Republicans at the DNC urge anti-Trump voters to put ‘country over party’

CHICAGO — Republicans are showing up on and off the stage at the Democratic National Convention to urge their peers to support Vice President Kamala Harris for president over former President Donald Trump.

A mayor in a battleground state, a former Trump voter, and a former Trump White House official have already addressed the convention to explain why they cannot support the former president’s return to the White House as they seek to appeal to those in the middle of the political spectrum. More high-profile Republicans will take the stage on Wednesday.

On the sidelines, there are a number of Republicans sitting in the stands of the United Center who are actively working to get Harris elected. Joe Walsh, a former GOP congressman from Illinois, said he reached over 70,000 people over Zoom in his Republicans for Harris effort, along with former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who was part of the House committee that was in charge of investigating the former president’s actions during the Jan. 6 attack.

“It continues to grow and more high-profile national people join me and Adam Kinzinger and others. And you know this election is going to come down to 12 people in four states, and if we can just help give enough courage to some local Republicans in the battleground states, it’ll help,” Walsh told the Washington Examiner at the Democratic National Convention.

Craig Snyder is the director of Haley Voters for Harris, a PAC of like-minded Republicans who voted for former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley in this year’s Republican primaries. He believes there’s a sizable number of Republicans who could be swayed, pointing to the tens of thousands of primary voters who chose Haley even after she dropped out of the primary race.

“There could easily be a third of registered Republicans who really want to move on from Donald Trump,” Snyder explained in an interview with the Washington Examiner ahead of a planned happy hour with Republicans attending the DNC on Wednesday. “The only way to move on from Donald Trump is to defeat him.”

In the weeks following Harris’s rise to the top of the ticket, the Trump campaign has struggled to define Harris. In their most recent attack ads airing in swing states, they call her a “soft-on-crime radical who is too dangerous for the White House.” Snyder doesn’t think that branding is effective.

“Look, she’s going to be labeled as Mao Zedong by the Trump campaign but the truth is they would say that about any Democrat, that’s the playbook,” he said. “The reality is that she was a tough prosecutor, tough on crime, for most of her career, the political criticism from the Left.

“When she ran for president in 2019, she took a bunch of positions that were, in fact, pretty far left. She is renouncing those positions in this campaign. I think people can criticize that, I think it’s a sign of growth,” he added.

Stephanie Sharp is also working to court a similar group of voters as the co-founder of Women4U.S., an organization of center-right women working to defeat Trump. Sharp describes herself as a lifelong Republican who served in the Kansas legislature.

“We’ve talked to three different state party people this week that have said, ‘we have women walking through the doors of the Georgia Democratic Party and saying, ‘I’m a lifelong Republican, but you have to activate me’,” she said.

Renee Lafair, a co-founder of the group, said there are a lot of Republicans who are helping them organize behind the scenes, specifically targeting women in swing states.

“There’s a real cost for people to publicly say they’re not supporting the top of the ticket on the Republican side,” Lafair said. “There are a lot of people who are helping us quietly organize, and we’ve been happy with the response.

The Trump campaign said they continue to make inroads with disaffected Democrats and Independents, pointing to speculation that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may drop out of the 2024 race and endorse Trump.

“President Trump continues to build a historic and unified political movement to make America strong, wealthy, and safe again,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Comrade Kamala Harris is the most unpopular Vice President in history and our campaign will spend every day until Nov. 5 ensuring every voter understands how dangerously liberal Kamala is.”

On Tuesday, GOP Mayor John Giles, of Mesa, Arizona, pleaded with fellow Republicans to “put country first” in a prime-time speech at the convention and commended the Biden-Harris administration for “reaching across the aisle” to get things done.

“I’m going to ribbon cuttings every single week all because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris reached across the aisle and they delivered for my conservative community,” Giles said in a speech on Tuesday night.

Giles invoked the name of the late Sen. John McCain in his speech and the Arizona senator’s famous motto of “country over party.” 

“John McCain’s party is gone, and we don’t owe a damn thing to what’s been left behind,” he said.

Democratic delegates on the convention floor gave former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham a standing ovation as she shared what it was like to work for the former president. 

“I saw him when the cameras were off, behind closed doors. Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers,” she said.

After serving as Trump’s press secretary for nine months, Grisham was named first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff. She said the last straw for her was the Jan. 6 insurrection when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, seeking to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win. 

