‘More Republicans than you’ve seen vote for a Democrat in decades’: Inside the Harris campaign effort to turn red voters blue

For generations of American schoolchildren, a key rite of passage in civic education has been a visit to a centuries-old, two-story Georgian structure in downtown Philadelphia.

That building, formally known today as Independence Hall, has over the centuries played host to multiple American presidents, and remains the centerpiece of a national park celebrating America’s founding. It is where the constitution was born.

On Thursday, it was business as usual outside the iconic venue. Young students in identical hats emblazoned with their school and class year filed past on their way into the rooms where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were debated and approved by the nation’s founding fathers. Senior citizens on an organized tour walked past the front entrance on their way to the next stop on their journey.

But across Chestnut Street, on a sidewalk abutting the green grass of Independence Mall, another, much smaller group was gathering for a group photograph.

In this extremely Democratic city, they were card-carrying members of the Republican Party who’d come as part of a bus tour put on by Republican Voters Against Trump, or RVAT. RVAT is a political action committee that has spent the 2024 election cycle running advertisements meant to convince a small segment of GOP voters to step away from the party they’ve supported for all of their lives.

One of them, David McHenry of Oregon, is a Republican through-and-through, as well as an Army veteran with nearly a quarter-century in uniform under his belt.

McHenry told The Independent he has aligned with the Party of Lincoln since his high school days. He even spent time working for Victor Atiyeh, the last Republican governor of Oregon, during the eight years Atiyeh served in that state’s highest office. And although the former soldier voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, McHenry said the January 6 attack on the Capitol was a bridge too far for him.

“It took me a while until I came to the conclusion, but when Bill Barr, the Attorney General, said, ‘Hey, this is a legit election,’ it finally started dawning on me that I’d been had,” he said.

McHenry also said his outlook as a military veteran has shaped his post-2020 opposition to his party’s standard-bearer, citing his oath to defend the US Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.

“I’ve lost a lot of friends and family members, because all my family was pretty much full-scale for Trump. But right’s right, wrong is wrong, and I believe in this nation,” he said.

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McHenry is one of what RVAT organizers — and Democratic campaign officials — hope will be a critical number of Republican voters across the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who will pull the lever for a Democrat in November.

The group — which is run by longtime GOP strategist and former Log Cabin Republicans head Sarah Longwell — has spent the last few years running focus groups of Republican and conservative voters and testing what messages are most effective for convincing them to turn on their own party.

Seeking crossover voters from the opposing party is a time-honored tactic in American presidential politics. When Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential race, and when he won 49 of 50 states over Walter Mondale four years later, he did so with the help of so-called “Reagan Democrats” in places like Macomb County, Michigan.

Longwell’s group (combined with the efforts of other groups of anti-Trump Republicans) made a big dent in Trump’s numbers in 2020, when President Joe Biden carried around 5 per cent of Republicans. This year, they are hoping to bring as many as 10 per cent on board to the Democratic bandwagon, including by pulling in disaffected Republican primary voters who supported ex-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley earlier this year.

According to one RVAT staffer, it’s Haley’s former supporters who could make a big difference in Pennsylvania, a state that Harris must carry if she wants to maintain her easiest path to the White House. By winning the Keystone State’s electoral votes, maintaining a Democratic hold on the other two “blue wall” states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and carrying the single Democratic-leaning congressional district in Nebraska (a state that awards electoral votes by district), she would earn exactly 270 electoral votes — the exact number she needs to win the presidency.

Both the Harris campaign and Longwell’s group are focusing on the Keystone State. That’s why Harris took to a stage in Chester, Pennsylvania on Monday accompanied by Longwell and Liz Cheney, the ex-Wyoming congresswoman who has emerged as a top anti-Trump Republican since she lost her seat to a Trump-endorsed challenger in 2022.

Cheney, who was once the third-highest-ranking House Republican, threw her support behind Harris at an event in Wisconsin earlier this month at which she said she would be “proudly casting [her] vote” for the Democrat in the race. She is doing so because Harris is “standing in the breach at a critical moment in our nation’s history” and “working to unite reasonable people from all across the political spectrum,” Cheney said.

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Under questioning from Longwell, Harris sought to reassure skeptical potential anti-Trump Republicans that her administration would break from that of Biden.

She said the “turn the page” slogan she’s been using on the stump is “meant to also describe my intention to embark on a new generation of leadership.”

“And needless to say, mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration. I bring to it my own ideas, my own experiences,” she said.

Harris also said her presidency would be a break from nearly ten years “of the American discourse being influenced by Donald Trump in a way that has had the effect of suggesting [that] we as Americans should point the finger at one another” and “a way that has been using the power of the presidency to demean [and] to divide us.”

“People are exhausted with that,” she added.

The vice president’s sentiments appeared tailor-made to fit the concerns of the voters who Longwell had brought to Philadelphia just four days earlier. One of them, a Wisconsinite named Ethan Lenz, told The Independent that he still considers himself “a real conservative” who nonetheless has “no time for a candidate on either side who incites a riot and then tries to pretend like nothing happened and somehow thinks that they’re eligible to be back in office again.”

“I view this election as the last chance that there will be to ever have a shot at there being a real conservative movement in this country again and a real conservative alternative,” he said.

Like McHenry, Lenz said his experience as a military veteran has colored his view of Trump. A former National Guard soldier who served during the 1991 Gulf War, said he doesn’t think Trump has “any real respect” for veterans because the ex-president “doesn’t understand the military.”

“He doesn’t respect the veteran community or the military, or understand the sacrifices that people have gone through in order to both enter the military and to do things for this country,” he said. “I mean, Donald Trump’s had everything handed to him his entire life, and I don’t think he has any understanding at all what real sacrifice is all about.”

Harris’s joint appearance with Longwell and Cheney is a sign that her campaign is taking seriously the prospect of being put in the White House by people who normally would have never pulled a lever for any candidate with a (D) next to their name.

According to a Harris campaign operative, it’s part of a deliberate strategy to juice turnout among the college-educated, reliable voters who once turned out in droves for the GOP. That’s why Harris and Cheney are set to campaign together across the “blue wall” states this week.

The campaign staffer pointed out that Democrats have performed well in low-turnout and off-year elections recently — areas the party never really excelled in — because of a shift among educated, suburban voters away from the Trump-era GOP.

While Trump’s campaign has been making constant — and often awkward — appeals to male and less-educated voters, including Black and Hispanic ones, Harris’s campaign is betting that Trump’s continued presence on the ballot is going to bring the more educated out for her in numbers that far exceed what Biden achieved four years ago.

“They’re pissed, they’re scared, they’re sick of Donald Trump — and they vote,” the operative said. “It’s not just the ‘Women’s March’ crowd anymore. It’s going to be more Republicans than you’ve seen vote for a Democrat in decades.”