Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday ramped up her aggressive bid to win over independents and disillusioned Republicans in swing-state suburbs, holding a moderated conversation with anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney.
As the presidential race enters its final days, Ms. Harris and Ms. Cheney, a former lawmaker from Wyoming, are traveling Monday to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to court a small but possibly election-deciding group. The three states handed former President Donald Trump a victory in 2016 but flipped back to President Biden in 2020.
The first event in the Philadelphia suburb of Malvern, Pennsylvania was hosted by Sarah Longwell, a former GOP strategist who leads a group dubbed Republican Voters Against Trump. Ms. Cheney repeated pleas to dissatisfied Republicans to back Ms. Harris.
“I’m a conservative and I know the conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the Constitution,” she said. “And you have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the Constitution… and Donald Trump, who is just us predicting how he will act. We watched what he did after the last election.”
The trio also is stopping in suburban Detroit and Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, the event will be hosted by Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative talk show host in Wisconsin who declared in 2016 that the conservative movement has lost its way. He is backing Ms. Harris in this election.
Mr. Trump predicted the events with Ms. Cheney will hurt Ms. Harris among Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan, a critical battleground state. Her father, Dick Cheney, was one of the architects of the second Iraq war while serving as vice president under President George W. Bush.
“Liz Cheney, who like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to war with every Muslim Country known to mankind,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “If Kamala gets for more years, the Middle East will spend the four decades going up in flames and your kids will be going off to war, maybe even a third world war.”
Ms. Harris in the last few weeks has intensified her push to pick off Republicans frustrated with Mr. Trump. On Sunday, Republican former Sen. Jeff Blake argued on MSNBC that Ms. Harris is the “conservative” candidate in this election. He said the vice president embodies traditional conservative values, including respect for law enforcement and free trade.
Last week, Ms. Harris showcased more than 100 Republican supporters at an event in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She urged Republicans to put country over party and unify against Mr. Trump, whom she said has no regard for the Constitution.
There is some evidence that her strategy could pay off. In Pennsylvania, 150,000 Republicans voted for Nikki Haley, the most serious challenger to Mr. Trump in the GOP primary, weeks after she dropped out of the race.
Haley Voters for Harris, a SuperPAC working to convince conservatives to vote for Ms. Harris, estimates that the number of people who voted for Ms. Haley in the 2024 primary is enough to swing battleground states North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona.
However, 36% of Haley supporters say they’ll vote for Ms. Harris, compared with 45% who say they will vote for Mr. Trump according to pollster Blueprint. About 20% of those voters say they are undecided.
A New York Times/Siena poll estimates that Ms. Harris is winning about 9% of Republican voters.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.