Trump, who frankly, as we have seen, cares more about running on problems than fixing problems, I want to fix problems, which means working across the aisle,” Harris said Wednesday during her Bucks County rally. “It requires working across the aisle. It requires embracing good ideas from wherever they come.”

There’s reason to think the group ranging from anti-Trump Republicans to Trump skeptics has grown since the 2020 election. First, there was the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which saw a number of Republicans — including some on his own staff — break from Trump. Then, there was the significant protest vote lodged against Trump in this year’s GOP primary after his rivals, namely former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, ended their campaigns. But pro-Harris Republicans still acknowledge winning these voters on the margins is a tough battle in the weeks ahead.

“When they’re in private, it seems like an easy task,” said former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who appeared alongside Harris in Pennsylvania and soured on Trump after the 2020 election. “When they’re in a public setting, it doesn’t seem like an easy task.”

“There’s peer pressure in politics,” he added. “It’s a real thing, and so a lot of Republicans don’t want to publicly state [their support], and that’s what I think is leading to the tightness of the polls that we see. I think there’s a whisper caucus that’s going to do something different [at the ballot box] than they’re signaling.”

Trump’s Pennsylvania spokesperson Kush Desai said the Republicans Harris rallied with in Bucks County were “dug up out of irrelevance” and amounted to a “theatrical prop.” The Trump campaign sees this increased effort as a distraction from bigger issues the Harris campaign faces — particularly with support among young Black men in places like Philadelphia and Detroit that the Harris campaign is racing to shore up.

“They are spending heavily in areas they should already have locked up,” a senior Trump campaign adviser said. “Not the first time Liz Cheney’s been used as a decoy.”

Any losses Trump suffers with these disaffected Republicans, the Trump campaign believes, will be more than accounted for by boosting support among traditional Democratic voting blocs, including union workers and Black men, as well as low-propensity voters who polls have shown favor Trump.

“Kamala is spending more time trying to cobble together her own base than reach independent voters,” Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said. “President Trump is on full blown offense, polling better than he ever has, leading in the battlegrounds, and picking up historic gains with new voters.”

Another Trump campaign official pointed to the former president holding events in traditional Democratic strongholds, including the Bronx and Coachella, California, to bolster their case for growing the GOP tent.

“Our coalition has grown completely beyond traditional Republicans,” a Trump campaign official said, pointing to former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, as “big ones that are much more well known than Liz Cheney, or at least more relevant.”

‘An insurance policy’

Polling offers a mixed perspective on Harris’ draw with Trump-skeptical Republicans. An October NBC News survey showed her winning over 6% of GOP support nationally, the same level that exit polls showed President Joe Biden winning in 2020. But an October New York Times/Siena College poll showed Harris’ support among Republicans at 9%, outpacing Trump’s 3% support among Democrats in a survey with a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points. That same survey in October 2020 found Biden’s GOP support at 7%.

The Harris campaign sees not only Jan. 6, but the fact that a number of prominent former Trump administration officials — including former Vice President Mike Pence — view him as unfit to be president, as key to their message to these voters. The Harris campaign recently launched a TV ad describing Trump as “unstable” — messaging that Harris herself is using on the trail and in interviews.

They also see this point as core to their pitch to undecided Latino voters, such as the construction worker who asked Trump during a Univision town hall this week about the Jan. 6 attack and the administration officials who’ve come out against him.

“We didn’t have guns,” Trump said as part of his answer, tying himself to the rioters and incorrectly stating none were armed. “The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say ‘we,’ these are people that walked down — this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody, nobody shows. But that was a day of love.”

Others, though, say they’re concerned that Jan. 6 might not be having as big of an impact on these voters as the Harris campaign would think.

“I’m hearing more on taxes, the kitchen-table issues and immigration that are rising to the surface,” Jane Andersen, an anti-Trump conservative in Arizona and a member of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, told NBC News. “And so I honestly don’t know which way our state’s going to go. I’m concerned that our memory is really short when it comes to Jan. 6.”

