Harris and Trump Are Deploying Party Defectors Very Differently

For a presidential election characterized by immense partisan polarization, where the two candidates sound as though they come from different universes, there is a remarkable amount of attention being paid to defectors. Kamala Harris campaigned last week with Liz Cheney, the woman who was the No. 3 House Republican as recently as 2021 and who happens to be the daughter of iconic conservative Dick Cheney, who has also endorsed Harris. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s campaign has blessed a road show by ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard that is showing up in battleground states, so far being Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada.

The obvious reason for this high-profile deployment of apostates is that this is a very close presidential election between two equally matched party bases that can achieve total victory with even a small accretion of additional support. But that doesn’t mean the two campaigns have mirror-image strategies for deploying defectors. A closer look, in fact, suggests very different approaches based on very different ideas of where to find the crucial bloc of persuadable voters.

The Harris-Walz campaign, like the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020, is focusing on a clearly identifiable slice of the electorate: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (some call them anti-Trump Republicans and others Nikki Haley Republicans) who don’t want to vote for Donald Trump but are reassured by the company of like-minded leaders that it’s acceptable to vote for Democrats. Despite the complaints of some progressives that the size of this bloc of voters is perpetually overrated, Pew’s authoritative analysis of validated voters shows the share of moderate/liberal Republicans voting for the Democratic nominee doubled from 8 percent to 16 percent between 2016 and 2020. The value of these voters is enhanced by their demographic characteristics; they are disproportionately college educated and somewhat older and very likely to show up at the polls, all other things being equal. In addition, the Harris campaign can reach out to them without modifying its message significantly, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out:

Harris’s Republican supporters generally don’t claim her policy agenda is better than Trump’s. Their argument is simply that supporting the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power is a threshold issue he fails to clear. Trump “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” said [Liz] Cheney, “He can never be trusted with power again.”

So conventionally speaking, Harris is able to use Republican surrogates to reinforce her implicit message that she is much closer to the country’s mainstream — closer to “the center,” in the language of the Beltway — than Trump and a safer option for voters fearful of both left and right extremism. If Harris is indeed a “Marxist,” as Trump likes to say, could Dick Cheney and his daughter really support her? Probably not.

Now the mirror-image strategy for the Trump-Vance campaign would be to identify and deploy relatively conservative Democrats to denounce Harris and Tim Walz as radical leftists who are inadequately patriotic, too “woke,” and in love with open borders and runaway government spending. That is, after all, what the Trump campaign and conservative media are saying around the clock. But there just aren’t any notable Democratic celebrities this year who are willing and able to play the role of centrist defector played by Zell Miller in 2004, Joe Lieberman in 2008, or Artur Davis in 2012. To a remarkable extent, Democratic opinion leaders have lined up behind Harris. That’s one major reason the Trump campaign is going in a different direction in using apostates. The big-name defectors who are available are by no means sensible centrists tut-tutting about her San Francisco liberalism. They are people like Kennedy and Gabbard, who have an entirely different rationale for going MAGA, as the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo explained after taking in their Reclaim America event for Trump in Michigan:

The message delivered to the thousand people who showed up at a local Detroit area theater that day was hardly typical GOP fare.

Speakers issued dire warnings about the dangers of illiberalism, corporate power, “poison food,” state surveillance, and the military industrial complex. Former Vice President Dick Cheney and past Ambassador John Bolton were name-dropped and booed as war pigs. Mentions of illegal immigration were scant. Dystopian rhetoric about big city crime was absent.

This is Blue MAGA.

If the messengers aren’t the Democratic equivalent of the Cheneys or the host of former GOP administration appointees who have endorsed Harris, neither are the voters Kennedy and Gabbard are targeting typical middle-of-the-roaders. Au contraire, particularly with respect to the former 2024 candidate Kennedy:

Kennedy’s political value is not in the typical Democrats he can bring to Trump but in the unconventional voters and audiences he can reach. He has received positive attention on influential podcasts, most notably the Joe Rogan Experience, whose host praised Kennedy as “the only [presidential candidate] who makes sense to me” before he quit his campaign in August …

How big a boost Kennedy and Gabbard provide Trump is ultimately the million-dollar question. A Trump campaign adviser, speaking anonymously, said the campaign’s internal data indicates about 30 percent of the Reclaim America Tour’s audiences are people who “are not in our system.” 

What this suggests is that the deployment of these ex-Democrats is part and parcel of a Trump campaign strategy that has eschewed traditional get-out-the-vote methods in favor of a focus on “low-propensity” voters. This controversial approach has its critics and its admirers, but it does seem Team Trump is pursuing it consistently.

It’s probably not a coincidence that prize Trump surrogate Kennedy had a sizable following among low-propensity voters at the peak of his now-abandoned independent presidential campaign: voters hard to classify by conventional ideological categories and often relying on unconventional sources of political information — like, for example, Joe Rogan — while expressing mistrust and even fury toward conventional politics and other Establishment institutions. It’s not surprising that a master of rage and chaos like Trump might have a potential edge among “I hate everybody” voters who believe government and corporations are conspiring to poison their children and then send them off to war.

A lot may depend on which campaign’s theory of the nature of persuadable voters is accurate and how well their surrogates are able to reach out to them. For all we know, the Cheneys could be the key to victory for Harris and Kennedy the key to victory for Trump. In either event, that would blow many minds.