Harris leans on 'McCain Republicans' to close the deal in Arizona

PHOENIX — Kamala Harris is staking her hopes of vanquishing Donald Trump in the pivotal state of Arizona by leaning on a familiar group of voters: moderate Republicans with an affinity for the late Sen. John McCain.

Concentrated in the suburbs of Phoenix, those voters were decisive in 2020 in delivering the state for Joe Biden, the first Democrat in a quarter-century to carry Arizona in a presidential race.

But Harris' history of progressive positions is complicating her path to replicating her boss' coalition in the former GOP stronghold.

“The McCain wing of this party is a conservative group. It just isn’t nuts,” Phoenix-based Republican consultant Barrett Marson said.

“It makes it hard to vote for someone like Kamala Harris, because she’s the antithesis of a lot of things John McCain advocated for throughout his life. But on the other hand, she doesn’t want to overthrow the government. She doesn’t want to institute a dictatorship. She doesn’t want to instruct the Justice Department to start arresting Republicans left and right,” Marson said, calling the contrast enough for him to cast his ballot for her. “So the choice isn’t a very good one for McCain Republicans, but it is also probably easier because of the actions of Donald Trump.”

Harris’ strategy to win them over is to promise to govern as an institutionalist and cast Trump as a radical who is a threat to the American way of life. She frequently advertises Republicans for Harris, a group that includes the late senator’s son Jim McCain, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Mesa Mayor John Giles.

Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, accounts for about two-thirds of Arizona voters, including many of those disaffected Republicans who are well-educated center-right voters. Harris allies see it as essential to her path.

“Talking with folks in the Maricopa County suburbs is really, really critical to our path to victory,” Jen Cox, senior adviser for the Harris campaign in Arizona, told NBC News. “What we’ve heard from Republicans who have come out in support of the vice president is that respect for the rule of law is a critical component of their support for her.”

Lessons from Kyrsten Sinema's playbook

Arizona had long been a solidly Republican state, but Democrats are on a six-year winning streak in presidential and Senate races. They have also had success in other key statewide contests, including races for governor and secretary of state, in the Trump era.

Recent public polls indicate Trump with a slight lead in the final weeks of the race in Arizona, which is shaping up as a must-win for him. While Harris has other plausible ways to collect 270 electoral votes, it could also prove critical for her if Trump cracks one of the three "blue wall" states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

And Harris' hopes in the state hinge on attracting historically Republican voters in the populous and well-educated suburbs of Phoenix, where Arizonans who boosted McCain into being a historic figure have soured on the GOP since Trump took control, and they have shifted their support to more moderate Democrats.

Harris, not even three full months into being the Democrats' standard-bearer, is untested with those voters. Part of her challenge is to convince them she would govern as a moderate and not as the former presidential candidate who embraced a smorgasbord of left-wing positions in 2019.

“There are people, like myself, who are traditional Republicans — but just can’t see themselves voting for a Democrat at the top of the ticket. And so they need to be comfortable with her,” Giles, the mayor of Mesa, said in an interview, adding that he has evolved from just being anti-Trump to being pro-Harris. He has appeared in ads making the case for her.

Giles said convincing other moderate Republicans of that is Harris’ main challenge.

“They need to know that she is not a wild socialist, progressive person that is contrary to their very soul, that she is someone who’s going to govern from the middle,” Giles said. “And is going to work on solving problems.”

Those voters have been essential to Democratic victories since 2018, including Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s in 2018, Biden’s and Sen. Mark Kelly’s in 2020 and Kelly’s again in 2022.

Fortunately for Harris, they have shown a willingness to forgive Democrats for past positions. In 2018 they helped elect Sinema, a former Green Party organizer who rebranded herself as a centrist. (Sinema has since left the Democratic Party and become an independent; she is retiring this year.) Like Harris today, Sinema faced an opponent who sought to heavily attack her past positions and a GOP apparatus that painted her as a socialist.

“Kyrsten Sinema rewrote the playbook for how to win an election in Arizona,” Giles said. “That’s exactly what Kamala Harris needs to do — help people get over some of the progressive things she said in the past and convince people that she’s going to govern from the center.”

Another part of Harris’ strategy: remind voters of the rift between Trump and McCain. The two had a famously frosty relationship after Trump insulted McCain’s war record during his 2016 campaign and repeatedly attacked him for his decisive vote to save the Affordable Care Act in 2017, when he was battling cancer.

Harris praises McCain in Arizona campaign stops

In a campaign swing through Arizona last week, Harris fondly — and repeatedly — spoke of McCain and lavished praise on his ACA vote. She served with McCain in the Senate until he died in 2018.

“It required one more vote to keep it intact, and that vote was the late, great John McCain,” Harris said in Chandler, just outside Phoenix. “A great American, a war hero: John McCain. And I’ll never forget that night.”

Recent polls show a variety of possible outcomes in Arizona next month. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found Trump leading by 5 points in the state. The main source of his advantage: He led Harris by 6 points in Maricopa County, which voted for Biden by 2 points in 2020 and Kelly by 6 in 2022. But a separate Wall Street Journal poll found Harris leading Trump by 2 points.

The Trump campaign dismissed Harris’ GOP outreach as a mirage.

“Democrats are trying to capitalize on so-called soft Republicans, or whatever they’re deeming this ‘Republicans for Harris’ group, but on the ground we’re not seeing that go anywhere. It’s more of a facade than it is any effort they’re putting behind it,” said Rachel Reisner, the Trump campaign’s director of battleground state communications.

Cox, the Harris adviser in the state, would not say whether Harris needs to improve in Maricopa County, but Giles said losing it would all but choke off her path.

“It’s a mathematical impossibility. You have to win Maricopa County to win the state of Arizona,” she said.

Another tantalizing clue for the Harris campaign's chances in the state: Nikki Haley won 18% of the GOP primary vote in Arizona, weeks after she dropped out of the race. That included nearly 75,000 votes in Maricopa County and 15,000 more in Pima County, where Tucson is based.

Marson also said a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in Arizona's constitution could give Harris a boost.

“The abortion initiative is the only hope that Harris has to win Arizona,” he said, calling it a way to “excite that 18- to 24-year-old crowd that’s going to vote for abortion” and persuade them to “stick around” to vote for her.

Cox also cited Project 2025, a conservative blueprint written by Trump’s allies to dismantle much of the U.S. government and place more power in Trump’s hands, as dangerous for the rule of law and working-class Arizonans, including the large Latino population. Trump has sought to distance himself from the blueprint.

“It would put unchecked power in Trump’s hands,” Cox said, including by “monitoring pregnancies” and “eliminating the Department of Education.”

“Arizonans have rejected the MAGA slate of candidates in the last three cycles — 2018, 2020 and 2022,” she added. “And I am confident that will happen again in 2024.”

Harris is underperforming Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Democrats' Senate nominee in Arizona, in numerous polls, most notably among Latinos and men. Unlike Harris, who is locked in a tight race, Gallego consistently leads GOP rival Kari Lake.

“Honestly, the only thing she could be doing right now is being a Latino male veteran,” Gallego quipped when he was asked what he is doing that Harris is not. “Policy-wise, I think it’s important that Democrats continue understanding that the most important thing that Latino men value is being able to support their families, start a business, buy a home.”

Gallego said there “isn’t that much of a separation between her and I” on understanding that. “A lot of it’s just because I’m a veteran and there is a certain amount of Latino male voters who appreciate the fact that I served my country.”