Vice President Kamala Harris’s top Republican supporters are testing the number of disaffected Republican voters at stake in her race against polarizing former President Donald Trump.
Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a member of pre-Trump Republican royalty, became the latest and most prominent Republican to endorse Harris on Wednesday. Harris has also received support from former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and hundreds of local Republican officials in an attempt to penetrate what her campaign sees as Trump’s soft underbelly with Republican voters who are uncomfortable with the former president’s brash and unorthodox political style.
The ongoing outreach is only part of Harris’ overall path to Election Day, but now, with no bigger names on the table for support, the vice president will likely find out if she can drum up more support from disgruntled Republicans — or if she’s already maxed out.
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“The Kinzinger/Cheney endorsements are designed by Democrats to make Republican voters who are alienated by Trump’s dishonesty, bad character, felony convictions, ignorance of public policy, etc., feel better about not just abstaining but actively showing their displeasure by voting for Harris,” said former Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., a six-term conservative lawmaker who ran against Trump in his 2022 Senate race.
“The number of Republican voters influenced by Republicans who support Harris is relatively small,” he added. “But in an otherwise close race, it could be the difference between victory and defeat.”
Former U.S. Rep. Wyo. (R) Liz Cheney speaks onstage during the 2024 Martin Luther King, Jr. Beloved Community Memorial Service at Ebenezer Baptist Church on January 15, 2024, in Atlanta.
By Griffin/Getty Images
Cheney, a rising star in the Republican Party who became both a pariah and the face of the anti-Trump Republican wing after the Jan. 6 insurrection, said Wednesday in Republican-leaning North Carolina that she would support Harris out of fear for American democracy. On Friday, she said her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, would do the same.
“I thought it was a particularly important discussion to have for the first time in North Carolina, where, you know, one of the questions I hear from Republicans who know they’re not going to support Donald Trump again, but who, you know, are kind of like, well, maybe I’ll just write somebody,” she said Friday. “And I think, particularly when we’re talking about states where we know it’s going to be close, where the election is going to be decided, we don’t have that luxury and I think it’s really important to recognize the nature of the choice that’s in front of us,” she said.
The endorsement is just part of Harris’ strategy to win over swing Republican voters.
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) takes the stage on the fourth day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, August 22, 2024.
Kevin Wurm/Reuters
The party sees an opening for expansion with Republican rebels, especially after hundreds of thousands of voters turned out against Trump in the GOP primaries to vote for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, including after she ended her campaign. And Trump has shown little interest in those who oppose him, telling a town hall meeting Thursday, “I don’t want that person” when asked about people who didn’t vote for him in the primaries.
Democrats got a series of Republican speeches, including Kinzinger, at their convention last month. Harris said she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet. A network of local officials and former Trump administration officials hit the road to advocate for Harris. And the campaign spent millions of dollars on advertising to suggest to Republicans that they have a place in the modern Democratic Party.
To be sure, Harris doesn’t put Republican converts at the heart of her strategy, acknowledging the limited opportunities to challenge a Republican Party largely in Trump’s thrall. But Democrats insist that winning over a handful of protest voters can pay off — and that big names like Cheney and Kinzinger could provide a clearinghouse for some Republicans to validate their ticket for a Democrat in November.
“We know that there are a number of Republicans who are in a similar situation. They’re not necessarily Trump. Some of them may be, but they may not know what they think about Vice President Harris yet,” said Democratic strategist Karen Finney. “That kind of support sends a signal to those voters that there’s someone else who is very high profile but who feels the same way they do about Trump and has similar concerns, and who they respect.”
It’s unclear how much effort Cheney will put into converting Republicans, but there’s already a plan to show her how to wield her clout.
In 2022, she invested $500,000 in an Arizona ad that lambasted Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, the Republican candidates for governor and secretary of state and ardent election deniers, saying, “I don’t know if I’ve ever voted for a Democrat, but if I lived in Arizona, I absolutely would.”
Lake and Finchem both lost their races.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks during a Fox News town hall hosted by Sean Hannity in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on September 4, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
But state midterm elections are not the same as a historic presidential election with a Republican candidate sucking up an unprecedented amount of political oxygen.
Polls have shown Harris has remained in the single-digit support among Republicans, and Trump has been a public figure for years, including nearly 10 years since he launched his first campaign, leaving perceptions of him cemented enough to withstand new support.
“My instinct tells me that those [Republicans] And [independents] “They’re not moved by this — they’re already on board with Harris,” said Chuck Coughlin, an Arizona strategist who left the GOP during the Trump era.
“Anyone who is already voting against Trump because they hate him is already in that situation,” Republican pollster Robert Blizzard confirmed. “They’re not voting against him because some random former congressman says they do too.”
Other Republicans said voters might not be convinced by Cheney and Kinzinger’s dire warnings about the threat Trump poses to democracy, given that despite the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, the safeguards held.
“I think Kinzinger and Cheney are not very convincing to swing voters or to Haley voters. They generally don’t buy the apocalyptic framework that they use that democracy ends with Trump. I think the most convincing are people who worked with him, like [Jon] Kelly, [Mark] Hope, [Henry] McMaster University, [John] Bolton and others can say they worked with him and he’s not fit,” said anti-Trump Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, referring to former Trump administration officials with national security backgrounds.
And with all the work and money Harris has already invested in appealing to Republicans, some operatives have speculated that the ceiling of GOP support for the vice president may already have been reached.
“It certainly helps. But I’m not sure their endorsements are leading indicators of the Never Trump movement, they seem to be lagging indicators of the movement,” said former Florida Rep. David Jolly, who left the Republican Party over disagreements with Trump. “The real catalyst for the coalition-building was Harris herself.”
The Trump campaign, for its part, appears unconcerned by the recent endorsements for Cheney.
When asked what the campaign thought of Cheney’s announcement that she and her father would vote for Harris, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded, “But who is Liz Cheney?”
ABC News’ Isabella Murray contributed to this report.