But there’s another angle that pro-Harris Republicans have said is making their pitch somewhat easier: the likelihood that Republicans gain control of the Senate this fall. For voters worried that Harris would shift policy further left, these Republicans said it allows for them to promote a check on her while warning of Trump’s unchecked potential.

“When this election is over, there will be plenty of Republicans in the Congress,” former Rep. Jim Greenwood, R-Pa., who is leading the state branch of Republicans for Harris, said of his pitch to skeptical Republicans. “Kamala Harris will need to and has continuously expressed that she wants to reach across the aisle and solve problems in a bipartisan way.”

Both Greenwood and Duncan said Harris’ move away from a fracking ban has made it easier to pitch Republicans, with Duncan adding her pivot away from universal health care and the Green New Deal was “helpful for me to walk into [conservative] crowds.”

Duncan too said that noting the likelihood of the Senate flipping into GOP control has eased some concerns.

“There’s an extremely high likelihood that we’re going to have a split Congress to be a check and balance,” Duncan said. “It’s an insurance policy on a runaway idea that doesn’t jive with their conservative approach. I’ve heard it referred to in many Republican circles as an insurance policy against a runaway policy train.”

The Harris campaign insists its focus on these Republicans is not new, pointing to seven-figure investments it made dating back to when Biden was in the race. And the campaign says it’s not ignoring other groups to focus on these Republicans, pointing to its policy rollout aimed at Black men this week. It also pushed back on the idea that she is watering down her policy agenda to appeal to these voters.

But the ramp-up here has been obvious, with events with key surrogates lined up in the final weeks in hopes of reaching maximum impact.

During her Fox News interview on Wednesday, Harris said she would invite ideas from Republicans when asked what she would do differently than Biden, whom she replaced on the ticket this summer.

“There’s a good number of independents and Haley-style Republicans who are very open to voting for VP Harris, and that’s why we are open to doing events with Republicans and on Fox News,” communications director Brian Fallon told reporters afterward.

‘They’re hugely important’

Nowhere is the battle for these voters more clear than Pennsylvania. Ahead of its events there this week, the Harris team authored a memo detailing that its plan to win arguably the most critical battleground involved boosting its vote share in the suburbs with educated women and by shaving off Trump’s margins in red counties, including with the roughly 160,000 Pennsylvania Republicans who cast a ballot for Haley in the state’s closed party primary earlier this year.

“They’re hugely important,” a Harris campaign official in the Keystone State said. “And it’s not just limited to the suburbs, but there’s a lot of people like that in more rural places as well, who were already tired of Trump, wanted somebody like Nikki Haley instead, and didn’t get it, because this is now the party of Trump.”

This person said they believe surveys are “undercounting” support among Republicans and pointed to Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. John Fetterman having outperformed their pre-Election Day polling with Republicans in the state in 2022.

The October Pennsylvania poll from The Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College has Harris pulling support from 7% of Pennsylvania Republicans — a lower total than exit polls showed Shapiro and Fetterman won in 2022. That survey has a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points and found Trump winning the support of 5% of state Democrats.

To that end, some Pennsylvania Democrats see value in telling voters where they aligned with Trump. Sen. Bob Casey just released an ad touting his support for Trump’s trade policies in his critical race against Republican Dave McCormick. And team Trump thinks its secret weapon in any fight for Haley voters is the fact that Haley herself has endorsed Trump.

On Friday, two people familiar with the planning told NBC News the Trump campaign is in talks with Haley to hold a joint event. A Haley spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

“When you have Nikki Haley, who is voting and supporting and backing President Trump, I think that that is a bigger pull and much more powerful than anything Liz Cheney is saying or doing,” the Trump campaign official said.

But Greenwood said the Haley endorsement doesn’t hold much weight for him, not only because it’s been tepid at best but because he believes her voters were more interested in lodging a protest against Trump than affirmative support for the former governor of South Carolina.

“She was basically the only other Republican alternative,” he said.

For Duncan, he said the most important battle he’s fighting for these voters is against voter apathy.

“The votes I’m flipping, for the most part, are not Trump to Harris,” he said. “They’re from couch to Harris. A lot of Republicans just need that little extra nudge.”