Pennsylvania’s Nikki Haley voters will be getting a call in the coming months urging them to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris — or at the very least, to not vote at all.
A group of moderate Pennsylvania Republicans, led by former GOP Rep. Jim Greenwood, launched Republican Voters for Harris on Monday, with plans to reach out to every Republican in Pennsylvania. The group has a particular focus on the 158,000 registered Republicans who voted for Haley back in April in the state’s Republican presidential primary.
Haley herself has said she’s voting for former President Donald Trump despite campaigning against him. Trump has also repeatedly bashed Haley voters, saying in March that he’s sure they’ll get on board with him, but that “I’m not sure we need too many.” (Pennsylvania was decided by fewer than 100,000 votes in both 2016 and 2020.)
Harris, who Republicans are attacking as more liberal than President Joe Biden, is proving to be a difficult sell to some. But Greenwood and his allies still see an opening.
“I do talk to people a lot who say, ‘Yeah, I can’t vote for Trump, but I can bring myself to vote for Harris,’” Greenwood said on Monday.
His answer to them: Those Republicans can “waste their vote” on a third-party candidate or on a “feel-good write-in,” but that ultimately, a vote for Harris isn’t about Harris herself, it’s about defeating Trump.
Ann Womble, a former Lancaster County GOP chair who is co-leading the group with Greenwood, also said the focus isn’t about promoting Harris but about defeating Trump. She called this year’s presidential race an “asymmetric” choice.
“This isn’t a balancing act between a list of Trump’s positions on policies and Kamala Harris’ positions on policies. The issue of character and fitness for office outweighs everything I can imagine,” Womble said. “I do not need a president whom I agree with on every issue.”
Greenwood said the group currently includes about three dozen GOP organizers in the state who heard about the effort from word of mouth. He expects the number to be in the thousands by November.
Greenwood is a leading anti-Trump Republican in the state. He called Biden a personal friend, raising money for his 2020 campaign and organizing a Biden endorsement from over two dozen former members of Congress.
He also supported a super PAC in 2022 against GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, whom organizers viewed as too extreme. Now, with Gov. Josh Shapiro in the spotlight, Greenwood fully endorses him for the vice presidential nomination.
Outside of Pennsylvania, a Republican coalition in Arizona also announced a group that will target and convince Republicans in the state to vote for Harris, launching Monday.
The Pennsylvania group plans to contact every one of the 3.5 million registered Republicans in the Commonwealth between now and November, Greenwood said.
From there, the group plans to recruit the Harris Republicans to write op-eds and knock on other Republicans’ doors. For the undecided, Womble said it’s less about changing minds and more about making lifelong Republicans feel they do have a choice other than Trump.
“We know that there’s a good number of the 158,000 that are going to probably go home and vote for their party, so we don’t have any kind of illusions that all 150,000 are coming with us,” Womble said. “But we believe that there’s a significant portion of those folks that believe the same way we do, who are willing to take, I don’t want to call it a risk, take a new path and maybe vote for a Democrat for president for the first time in their lives.”
“And we’re here to tell them, ‘It’s OK, we’ve done it, we welcome you, and we want to hear what you have to say,’” she said.
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.