ROYAL OAK, MI – This is what pitching Kamala Harris to Republicans sounded like from former Rep. Liz Cheney.
“What I can tell you is that what the Vice President is saying about being a president for all Americans and caring deeply about this country, those are things that come across very clearly and directly,” she said on stage Monday sitting next to Kamala Harris.
It was a campaign event aimed at making Cheney Republicans — anti-Trump but still self-described conservatives — comfortable with voting for the Democratic nominee. It is a message built on trust: believe me, I am one of you, Cheney relayed, and I am telling you we can live with this Democrat in office.
There are two things to think about when it comes to the last-ditch all-out push to get Republicans to vote for Harris: the first is that it is going to be hard to do; the second is how badly Democrats may need it to work.
Fears that Democratic base voters won’t show up like Harris needs are everywhere in battleground states. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, there’s a concern that white, working-class voters won’t show up for Harris like they did for Union Joe. In Arizona and Nevada, polls show Hispanic men moving toward Trump. In North Carolina and Georgia, the concern is Black men doing the same thing. In Michigan, vocal leaders in the Arab American community have vowed to punish Harris over the current administration’s policies on the war in Gaza.
Falling short among these voters could, theoretically, be made up with good turnout from Never Trump Republicans. They helped Biden win in 2020. Now, some really need to be convinced that Harris is not the socialist caricature that a lifelong Republican might be conditioned to see her as.
So, two weeks before the election, the campaign assembled a Harris tour through Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania with Cheney at her side, and Harris’s most prominent Republican supporters got on a bus and drove from Philadelphia to Detroit.
Jim Skovgard, a lifelong Republican from Wyoming, mostly retired from an oil-drilling adjacent industry, was standing in the back of the Theater of Living Arts in Philadelphia, a rock club converted for one night only into a safe space for the vested and khaki-wearing middle- to upper-middle-aged white folks who make up the core audience for The Bulwark, a Never Trump media startup.
Skovgard talks with a cowboy’s drawl, and, lately, only about dark clouds rolling in with a possible second Trump term. About people wanting to belong, and believing in big lies, and what happens when they do.
“The stakes are pretty high.” he said. “From history, the stakes are huge. History warns us.”
A Bulwark liveshow brought the crowd to the theater; a bus emblazoned with “Republican Voters Against Trump” on the side brought Skovgard.
He joined the group in August, one of hundreds of fed-up Republicans who have created testimonials to lead their fellow Republicans away from Trump. The testimonials have been turned into a $40 million ad campaign, which means just about every time one opens YouTube in a swing state these days, one hears a short pitch from a person like Skovgard.
What links The Bulwark crowd to the bus is Sarah Longwell, the political strategist, Trump-opposing Republican and podcast host. She dreamt up RVAT as part of her PAC work, she placed the ads, and she is a star of The Bulwark podcast universe.
“No one hates Trump more than us!” Longwell has said more than once. The bus was her idea — a way to leave it all on the field as this close election reaches its end. The testimonial ads, but IRL. The trip came together fast. It was a group of RVATs and some of the anti-Trump movements most recognizable names. Yes, George Conway was on the bus.
“Our ad campaign is in, it’s done,” Longwell told NOTUS. “And I just knew I couldn’t sit around the office for the last two weeks or I would go crazy.”
When Longwell got on stage, now with her Bulwark host hat on, she urged listeners to get out and knock on doors, to make calls, to make the case for Harris. It’s a shift from punditry and high-level ad buy strategy into actual campaign mode.
Skovgard has become a posting machine, joining every social network he can find and popping anti-Trump commentary under the handle The Crazy Republican. In Philadelphia, he was patiently using Facebook Messenger to talk to Myrna, an 88-year-old woman back in Wyoming whom he had had a public spat with over Trump on his Facebook page.
“Thank you for debating me on Facebook,” she wrote him. “I really enjoyed the back and forth. You’re here for a purpose. God bless you and yours.”
It read to Skovgard that a door was opening, just a little. The private comity was a good sign.
The overwhelming feeling on the road with RVAT, and then with the Harris campaign, is that of a race against time.
Longwell is all-in on Harris, but acknowledges the vice president still has work to do.
