The Democrats’ Hail Mary

A few years ago, all of this would have been extremely weird. Actually, as the Democrats around me in the theater stood to applaud Liz Cheney—the pro-life, ultraconservative daughter of Dick—it still kind of was. The former third-ranked GOP House leader was joined onstage in the Philadelphia suburbs by three young onetime Donald Trump staffers, together issuing a warning about his potentially catastrophic unfitness for office—the four horsewomen heralding the threat of the Trump-ocalypse. Attendees seemed in awe of their bravery, and every few moments clapped with vigor.

Such an alignment, everyone agreed, would have been unthinkable in some other, more normal political universe. “If you would have told me four years ago that I’d be voting for Kamala Harris in 2024, my head would have exploded,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary in the Trump administration, told me after the event. There were uncomfortable titters from some in the audience, of course, including once when the former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah Griffin spoke highly of her two former bosses, Vice President Mike Pence and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. But the broader feeling—the powerful force that is disdain for Trump—kept everyone nodding solemnly in their seat.

This shared sentiment lines up with the Democrats’ closing pitch in the final days before the election: that Trump is an exceptional threat to American democracy. Voters of all ideological persuasions should choose Harris now and disagree about policy later.

Cheney and her fellow anti-Trump surrogates have run with that message in recent weeks, sometimes even joining Harris herself on the trail. Their effort, the thinking goes, gives Republicans permission to hold their nose and vote for a Democrat, maybe for the first time ever.

It might work. In an election that will almost certainly be decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, Cheney could reach a significant-enough sliver of the electorate for Harris to scrape by in November. They’re hopeful, even, for the deus ex machina of a silent minority. “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody,” Cheney said Monday during an event with Harris in Royal Oak, Michigan. But centering a campaign on the nobler questions in politics—morality, democracy—is a risky bet when it comes to Trump, who has remained, throughout the past nine years, robustly immune to such high-minded attacks. The Cheney Strategy presumes that bipartisanship can win the day. It might be wishful thinking.

[Listen: Trump and the January 6 memory hole]

In the month since she formally endorsed Harris, Cheney has served as a traveling evangelist for the Democrats, hitting the road in America’s swing states to spread the good news about personal sacrifice and national redemption. There was that event onstage with the former Trump staffers in Philly, plus the stop with Harris in the Wisconsin town where the GOP was founded, and where Cheney declared that she “was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning.” And this week, she wrapped up a three-state series of fireside-chats with Harris. In these appearances, Cheney has repeatedly referred to Trump as “cruel” and “depraved.” She warns that if he becomes president again, the mob attack of January 6, 2021, might look, in comparison, like the peaceful lovefest that Trump falsely maintains it was.

Nothing Cheney says is more telling than her example: A Republican born and bred, she effectively relinquished her seat in Congress and what was already an illustrious political career to stand up for what she thought was right. If a Cheney can vote blue, so can you. One problem, of course, is that most of the attendees at Cheney’s events are not Republicans. They are mostly Democrats—or Republicans who have been casting ballots for Democratic candidates in one election or another since 2016.

These gatherings sometimes carry the air of a religious revival, of people desperate to commune over their almighty revulsion for Trump. They weep and cheer to see Cheney confronting the bullies in this new, disfigured GOP. At other times, the events seem like a group-therapy session. At the theater outside Philly, several people told me, unprompted, about their own family divisions over politics: marriages and relationships torn apart during the Trump era. “I lost a 40-year friendship over Trump,” Sandy Lightkep, from nearby Horsham, told me. “My family’s split in half.” They come because they appreciate the sense of unity, real or imagined. “It’s wonderful that Republicans and Democrats are finally getting together,” Nancy Moskalski, visiting from Connecticut, told me. “This is what Joe Biden always wanted.”

Before a Harris-Cheney appearance in Chester County, Pennsylvania, earlier this week, I met two women who seemed to reflect the improbable alliance of the pair that would soon be onstage. “I just remember there was a time when I could have a discussion with a lot of my Republican and conservative friends,” Tanya Cain, who wore a navy-blue KAMALA HARRIS sweatshirt, told me. “We have to break this, whatever this is, and move forward.” Cain laughed. “If you would tell me Liz Cheney was gonna be in my politics—” The woman next to her, Susan Springman, broke in: “I never thought Harris would be in my politics either!” A lifelong Republican voter wearing a black turtleneck and pearls, Springman had voted for Trump in 2016 but now regretted it. “MAGA has to go, and whatever that means, I am willing to go with it to destroy that and to move forward with something else,” she said. She’d also persuaded her Republican husband to read Cheney’s book Oath and Honor, she said; he’d be voting for Harris too.

Democrats are banking on hopes that people like Springman aren’t such rare birds. That similar aisle-crossing comity is happening all around the country, under the radar. It’s totally fine, they say, if only a few Republicans are showing up to these events—they believe the important thing is the message it sends. Perhaps Cheney’s efforts will help remind voters of the violent attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election. “It’s about driving a news cycle that reinjects the memory of what happened and tries to put the stakes back at the center of the conversation,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump publication The Bulwark who has appeared on the trail in support of Harris, told me.

