If you know anything about the founding and history of the Republican Party, the symbolism of Thursday’s event where Liz Cheney appeared with Kamala Harris had to get your attention. This party that has descended into antidemocratic neofascism was founded in 1854 as a progressive beacon. The Whig Party was dissolving and split into anti- and pro-slavery factions. The Free Soil Party was well intentioned but small. But when the antislavery Whigs and the Free Soilers got together, then they had some numbers and some power. Within six years, they elected not just a president but the most courageous and consequential president in American history (yes, FDR is a close second in my book).
It all started in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, which sits less than a mile away from where Cheney appeared with Harris. Is Cheney a “Lincoln Republican”? In one sense, she’s not even close. Lincoln was a liberal. In addition to ending slavery, he made public universities possible and created the national railroad system. He levied the country’s first income tax, to pay for the Civil War. He was way too big-government for Liz.
But in another sense, yes, she is, because at least she believes in the union, the republic, and the Constitution. By the benighted current standards of her party, that earns her a gold star.
Do liberals love Liz Cheney? Of course not. Nor should we. She’s a super-hawkish neocon. She defended torture. There’s a reason she was ascending the ladder of GOP House leadership in the 2010s. Yes, she had a pedigree, but also, she was totally fine with everything the GOP stood for.
But then Trump happened, and she stood up to say no. That did take some guts, in that authoritarian party. It unambiguously cost her her career, as she surely knew it would. And now she’s talking about the “depraved cruelty” of Donald Trump and endorsing a Democrat. And it’s not as if Harris promised her anything—that she’d bomb Iran or whatever. Cheney did this because Harris “will be a president who will defend the rule of law.”
Will it matter? I think so, and so does Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and one of the best state party chairs in the country. On MSNBC Thursday night, Wikler identified two groups of voters who might be influenced by this endorsement.
The first group is low-information uncommitted voters. He used a great analogy to describe these people. “These are people,” he told Jen Psaki, “who think about politics the way you and I think about the javelin at the Olympics, which is something that we’re vaguely aware happens every four years, but it’s not something we’re seeking out.” Yes, there are such people. For these voters, Wikler said, “just hearing that Democrats and Republicans are all agreeing that Kamala Harris is the person” might matter.
His second group was more interesting. It consists of “highly engaged” Republicans whose first loyalty is not to Trump but to “the flag and the Constitution.” Cheney’s move shows these people that “you can be yourself with your conservative commitments” and vote for a Democrat.
How many such people are there? A lot. Let’s start with the fact that Nikki Haley got nearly 4.4 million votes in the primaries. That was 20 percent of the total number of votes cast. Now let’s extrapolate that out to a November electorate. In 2020, around 155 million people voted. According to CNN exit polls, 36 percent were Republican, or around 56 million.
And 20 percent of 56 million—that is, the extrapolated Haley vote—makes for a potential pool of anti-Trump Republicans of around 11 million. Now, most of them may not bother to vote, or will write in Ronald Reagan or whomever. But surely Cheney’s backing will help convince some of them that voting for Harris is all right. And if you throw in Republican-leaning independents, that pool grows by maybe another 20 million.
If Harris can harvest votes from these people while promising nothing more than that she isn’t Donald Trump and will defend the Constitution, why shouldn’t she? I’m for as many Republican endorsements of Harris as possible. Aside from signaling a green light to Republican voters, it’ll drive Trump up a wall.
The list of Harris’s GOP endorsers is growing. Former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake joined the band earlier this week. Flake is respected by independent voters in his state. If he campaigns with Harris, he too could move votes.
Meanwhile, the big questions in this arena: What’s up with Mitt Romney and George W. Bush? There are others, like former Trump chief of staff John Kelly. But Romney and Bush are the big fish. What in the world does either man have to lose? Romney is retiring. Bush paints and golfs. Both are richer than Croesus. I assume both want desperately to save their party from Trumpism. Isn’t the obvious best way to do that by encouraging their fellow Republicans to vote for Harris so they can end the scourge of Trumpism and get back to being a normal, warmongering, poor-people-penalizing, planet-scorching party again?
But seriously. If they were to back Harris, and Harris wins semi-convincingly with something like 15 percent of the Republican vote (around half that is normal), Trump will be finished. Not Trumpism. That will take a lot longer.
People like Romney and Bush should consider their place in history. In these next few years, the Republican Party will either corrupt itself beyond repair and crumble into out-and-out fascism, becoming the vehicle that ended the human race’s longest-lasting democratic experiment, or it will finally cast that off and begin to resurrect itself. Do they want to be among those who sat by and let the former happen or those who helped the latter take place? There’s a little schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, they might visit for inspiration.
Kamala Harris’s economic vision speech (delivered in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, a mere two days after yours truly wrote that she needed to give an economic vision speech!) was … fine. Was she offering the second coming of the New Deal? No. Her rhetoric is cautious. More cautious, as American Prospect editor David Dayen interestingly pointed out this week (because Dayen is strongly of the economic populist school), than the plan itself as described in an 82-page “fact sheet” distributed by the campaign. The plan, he wrote, is more progressive than the rhetoric. But on the stump, Harris is not suddenly going to morph into Elizabeth Warren.
