It’s an unusual effort that reflects just how close the race is.
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Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris during a campaign rally in Washington Crossing, Pa., last week.
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.
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Source: nytimes.com