The Cheney Strategy reflects a Harris-campaign pivot. For the first weeks of her presidential bid, Harris’s line about Trump was, primarily, that he was responsible for taking away women’s reproductive rights. When Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joined the ticket, the pair focused on communicating to voters that Trump and the MAGA Republicans were “weird.”

[Read: The swing states are in good hands]

Harris has worked hard to introduce herself, define her campaign, and deliver a message that sets her apart from Biden. For a while, she seemed successful, pulling ahead of Trump in several key swing states. But the polls have been tightening for weeks, compelling Harris to adopt something closer to Biden’s final pitch from 2020: that Trump is a reckless would-be dictator, whose reelection could bring about the end of American decency and democracy. “Brat summer is over,” as Vox’s Christian Paz put it. “‘Trump is a fascist’ fall is in.”

A closing argument about January 6 was the natural next move in this high-stakes election, Longwell told me. “They’ve decided that’s their closing pitch, to sort of go for those undecided voters,” she said. “Strategically, that’s correct.”

Most registered Republicans will vote for Trump, but it’s true that many conservative-identifying voters have concerns about his character. Whether enough of those exist to change the election result is debatable. Longwell and her Never Trump allies point to the GOP primary contest for evidence: Nikki Haley received 157,000 votes in Pennsylvania, even after she’d dropped out of the race, and she got 14 percent of the vote in pivotal Waukesha County, Wisconsin. “Trump has actively avoided courting any of those people,” Griffin, the former White House aide, told me. “So our belief is that there are people that you can reach—a sizable number of Republican voters—who will be willing to either cast their ballot this one time only for a Democrat, or at minimum, not vote for him.”

The gender gap in voting intention is wider than ever. College-educated women and suburbanites, in particular, are recoiling from Trump, and recent polling shows that women voters in general are 16 points more likely to support Harris. “Republican women can tip this election,” Brittany Prime, a self-identified moderate Republican and a co-founder of the anti-Trump organization Women4US, told me. Her group has identified nearly 400,000 “MAGA-exhausted” women in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, who, the group believes, can be persuaded to vote for Harris in November. Prime sees that effort as a twofold push. First, they assure voters that backing a Democrat “doesn’t mean you aren’t a Republican anymore,” she said. The second part of the message is that “no one’s going to find out, I promise.”

Some of the Republican women that Prime’s organization is talking to have requested that no mailers or ballots be sent to their home, she told me, because they don’t want their husband to find out. They plan to “go into the voting booth, vote their conscience, and never admit to it,” she said. When you talk to anti-Trump Republicans about this clandestine sisterhood, they will share stories about sticky notes in bathroom stalls reminding women that who they vote for is secret. Back in 2016, pollsters identified the “shy Trump voter” phenomenon, which referred to the poll respondents who were unwilling to admit that they were voting for Trump—and thus went unrepresented in surveys. Prime and other anti-Trump conservatives are hopeful that a similar phenomenon happens again, but in reverse: the shy anti-Trump voter. “We could be surprised on Election Day and the days after that there’s a silent majority, a quiet groundswell” in support of Harris, she said.

The problem with a quiet groundswell, though, is in its name. All of these hopeful anecdotes are impossible to translate into hard data about voter numbers and behavior. And some on the left are frustrated with Harris’s closing strategy, partly, because it’s an appeal to Republicans. “She’s trying to win without the base,” as Naomi Klein, the progressive author and columnist, put it this week.

A consistent drumbeat about practical, pocketbook policies would be better, other critics argue. After all, Democratic candidates in close House and Senate races are running campaign ads about abortion. A recent survey from the Center for Working-Class Politics found that voters responded better to “economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative” than to warnings about Trump. “Ironically,” Dustin Guastella, a research associate with the group, wrote this week, “if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it.”

[Read: The everyday warfare of voting in America]

Most Americans already know what they think about Trump. As New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who was once a Trump critic and now supports him, put it rather cynically on CNN this week, “With a guy like [Trump], it’s kinda baked into the vote.” Sure, Trump referring to his critics as “the enemy from within” is despicable. So is Trump’s statement as president, reported by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, that he wished he had generals like Hitler’s. But voters have been hearing stories about Trump’s authoritarian inclinations and norm violations for years, and the polls still show an impossibly tight race. Almost four years after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol—and amid his four indictments and felony conviction—Trump’s favorability rating is higher now than at any time during his presidency.

After Cheney and the former Trump staffers finished speaking onstage in the Philadelphia suburbs, the audience responded with sustained applause, and the attendees I interviewed for feedback shook their heads in wonder. “It’s just amazing. I was impressed by these young women,” Ann Marie Nasek, a lawyer from Glenside, Pennsylvania, told me. It’s so difficult to understand the other side, she explained—why her neighbors and family members, who are, by all accounts, good and decent people, still support Trump, despite everything. “I wish this whole room was filled with Republicans,” she said, looking around.

On Tuesday, seven days before Election Day, Harris will deliver a speech from the Ellipse, the park behind the South Lawn of the White House where four years ago Trump rallied his supporters before they descended on the Capitol. Harris’s intention is obvious: conjure the dark imagery of the day that a defeated American president attempted to cling to power, just as voters make their final deliberations. Less clear is whether enough of those voters care.