Kamala Harris did not enter the Fox News den to convert the MAGA faithful. She went there to appeal to the new apostates; Republican voters disillusioned with their own party generally and Donald Trump specifically.
Harris campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the vice president’s aim was to convince supporters of Nikki Haley, the other female candidate who questioned Trump’s mental fitness earlier this year, to consider doing something that even the former ambassador to the United Nations will not: break with Trump.
The Harris aide said this only after the fact, inducing eye rolls among Republicans who saw it as an obvious attempt to put the best face on things. Had he even watched the same interview?
She regurgitated talking points instead of answering questions about the border crisis, the critics said.
She all but accepted responsibility for each of President Biden’s mistakes, those opponents insisted.
She left Bret Baier genuinely confused at one point with a complete non-sequitur, they jeered.
But maybe, just maybe, Harris did hit all her intended marks. When it comes to Haley supporters, said Evan Roth Smith, pollster at Democratic Party-aligned polling organization Blueprint, “policy is a tough sell.” The vice president is a Democrat after all, and even disaffected Republican primary voters remain Republicans – most of them anyway. No amount of moderation can convince them that Harris became a fiscal hawk or an immigration hardliner overnight. “There isn’t a lot of pull towards the Democratic Party for Haley voters,” the pollster said, “but there’s a hell of a lot of push out of the GOP from Trump.”
How do you convince a Nikki Haley voter to step over the grave of Ronald Reagan to vote for a liberal Democrat, especially when Harris’ own voting was once to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders? “Work the pain point,” replied Smith, referring to “how much these people despise sharing a party with Donald Trump.” And that is exactly what Harris did. The right calls it classic “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Smith calls it a winning playbook.
The Democratic polling firm surveyed 781 Haley voters the week before Harris sat down with Fox.
A majority, 57%, reported that they were concerned with Trump’s erratic behavior. On set with Baier, Harris made sure to call Trump both “unfit and dangerous,” citing former Republican cabinet officials who said he “should never be president of the United States again.”
The top negative trait Haley voters most associate with Trump, other than believing the Republican nominee is “too old” at 78, is that he is “too selfish to lead.” So Harris, sticking with the script, told Fox anchorman Bret Baier “the strength of a leader” is not based “on who you beat down,” but instead “on who you lift up.”
After youth and compassion, the positive trait Haley voters most associated with Harris was caring what those who disagree with her believe. Pointing to comments Trump made about “the enemy within,” Harris said during the interview that “in a democracy, the president … should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it.”
Again and again, Baier asked policy questions. Often, Harris responded with boilerplate meant to inspire vibes. She took the opportunity on the conservative cable news channel with the biggest audience both nationally and in each of the swing states to impugn Trump’s temperament. “To channel some of the Republicans that Haley voters admire the most,” said Smith, it was “mission accomplished.”
The mission is a very specific one. A second Blueprint poll, this one conducted at the end of September, found that while 45% of self-identified Haley voters plan to back Trump, 36% say they are ready to support Harris. The remainder are considering third party options or thinking of writing in the name of the former ambassador. Craig Snyder, executive director of the Haley Voters for Harris, told RCP his organization is focused on solidifying the 55% for Harris.
Biden carried 6% of the Republican vote in 2020, and it was enough to help him win the White House. “We think if Harris is over 10% in the swing states,” Craig said, “she’s going to win.” Toward that end, the super PAC is spending millions in swing states, not to convince the MAGA faithful to break ranks with Trump, but to target get-able Haley holdouts. Pennsylvania is their biggest target where the group is reaching out to about 1.5 million voters. By contrast, Craig said his group is focused on only about 100,000 voters in Arizona.
Those are small fractions in comparison to the 155.5 million Americans who voted during the last presidential election. Yet they might make the difference. Harris has acknowledged as much by surrounding herself with former Republicans in the final stretch of the race. She sounded almost conservative during a Pennsylvania campaign stop earlier this week when she waxed poetically about the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution.
“Ultimately for a lot of Haley voters, it is Jan. 6 vs. the border,” said Arizona small businesswoman Amanda Stewart when describing “the two humongous, massive screw-ups that have really hurt the country.” She voted for Trump in the last two general elections before backing Haley in the GOP primary. Stewart even knocked on doors for Haley in snowy Iowa during the primary because she believed that the former ambassador was right. She thought Trump was unfit to serve a second term.
Now she is debating between pulling the lever for Harris or writing in Haley’s name. The vice president made a good impression on Fox News. “I actually prefer the more pissed-off, more forthright Kamala,” she said of how the candidate answered questions. “More power to her.”
The thing she didn’t hear from Harris: any kind of guarantee that she would permanently change course on illegal immigration once in the Oval Office. On that issue, Stewart was watching the interview hoping to hear Harris say something along the lines of “the old man, he screwed up, and I’m the vice president, but I don’t make policy.” With less than three weeks to go, she complained that “the Harris campaign is asking us to take this other leap of faith that she really won’t be as bad as Biden.” The Democrat could put her mind at ease a bit if she vowed to make retiring independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema head of the Department of Homeland Security or just to promise to fire the current DHS chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Snyder acknowledged that Haley supporters won’t agree with Harris on the majority of policy. But the big thing that the vice president accomplished with her interview, he argued, was rejecting “this idea that America is actually two countries, that there is a hard dividing line between the blue and the red teams.” That is a hard case to make after the former ambassador made her own allegiances known.
“I haven’t always agreed with President Trump, but we agree more often than we disagree,” Haley said at the Republican National Convention earlier this summer. She had traveled to Milwaukee, she said, “because we have a country to save, and a unified Republican Party is essential for saving her.”
Splitting the GOP could potentially hand Harris the White House if the election comes down to the margins. Currently the contest is the definition of a dead heat. She leads Trump nationally by a point and a half in the RealClearPolitics Average. He leads Harris in each of the battleground states but by no more than two points. It is a jump ball as Haley supporters debate staying on the sidelines.
“I don’t agree with her on many economic issues,” said Tom Evslin, who served as secretary of transportation for the state of Vermont during the Reagan administration, before explaining that he was a Haley supporter “because I don’t think Trump ought to be president again. Now the question is, can I vote for Harris?” Her answers on foreign policy made that more likely, and while he admits that his vote in Vermont won’t change much, he believes he is representative of other disillusioned Republicans.
“I supported Trump in ’16, and I supported Biden in ’20,” Evslin said. “Trump because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton; Biden because he wasn’t Donald Trump.” Four years later he says that he would “really like to actually vote for somebody.”
He worries about Harris’ economic views. He doesn’t care for her past energy policy either. But Evslin was encouraged to see Harris praise Israel after Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 attack, was killed in a Wednesday strike. All the same, he remains undecided.
He noted that Harris has abandoned some of her more progressive policy positions since becoming the Democratic nominee. “If it turns out all to be a front,” Evslin said, “I’ll be terribly disappointed, but I’m hopeful that it’s not.”
By entering the Fox den and hitting all her marks, Harris has at least cracked the door for some Haley voters willing to make a leap of faith.