“On Jan. 6, I asked Melania if we could at least tweet that while peaceful protest is the right of every American, there’s no place for lawlessness and violence. She replied with one word: ‘No,’” Grisham said, as a picture of the alleged text chain appeared on the jumbotron. 

Cross-party endorsements are not new in U.S. politics and Republicans have played prominent roles in previous Democratic conventions in the past. In 2020, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich endorsed Biden in a recorded speech. Democrats were not regularly featured at last month’s Republican convention, although Trump counts on support and advice from former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who once served as a congresswoman from Hawaii. 

Harris’s campaign is seeking to court disaffected Republicans and recently unveiled a GOP task force for the vice president across the country through outreach to current and former GOP voters in the state “who feel marginalized by the MAGA movement.” The group is working to poach an existing network of anti-Trump Republicans who have opposed the former president’s bid for a third presidential cycle. 

Democrats appear to understand the benefits of courting conservative and moderate voters outweigh the risks of offending their progressive flank. Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), the former House majority whip and one of the most influential voices in Congress, praised Republicans who are at the DNC and those who are taking the stage.

“I really applaud [Republicans] for doing this for the American people and letting them know what is at stake here is in fact our democracy and not Democrats or Republicans or Independents – but it’s for everybody,” Clyburn said, speaking to reporters Monday night after he took the stage. “So many Republicans in my home state, believe it or not, of South Carolina, are now speaking out.”

“I think it’s good for us to give a platform to these people while they are tuning in and trying to find out who Kamala Harris is, so I think this is a good time to do that,” he said.

Before Republicans took to the stage this week, Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) contended that Republicans and “everybody else” are welcome in the Harris campaign and “space” in a potential administration that Harris “would put together.”

“So many people feel that they’ve been left out and left behind by the extremism that is Donald Trump,” Beshear told reporters Tuesday after addressing the Democratic National Committee’s Rural Council. “We can be a party that works with everyone, that believes that our job is to create a better life for every single American, not to spend our time on vengeance or retribution, but to spend time moving our country forward.” 

“At the end of the day, people care most about how their family is doing, how their neighbors are doing, and yes, their neighbors may be of a different party, but you still care about your neighbor and you want them to do well,” he said.

When asked about prickly issues such as immigration, Beshear predicted the public will “get thoughtful answers from her, answers that are based on policy, and answers that recognize the complexity that yes, we need strong borders, and border security is national security, but we’re still talking about human beings”.

“You can believe in both, and then we can get real immigration reform that they were working on until Donald Trump killed it,” he added. “So yes, she’s going to be able to talk to all voters.”

For former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, Republican outreach cannot be patronizing.

“No one likes to be told that they made a mistake when they voted, right?” Heitkamp told the Washington Examiner after the same Rural Council meeting. “What you will hear from so many people in rural America is, ‘I don’t like the guy, I don’t like how he talks to people, I don’t like how he represents, you know, himself, but I like his ideas.’ And that’s an opening to talk about what those ideas are and how our ideas are better.” 

The day before, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) agreed about drawing a contrast for Republicans between Harris and Trump.

“I think what Pennsylvanians want to know is how is the next president going to impact their lives and Donald Trump has a history of bringing chaos into people’s lives, less jobs, less freedom,” Shapiro told reporters after addressing the Labor Council. “Kamala Harris has been on the side of the people, and I think Pennsylvanians are less concerned about where she grew up, as opposed to what direction she wants to take the country in the future, and what she’s talking about, bringing down costs, increasing job opportunities, particularly in the energy sector.”

Democrats are aggressively courting rank-and-file union members who had drifted over to Trump in the 2016 election, believing he’d be a champion for the working class. While the former president led with union voters in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania 50% to 45% in July, Pennsylvania likely voters in unions are now breaking for Harris by 15 points, according to an Emerson College poll released last week.

“Unions are a critical element of any kind of electoral coalition. We care deeply as Democrats about unions and the right to collectively bargain,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), speaking with reporters on Tuesday.

“Kamala Harris is part of the Biden Harris administration that was, without question, the most pro-union administration we have seen in the presidency,” Peters said.

In former President Barack Obama’s speech to the convention on Tuesday night, he urged Democrats to appeal to a large swath of voters, which includes outreach to Republicans and independents alike.

“To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices; and that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidate, we need to listen to their concerns — and maybe learn something in the process,” Obama said.

Marisa Schultz contributed to this report.