Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign Thursday at an iconic location in Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party, alongside her most prominent bipartisan supporter, Republican Liz Cheney.
Ms. Harris and Ms. Cheney will appear together in a joint appeal to the kind of Republican voters who maintain conservative positions but are repulsed by former President Donald J. Trump and his politics. Their event will be held in Ripon, Wisconsin, the site of a series of meetings that led to the founding of the Republican Party in 1854.
The two women have little in common politically, other than their distaste for Trump. The two had little to do when they overlapped in Congress, though they did speak on the phone earlier this summer about supporting Cheney.
The endorsements of Ms. Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, are intended to demonstrate the breadth of support for Ms. Harris, a point that her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also made during the debate. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio on Tuesday night.
“I’m as surprised as anyone in this coalition that Kamala Harris has built, from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift and so many people in between,” Walz said. He spoke while confirming the leftist senator’s name. The world’s biggest pop music star from Vermont. “And while they don’t all agree on everything, they’re really optimistic people.”
Mr. Cheney is a Wisconsin native who grew up in Virginia and served in the Wyoming state legislature for six years. She disowned Trump after he tried to overturn the 2020 election results and joined the House Select Committee investigating the Trump-inspired attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 did. She alienated her fellow Wyoming Republicans so much that she lost her job. A primary challenger loyal to Trump has become president.
“As a conservative, as someone who believes in the Constitution and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and given the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only will I not vote for Donald Trump, but I will not vote for Kamala Harris. I’m going to vote for it,”’ Cheney told an audience at Duke University in North Carolina last month.
Her appearance against Mr. Harris will be particularly impressive due to its timing. New evidence in the federal criminal case against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election was released Wednesday in a 165-page brief from special counsel Jack. Smith. In the final weeks of the presidential election, details have focused new attention on Trump’s actions surrounding Jan. 6. The move comes at a time when conflicts in the Middle East are escalating and the longshoremen’s strike is becoming more serious, a politically advantageous development for Harris. cause for concern.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has shifted to a centrist position, repudiating many of the progressive positions she held when she ran for president in 2020, making her position as a California liberal. Trying to ruin your reputation.
This time, she described herself as a committed “capitalist,” took a hard line on border security, and embraced hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from her territory in Pennsylvania. This is a position she opposed during her first presidential campaign. Polls show voters are more worried that Harris is too liberal than that Trump, who has proposed a series of radical right-wing policies, is too conservative.
Wisconsin is seen as a must-win state for Harris, along with Michigan, where she will campaign on Friday, and Pennsylvania, which has more candidates running than any other battleground state. Harris built a narrow lead in Wisconsin, quickly rebounding from President Biden’s deficit against Trump, according to an average of New York Times polls.
A Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday found that 71% of Wisconsin Democrats were enthusiastic about voting in the presidential election, compared to June, when Biden was still in the race. This is an increase from 40%.
Harris also has the support of more than 100 former national security officials and former Republican members of Congress.
