Harris Wants Moderate Republicans to Back Her. Are They Out There?

It’s an unusual effort that reflects just how close the race is.

Stella Sexton, a lifelong Democrat, did something yesterday that at another time in American political history might have felt kind of weird.

She removed one of the “Pennsylvania Democrats” campaign signs from the wall of the local party’s subterranean office in Lancaster County and, in its place, taped up one that said “Republicans for Harris.”

It was one little gesture that reflects an unusual effort by Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, one that is increasingly becoming a defining piece of her strategy in the race’s homestretch: persuading Republicans to vote for her.

As Harris’s campaign tries to win every possible vote on a swing-state battlefield that is essentially tied, her campaign is hoping that Republicans alienated by Donald Trump — especially women in the suburbs — can be persuaded to cross party lines and cast a vote to stop him. She spent today traveling to narrowly divided suburbs in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin with former Representative Liz Cheney, her most prominent Republican supporter, making that pitch.

“I don’t know if anybody’s more conservative than I am, and I understand that the most conservative value there is, is to defend the Constitution,” Cheney said this afternoon in Royal Oak, Mich., after describing Trump as a grave threat to democracy and urging Republicans to support Harris even if they disagree with her in some policy areas.

The strategy, which Harris ramped up last week when she campaigned with Republicans in Pennsylvania’s purple Bucks County and appeared on Fox News, is a bet that Trump’s bombastic and divisive cannonball into the Republican Party has displaced just enough voters to help her.

It’s an at-times uncanny play for a vanishingly narrow slice of Republicans whose most prominent members, including Cheney, have found themselves decidedly out of power. The campaign is under no illusion that it will win them all — and the fact that they see it as a play worth making reflects just how close they believe the race to be.

“It’s not a fool’s errand,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who estimates that about 10 to 12 percent of his party are so-called Never Trumpers. “Those folks aren’t going to vote for Trump. The question is whether they skip the presidential ballot or whether they vote for Harris.”

A small group

One thing we know is this: The universe of gettable Republicans is very small. The last national poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that 9 percent of Republicans planned to support Harris — a group that was slightly more likely to be female than male, and a bit more likely to be older than younger.

Late last year, the Pew Research Center found that just 11 percent of Republican voters were considering supporting former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who ran as a moderate Republican and Trump critic, in the primary, and whose level of support is often viewed as a proxy for Republicans who are willing to break with Trump.

When they reached back out to those same voters in August, they found she had the support of 18 percent of those voters, compared with 78 percent for Trump.

That would be a meaningful share for Harris to pull away — but it amounts to just 1 percent of the electorate.

Trump has done little to engage moderate Republicans and Haley supporters, and earlier this year he suggested that anyone who donated to Haley was unwelcome in his political movement. The Harris campaign, by contrast, has worked hard to engage them.

Harris has rolled out endorsements from Republicans including Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Ariz., and the son of the late Senator John McCain. A Harris official said the campaign had spent seven figures communicating directly with Republicans, including through advertisements that feature former Trump voters explaining why they are now backing Harris.

The battle for Lancaster

The battle for moderate Republicans is playing out especially intensely in places like Lancaster County, a swath of southeastern Pennsylvania that Trump won handily in 2020 — but where 20 percent of Republican primary voters in April cast ballots for Haley, even though she was no longer in the race.

On Sunday, as Sexton hung up her sign, out-of-state Republicans who once worked for the likes of President George W. Bush filed into the Democrats’ basement to knock on doors in the area.

“I don’t recognize the Republican Party anymore,” Olivia Troye, a former national security official during the Trump administration, told the assembled volunteers.

A few minutes away, a river of MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporters was materializing outside the Lancaster County Convention Center before a town-hall event that the former president was holding that afternoon, throwing the David-vs.-Goliath nature of this effort into sharp relief.

“We’re going to communities all over Pennsylvania to show there’s more of us than you think,” said Ann Womble, the former head of the Republican Committee of Lancaster County who is now the co-chair of Pennsylvania Republicans for Harris. The goal, she said, is to encourage Republicans that “when you go in that voting booth and you are looking at that secret ballot, it’s OK to vote for Harris.”

With the smell of pizza wafting in the air, Morris Meyer, a Democratic volunteer, was dispatching the Republican volunteers to nearby Manheim Township, a Lancaster suburb with the kind of highly educated population they believe includes Republicans willing to support Harris.

Meyer himself knows well how hard it can be to persuade Republicans to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate. He has been trying to urge his 87-year-old mother, Janice Meyer, a registered Republican who lives in nearby Lititz, Pa., to do just that.

As Meyer dispatched volunteers, I called his mom. She voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, she said, but she has been turned off by what she called his “baggage” and “drama.” Her son has not been able to sway her to vote for Harris, she said, but she told me she was considering not voting for a presidential candidate at all.

“I don’t think I’m going to make up my mind until I walk in there,” Janice Meyer said.

Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.

In Nevada, housing costs are hurting Democrats

Part of the reason Democrats are so focused on winning over moderate Republicans may be that they are trying to make up for losses elsewhere. My colleague Jennifer Medina has spent weeks this year reporting in Las Vegas and found that the high cost of housing is turning off voters who were once crucial to Democratic victories. I asked her to tell us what she found.

Nevada is an important prize for both Democrats and Republicans this year — and not just for the state’s six Electoral College votes. It is a symbol of one of the biggest political struggles of 2024: Both parties are trying to win over more working-class Black and Latino voters.

These are the very voters who are least likely to pay attention to the ins and outs of political drama and more likely to be frustrated over the economy. They make up a significant share of the tiny sliver of still-persuadable voters the campaigns are furiously focusing on in the final days of the presidential election.

In the past year, I’ve spoken to plenty of these voters in and around Las Vegas. Without exception, when they list their concerns, the cost of housing is chief among them. They describe the way their rents have increased at hundreds of dollars a month for years. They see owning a home as an impossibly out-of-reach dream. Even older voters who comfortably own their homes fret that their adult children may never have the kind of middle-class security they managed to find in the expansive desert sprawl of Nevada.

Now, many of these voters are turning their back on Democrats, who they believe have promised much but done little to improve their day-to-day lives. They believe they have little to lose by either sitting the election out or, in some cases, voting for Donald Trump. Voting for Democrats hasn’t worked for me, they reason, so why not try something different?

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