Chris Brennan, USA TODAY
Sun, October 6, 2024
The presidential election is 30 days away, and voters are starting to hear plenty of forceful sentiments from Republicans about Donald Trump.
It's not the kind of talk the former one-term Republican president wants out there about himself.
With the presidential race a dead heat and less than a month to go, every vote along the margins matters. Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump know that, and they are running very different campaigns. She's working feverishly to expand her reach while he stokes his base and hopes to energize low-propensity voters.
A key advantage for Harris: She has Republican allies doing some heavy lifting for her.
Republicans are lining up to help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to supporters at the Redford Fire Department on Oct. 4, 2024 in Redford, Mich.
Consider Republican Voters Against Trump, which last week launched a series of ads and billboards, spending $15 million to feature former Trump voters explaining how his behavior has persuaded them to cast a ballot this year for Harris.
Then there is Haley Voters for Harris, courting center-right voters who previously backed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in this year's Republican primaries for president. That group last week started a seven-figure digital ad buy that presents Harris as a better option than Trump for voters concerned about the economy.
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Harris is embracing the GOP support, appearing Thursday in Ripon, Wisconsin – the birthplace of the Republican Party, now in a critical swing state – with former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican who lost her Wyoming seat in 2022 due to her sustained criticism of Trump during and after his presidency.
Cheney's father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, is also backing Harris over Trump.
Trump, on the other hand, has been on a binge of ego-boosting rallies, where he rambles on for more than an hour at a time about a litany of grievances in front of supporters who are already planning to vote for him.
Harris is aiming for something new in crossover support. Trump is offering the same-old same old.
A look at the voting math in swing states
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley
The math tells a tantalizing tale in the "blue wall" swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Haley won more than 297,000 votes in Michigan's Feb. 27 Republican primary, eight days before she dropped out of the race. In the last presidential election, Joe Biden defeated Trump in that state by 154,188 votes.
Haley took nearly 77,000 votes in Wisconsin's Republican primary in April, a month after she had dropped out of the race. Biden beat Trump there by 20,682 votes four years ago.
And Haley received nearly 159,000 votes in Pennsylvania's April 23 Republican primary, seven weeks after she left the race. Biden defeated Trump in that state in 2020 by 80,555 votes.
Republicans were backing Haley before and especially after her bid was over. Does it really matter now that Haley endorsed Trump in July, after questioning in January whether he is "mentally fit" to be president again?
In an incredibly tight race, Haley's supporters in those three states could swing this for Harris.
The Republican must know this, because her former presidential campaign had a law firm send Haley Voters for Harris a "cease and desist" letter on July 23 – a week after she endorsed Trump at the Republican National Convention – demanding that the group not use her name.
Haley Voters for Harris responded by saying its rights to engage with her supporters "will not be suppressed."
What's the goal of these groups? Keep Trump away.
Craig Snyder, national director for Haley Voters for Harris, told me the group's ad is aimed at center-right voters "pretty much anywhere they go on the internet" – including YouTube, Facebook, streaming apps like HBO Max and gaming platforms.
It's geographically targeting 1.5 million voters in Pennsylvania, 600,000 in Michigan and 400,000 in Wisconsin.
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Snyder, a longtime Republican, said his group is making the "affirmative case for Harris, in terms of her record and her policy proposals, and why we think that those should not be scary to center-right voters."
Part of the pitch is that Republicans stand a good chance of winning back control of the U.S. Senate in November, and that the U.S. Supreme Court has a six-to-three conservative majority.
"Neither party is going to end up with complete control of our government," Snyder said. "There's too many firewalls. There's too many checks and balances."
Republican Voters Against Trump, Snyder said, is working toward the same goal but focused more on defining the former president "as a threat to democracy," in part due to his behavior before, during and after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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Campaign finance reports filed by both groups – Haley Voters for Harris raises money as PivotPAC while Republican Voters Against Trump goes by Republican Accountability PAC – show significant support from establishment Democrats and political action committees and nonprofits that lean that way, even if the potential audiences for the ads don't.
Snyder didn't dispute that but said his group's small-dollar donations come from people identifying as Republican from more than 40 states.
"So it's very much a bipartisan coalition of people who are working together." he said
Meanwhile, Trump is still very much Trump
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump reacts at a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. September 13, 2024. REUTERS/Piroschka Van de Wouw
Here's another thing both groups have working for them – Trump just keeps acting like Trump. If his behavior drives center-right voters to Harris, all the better for the never-Trumpers.
Trump on Friday posted a long screed on his social media site Truth Social excoriating Cheney and her father for backing Harris, mocking her as "a low IQ War Hawk" and claiming that both are "suffering gravely from Trump Derangement Syndrome."
He also threw a social media tantrum Wednesday after a prosecutor's brief was unsealed in his federal criminal case tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection that shed new and shocking light on his behavior. His freak-out was the standard stuff – calling the filing an "ILLEGAL ACTION" in a "Witch Hunt" to harm him and his reelection campaign.
Trump's fixation on grievance isn't doing much to expand his base. But building on a base requires discipline and focus, not exactly attributes that come to mind when thinking about Trump these days.
It looks like the best thing that could happen for Republican Voters Against Trump and Haley Voters for Harris – and for Harris herself – is for Trump to just keep on being Trump for the next 30 days.
Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Harris' new ally? Former Trump voters in key swing states
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