“She does have to overcome the ‘San Francisco liberal’ thing because to these voters it’s a very specific thing,” she said. “They don’t know what San Francisco liberal means exactly. It’s not a selection of policies. It’s a thing they reflexively don’t like.”
Harris talks about her time as a prosecutor, the gun in her house and her willingness to use it. She has made economic promises that progressives really do not like. At a campaign stop for her in Grand Rapids, Michigan, her husband, Doug Emhoff, appeared with Mark Cuban, one of people who has drawn that progressive ire as she seems to welcome his push for crypto deregulation.
Emhoff ticked off Harris’ qualifications and experience and then reminded the crowd that she calls herself a capitalist.
“What more do you need to know?” he said in a cadence that read genuinely baffled.
More, apparently. A polling analysis from the centrist think tank Third Way found Harris trailing Biden’s performance with moderates despite, a Third Way official said, “doing everything she needs to do on that front.”
Like just about everyone supporting Harris and staring at poll numbers in these final weeks, the big Bulwark names on the bus were feeling pretty punchy. At some point between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, George Conway pulled out a guitar and began noodling away on what became swiftly apparent was an actual composition: a parody version of Honky Tonk Women starring Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, U.S. district court judge Tanya Chutkan and Harris. “It’s the law and order women,” Conway sang as he debuted the song at the Pittsburgh bus stop. “They’re gonna give him, give him, give him, the law-and-order blues.”
It was weird. But so much of this was — people who never would have imagined supporting Harris were riding on a bus-sized bumper sticker opposing a popular Republican nominee for president.
It was not always a comfortable space to be in. Through the redder parts of Pennsylvania, cars and trucks regularly pulled alongside and honked their horns as occupants extended a middle finger. Mary, the contracted driver from the bus company, said she had been repeatedly cut off and otherwise harassed as she drove up from its homebase in Maryland with it’s fresh anti-Trump wrap. She laughed it off. Bus vs. car, bus wins, she said.
For the passengers, this was a familiar experience. Anti-Trump Republicans live very close to the most aggressive parts of the MAGA movement. Ursula Schneider lives just outside of Tucson, Arizona, and left Trumpism a while back. But her friends and acquaintances have only gotten Trumpier. A woman who stayed at her house with her husband for a week when her car broke down is currently in jail for participating in the Jan. 6 riot.
“Oh, yeah they were conspiracy theorists,” she said, laughing at the memory of the visit.
Robert Nix, a successful lawyer and lifelong Republican, was a senior member of George W. Bush’s Pennsylvania operation in 2004. Now his face is all over the state on RVAT billboards. He and his wife can’t talk about politics anymore because she’s too mad about his opposition to Trump. His mother has not really talked to him for a long time for the same reason.
“My brother was visiting me on July 13, Saturday, when there was the assassination attempt. He stopped her from calling me to ask if I had anything to do with it,” he said. “My. Mother.”
Not every Democrat agrees it’s necessary to deprogram Republicans to win. Bob Brady, Philadelphia Democratic Party chair, told NOTUS he feels good about the numbers he’s been seeing. He needs at least 400,000 Democratic votes in Philadelphia to secure a victory, he said, and his GOTV operation is pushing the base vote to make that happen. Mail-in ballots are coming back at a higher rate than in 2020, he said. Despite reports to the contrary, Brady insists all the Democrats are working together nicely.
But surely this is an election like he’s never seen before, right?
“Most of them are like this,” he said. “They’re all a pain in the ass.”
Skovgard was learning that in real time.Two days after his promising Messenger conversation with Myrna, “Her next message to me, on Facebook, is ‘you’re a hypocrite’ because I’m, you know, with the bus,” he said. It felt nasty, like none of the other private conversations had mattered.
Cheney and Longwell have put their names behind this effort to sell Harris. Democrats have tested elements of their coalition with rightward shifts on immigration, economics and more. Millions of dollars are being spent and thousands of campaign hours used to convince people who may not love love Trump to put an end to his political career by voting for Harris. Skovgard and his cohorts are working their networks. There’s about two weeks left for this heavy lift.
“We may be too late,” Skovgard said.
—
Evan McMorris-Santoro is a reporter at NOTUS. Jasmine Wright, a NOTUS reporter, contributed to this report.