WASHINGTON – The wave of enthusiasm around Kamala Harris has trapped powerful interest groups and unions, consolidated titans of Wall Street and Hollywood and captured “coconut” progressives as well as Joe Biden campaign aides.
But Harris’s rapid rise to the top of the Democratic ticket is also encouraging another important coalition of voters: former Republicans more desperate than ever to turn the page on Donald Trump.
Biden, with a decades-long track record in office, offered them a moderate who promised to court a compromise in Washington. Now, anti-Trump Republicans are sizing up Harris, trying to determine whether she can also appeal to the center with her own policy proposals and choice of running mate.
Harris has already won the Republican Party support from former Georgia Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan.
Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican, supported Biden in 2020. After launching a third party in 2022, Whitman said she is now fully behind Harris.
“It’s a totally different race, and the idea of a prosecutor versus a convicted felon is very appealing from a publicity standpoint,” Whitman said.
Others are also finding plenty of reasons to embrace the former California police officer.
“I loved her phrase: ‘I’m a prosecutor. I know how to deal with people like Donald Trump,’” said former Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican Trump critic from Connecticut. “She didn’t say that Donald Trump is a hateful, despicable man – ugly. She didn’t need to.
Shays said that after meeting Biden, she decided she would not vote for him, despite believing he had done a good job. He feared Trump might boost his support after the failed assassination attempt, but now thinks the effort to moderate him quickly faded. In Harris, he sees a way forward.
“I just love everything she’s done so far,” Shays said. “She doesn’t speak for an hour and a half and nails it. We won’t go back.”
Following the president’s announcement Sunday that he would step down, Harris worked the phones to win over top Democrats as her team worked to sway Biden’s delegates. Then she rose to prominence, decades younger than Trump, rejecting the former president’s jabs and challenging him to debate the terms she had agreed to with Biden.
Sometimes the answer borders on joy.
“Republicans have had a very lucky five weeks. That ended on Sunday,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “They don’t have a plan B: Their campaign is structured around young versus old, and Harris automatically walks in the door with a huge strategic advantage in that regard.”
Harris could also get a boost from Trump.
“He’ll do a lot of the work for her,” Wilson said. “The fundamentals of this race have not changed. The bottom line is still: ‘This is a referendum on Donald Trump’.”
In Wilson’s opinion, a new ad campaign aimed at conservative-leaning undecided voters by the group Republican Voters Against Trump shines its spotlight squarely on the former president, highlighting his actions on January 6, lawsuits, threats of retribution against enemies and voters. fears that he will leave NATO.
That $500,000 tone of anti-Trump voters is not so much a push for Harris as it is against Trump, part of an effort to mobilize what John Conway, strategy director for the group Republican Voters Against Donald Trump, calls the largest coalition in US politics. USA .
It wasn’t always that way for Harris, who, in 2020, faced Biden and more than a dozen other Democrats as the party tilted left.
“Running in the Democratic primary at the height of the racial reckoning in 2020, I think her experience as a former prosecutor hurt her,” Conway said. “In 2024, the country wants a candidate who has her training and can attack Donald Trump.”
First, Harris needs to reintroduce herself and, in the process, reassure moderates, Republicans who support her said. While Conway, Whitman and Shays plan to vote for Harris, others may need more to participate.
And there are potential pitfalls waiting for her. Shays said he remains concerned about the rate of migration across the southern border, a rise the vice president was tasked with curbing shortly after taking office. Instead, the numbers have soared and Harris has been on defense, fighting the “border czar” title that his team said was never the plan. Regardless, if Harris wants the top job, she can’t ignore the concerns, Shays and others said.
“Immigration is a risk,” Shays said. “It’s the only challenge she has.” He said he hopes she faces the issue head-on “and seeks common sense.”
Asked by reporters about the “prosecutor versus criminal” message, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung quickly dismissed it. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Kamala Harris is soft on crime.”
Harris’ choice as running mate could also be a factor for some Republicans who may be turned away from Trump.
“She has to pick a moderate,” said Amanda Stewart Sprowls, a former Nikki Haley supporter from Maricopa County, Arizona, who identifies as a “pro-choice moderate.”
She said Biden’s candidacy offered her a candidate she could support in 2020, and she’s looking forward to it again. Stewart Sprowls said the women she knows might even have considered Trump if he had chosen someone other than J.D. Vance, who she considers an extremist on women’s issues.
“If Trump had chosen a moderate, that would have been in play,” she said.
Now Stewart Sprowls and others like her are counting on Harris and her vice presidential pick to offer a more balanced ticket.
“I’m definitely a Republican, but I can’t vote for Trump,” she said. “We just want normalcy.”
Whitman is aware of the challenge of reassuring voters who may have reservations about Harris’ record and liberal positions. “It’s going to be difficult,” Whitman said. “A lot will depend on who she chooses as vice president. Even if she’s not left-wing, that’s how they’re going to paint her and that’s how she’s going to be perceived.”
A “solid” choice for vice president will prevent her from wasting time on defense, helping to deflect any criticism, Whitman added.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
