BROOKFIELD, Wis. ― Vice President Kamala Harris brought her swing-state tour with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney and conservative Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes to the traditional heart of Wisconsin conservatism in suburban Waukesha County on Monday night.
It was the third and final conversation-style event between Harris and Cheney ― moderated by Sykes ― on Monday. The earlier events were in the Philadelphia and Detroit suburbs, respectively.
But Waukesha County, which propelled Republican Scott Walker to the governorship in 2010, ushering in a period of right-wing ascendancy, was a fitting final location for a presidential campaign that is aggressively courting moderate Republicans and independents ― the kind cut from the same cloth as Cheney and Sykes ― to keep former President Donald Trump out of the White House. From 2016 to 2020, the affluent county, still a GOP stronghold, swung about six points toward the Democratic presidential nominee.
In keeping with the goal of moving the suburban needle further still, Harris, Cheney and Sykes spent the bulk of their time on areas of agreement: Trump’s disrespect for cornerstone American institutions like free and fair elections, his threat to the U.S.-led liberal order in the world, and his indecent character.
Sykes, an anti-Trump conservative from the Milwaukee suburbs who formally endorsed Harris on Monday, began the event with an election nerd joke about the event taking place in “crucial Waukesha County.”
He then asked Harris to explain why she was asking Republicans to forsake their party, and almost certainly a lot of their policy beliefs, to cast a vote for her.
“We love our country, and we believe in the foundational principles that are at stake in this election,” Harris said. “There is more we have in common than what separates us when we think about what is at stake in terms of our democracy, rule of law, the Constitution of the United States, national security, the standing of our country in the context of the world ― all of that is at stake.”
Cheney, who also held her first rally alongside Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin, earlier this month, won her place at Harris’ side thanks to her own personal sacrifice because of her principled stand against Trump. She lost her Republican primary in Wyoming in 2022 because of her vote to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and subsequent co-chairing of the special committee to investigate Trump’s role in the events of that day.
If you wouldn’t hire somebody to babysit your kids, then you shouldn’t make that guy the president of the United States.Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.)
In making her case to Republican voters to cross the aisle, Cheney invoked the example of former Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000 who conceded the race to President George W. Bush after the Supreme Court ordered a halt in vote counting, as a contrast with Trump, who refused to do the same in 2020.
“You don’t have to take my word for it, but look at what people closest to Donald Trump are saying about him,” said Cheney, noting how many former senior officials and aides have attested to his refusal to accept the election results, plan to overturn them, and indifference as his supporters besieged the Capitol. “We’ve never faced a threat like this before, and I think it’s so important for people to realize this republic only survives if we protect it, and that means putting partisan politics aside and standing up for the Constitution and for what’s right and loving our country.”
A self-described “pro-life” opponent of abortion rights, Cheney already made news earlier on Monday when she added the excesses of anti-abortion states to the list of her concerns about another Trump presidency.
She repeated that thought on Monday night, singling out for condemnation Texas’ attempts to gain access to women’s medical records and expressing dismay about the instances of pregnant women who have died unnecessarily because medical professionals feared the legal exposure that would come from terminating a pregnancy.
“It’s crucially important for us to find ways to have the federal government play a role and protect women from some of the worst harms that we’re seeing,” Cheney said.
Cheney also delivered the line of the night in a response to a question from Dan Voboril, an undecided and retired school teacher, who wanted to know how to convince people like him and his conservative siblings that Trump will worsen the “toxicity” in American culture.
“If you wouldn’t hire somebody to babysit your kids, then you shouldn’t make that guy the president of the United States,” she said, prompting whoops of laughter and applause from the crowd.
Not everyone in the Democratic coalition is pleased to see Cheney ― or her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney ― campaigning for Harris. The Cheneys are deeply hawkish proponents of American military interventionism; Dick Cheney was an architect of the Iraq War, which progressives consider the quintessential example of American hubris, disregard for human life, and even imperialism.
The debate over the Democratic Party’s foreign policy found its way into the hall on Monday night, when a lone heckler from the audience shouted out a critical question about Harris’ approach to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. “What about Gaza?” the attendee yelled out toward the beginning of the forum.
The response of those in the room mirrored how Harris has handled those dissenting voices to her left on foreign policy: by ignoring or outright flouting them. The audience applauded to drown out the man’s voice until he was removed from the theater by event staff.
Harris, unfazed, reveled in the opportunity to tout her and Cheney’s shared belief in the fundamentally noble nature of the U.S. security state and extol its mission to help Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion.
Referring to Trump’s vague promises to end the Russia-Ukraine war through negotiation, Harris said, “I don’t think we, as Americans, think that the president of the United States should solve an issue like that through surrender.”
The polls have tightened in Wisconsin to the point where Harris is now barely leading in the state. It’s unclear whether Monday night’s event will make a difference for Harris in the college-educated suburbs where she likely must maintain or exceed President Joe Biden’s performance to offset Trump’s inroads with non-college voters of all races.
Everything about him was against what we used to believe. And I just couldn’t go along with it.Cathy Waller, former executive director, Waukesha County Republican Party
But while many of the attendees were longtime Democrats who were simply eager to hear the vice president up close, a number of people in the audience had only begun abandoning the GOP in 2016 or in the intervening years.
Cathy Waller, the former executive director of the Waukesha County Republican Party, retired after Trump’s win in 2016. The outcome revolted her, prompting her to support Democrats for the presidency ― and downballot, since congressional Republicans are loyal to Trump.
She finds Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants, and decision to separate the families of undocumented immigrants, especially troubling.
“Everything about him was against what we used to believe,” Waller said. “And I just couldn’t go along with it.”
For Penny Miller, a real estate agent who drove down to the event with friends from Neenah, Wisconsin, the process had been slower. She voted for Trump twice due to what she hoped he would do as a business person, to tame the national debt and get the country’s budget in order.
Miller eventually got sick of Trump “making fun of people” and “not listening,” and believes he did not stabilize the country’s finances.
Miller’s friend from Waukesha County, who withheld her name for privacy, never voted for Trump, but expressed some disappointment that Harris had not done more that evening to address the most common reasons she hears from people about why they aren’t voting for Harris: the economy ― really, inflation ― and the chaos that erupted on the U.S.-Mexico border due to a surge in the number of asylum seekers.
“I would like her to speak about that, to persuade those voters to see how she is different from Biden and what she’s going to do differently,” the woman said.
