RIPON, Wis. ― Vice President Kamala Harris made an unlikely appearance with an unlikely surrogate, showing how former President Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and attempt to overthrow the 2020 election have scrambled traditional political alliances.
Appearing alongside former Rep. Liz Cheney, once the third-highest ranking House Republican and the daughter of a man regularly viewed as one of liberalism’s biggest enemies two decades ago, Harris tore into Trump as an enemy of the Constitution and rule of law.
“The tragic truth that we are facing in this election for president of the United States is that there is actually an honest question about whether one of the candidates will uphold the oath to the Constitution of the United States,” Harris said.
Cheney, a one-time Trump supporter who broke with him over the Jan. 6 insurrection, and who subsequently helped lead the congressional investigation into Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election, landed similar attacks while also praising Harris as a type of pragmatic Democrat who should not scare away her fellow conservatives.
“In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration, it is our duty,” said Cheney. “Our survival as a republic depends on a peaceful transition of power.”
The joint appearance with Cheney is the highest-profile effort by the Harris campaign since the Democratic National Convention to extend a hand to Republicans, a tactic the campaign hopes can convince voters to view the race as a democracy-or-bust referendum ― but which Republicans have disparaged as irrelevant.
“Our nation is not some spoil to be won,” Harris said. “In the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.”
The location of their appearance was more symbolic than practical: Ripon, located about 90 miles northwest of Milwaukee, is widely seen as the birthplace of the Republican Party in 1854, with a one-room schoolhouse in the city hosting several key meetings leading to the party’s formation. The county surrounding it, Fond du Lac, has been a GOP stronghold for decades, and Harris is unlikely to make significant gains there.
“It was founded in a meeting in 1854 in the little white schoolhouse, and it was founded by people who were opposed to slavery,” Cheney said. “It was that Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower, the party of Reagan and Bush. It’s that party that I belonged to my entire life.”
There was some awkwardness to Cheney’s appearance. While the crowd of roughly 1,600 Harris supporters greeted her with chants of “Thank you, Liz!” causing Cheney to appear to briefly tear up, their applause when she described herself as a “Reagan conservative,” outlined her long history of voting for and working for GOP presidents ― from Gerald Ford in 1976 to Trump more than four decades later, and her friendship with the conservative commentator Charles Krauthmamer was best described as perfunctory and polite.
But her digs at Trump ― “I was a Republican before Donald Trump started spray-tanning” ― generated more applause, as did an attack on former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, still a villain among Democrats in the state for his role pushing anti-union legislation more than a decade ago.
She ended her speech with a plea to her fellow Republicans: “I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump. And I ask you, instead, to help us elect Kamala Harris for president.”
The campaign backed up the event with launches of Republicans for Harris chapters in Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, and has scheduled events featuring former Rep. Adam Kinzinger in Nevada on Friday and former Trump aide Stephanie Grisham in Arizona on Saturday. The Wisconsin group is headed up by a sitting district attorney, while former Rep. David Trott leads the Michigan effort.
Harris’ campaign also released a new ad featuring a Republican voter from Pennsylvania backing her as the best choice for middle-class voters.
“I am a Republican. I voted for Donald Trump, and I went to his inauguration in 2016. We tried it for four years. It just didn’t work,” the voter, Matt McCaffery, says in one of the two ads released by the campaign. “All these billionaires are coming out of the woodwork to support Trump ― well, no shit. They want their tax breaks on the backs of the middle class.”
The Trump campaign responded to the appearance by noting Cheney’s attacks on Harris from when the former GOP representative was still backing Trump in 2019 and now-President Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate.
Harris “has a more liberal voting record than Bernie Sanders & Elizabeth Warren,” Cheney wrote on social media at the time.
In what appeared to be a brief interview with Fox News, Trump himself downplayed the appearance of a woman whose support he used to brag about. “Liz Cheney is a stupid war hawk. All she wants to do is shoot missiles at people,” he said. “I think they hurt each other. I think they’re both so bad.”
Harris, predictably, was a bit more friendly to Cheney.
“She’s been an extraordinary national leader, and has served with great honor,” Harris said. “It is my profound honor to have your support.”
At the same time, Harris seemed almost eager to return to a time where her and Cheney would not have to link arm-in-arm.
“We are going to get back to a healthy two-party system,” the Democratic presidential nominee said. “I’m sure of that.”