And today she goes to the Arizona border to try to establish more swing-voter cred. Am I loving the fact that it’s become a big Democratic applause line that she wants to sign conservative GOP Senator James Lankford’s border security bill? No, not by a long shot. On the other hand, in purely naked political terms, is it smart to go at your opponent’s strengths? Yes, it is.
It’s pretty basic politics. Trump, for all his extremism, does this frequently. Think of his twisted pitch to women this week. Campaigns that successfully neutralize the other side’s advantages tend to win (George W. Bush on John Kerry’s war record). Campaigns that let disadvantages fester tend to lose (Mitt Romney not convincingly answering Barack Obama’s Bain Capital–related attacks).
So Harris is cutting into Trump’s advantages on those two issues. That’s fine, especially with respect to the economy. But issues are the science of campaigning. There’s an art to campaigning too, and it’s on this front that the Harris campaign needs to keep pushing, because it’s here where her biggest advantage over Trump lies.
Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark had a smart piece this week reminding us that campaigns consist of news cycles, and the point of news cycles is to win them. Remember how Harris came out of the gate like a rocket in July? That’s because she was doing everything right. She was making news and winning news cycles. The early speeches, the choice and unveiling of Tim Walz, the near-flawless convention—Harris was firing on all cylinders.
Back then, practically everything about her was new to most people. But that was bound to end. Now we’re through that discovery phase. And she’s not dominating news cycles the way she was six weeks ago.
So, Last writes, the campaign needs to find ways to drive the news. It’s especially important when running against Trump, because he drives news nearly every day. Most of it is madness. But the media machine, as we have learned and relearned, has little capacity to punish madness. It rewards performance. This is what Trump has known for 40 years.
The Harris campaign seemed to know this at first, but it has lost a little momentum in these recent weeks as she’s settled more into normalcy—and, I’d say, defense. The economic speech and the border appearance are essentially defense: They’re defending or inoculating her against possible Trump attacks. As I said, they’re justifiable as politics. But they’re not offense.
So it’s time to play offense. This is where the art of campaigning comes in, and subconsciously taking advantage of her greatest strengths over Trump:
1. She’s not mentally unfit to be the president of the United States.
2. She’s not pushing 80.
3. People seem to like her. They even seem to like, or at least not dislike, her once-infamous laugh.
4. She proved in the debate that she is smarter than he is, sharper on her feet, his mental and intellectual superior in every way.
5. She knows how to get under his skin while keeping her cool.
What do these factors add up to? The idea that the Harris campaign should be tossing grenades at Trump that mock and expose him and that make news. Force him to respond. Make him explain. As an analogy, think of a tennis match: One player is sitting calmly at the center of the base line firing ground strokes left and right, while the other is running side to side, panting, covering 25 feet between each shot. It’s pretty obvious who’s going to win most of the points, and the match.
Here’s an example. Just yesterday, Trump spoke on Mark Robinson for the first time since the latter’s insane past comments (“I’m a Black NAZI!”) became public. He was making remarks at Trump Tower. As he finished and walked toward a bank of elevators, a reporter asked him if he was “going to pull” his Robinson endorsement. Trump, who once called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” paused and said: “Uh, I don’t know the situation.”
Obviously, he knows the situation. The Harris campaign should be out with an ad today mocking this, tying it to other similar remarks of his, like when he pretended he didn’t know who David Duke was. But more: Harris herself should talk to reporters mocking Trump’s lame denial. It needs to be Harris herself, not Walz or Doug Emhoff.
There are tons of opportunities. Trump’s liquid rhetoric is such that he constantly contradicts himself and often just makes no sense. It makes me crazy that Harris is being knocked for not having “positions.” Do those critics seriously think that what Trump is saying constitutes “positions”? Remember that answer of his a few weeks ago when the woman asked him about childcare? It was embarrassing to listen to. He does that all the time. Make sure voters know it. Attack. In a mocking way. Make news. Play offense.
People like me aren’t supposed to say things like this, but here it is: A lot of these swing voters, they’re not voting on issues. The economy, maybe. But generally, they vote on vibes. Who has the look of a winner? Who looks fresh and ready to tackle this big job, and who looks tired? Who appears to be having fun?
That was the Harris of July and August. She had some magic. It’s hardly panic time. A raft of swing state polls came out Thursday night, and she leads in every state except Georgia, where it’s tied. She’s ahead, and he’s weak and worried and knows he might lose (and then face sentencing). He’s crumbling, psychologically. Now is the time to step on the gas.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
It was billed as an antisemitism event, and, well, I guess it was, ultimately, although not in the intended sense. The phrase “antisemitism event” usually refers to an event designed to draw attention to and denounce antisemitism. But in Donald Trump’s hands, it morphed into an event that featured antisemitism, in the form of the mind-blowing comments by the principal.
After opining that the Democratic Party has “a hold, or curse” on Jewish Americans, he then said: “I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40 percent.… If I’m at 40, think of it, that means 60 percent are voting for Kamala [Harris], who, in particular, is a bad Democrat. The Democrats are bad to Israel, very bad.”
First of all, as always, he’s lying. He’s not at 40 percent. He’s at 25 percent. But lies are par for the course. What isn’t par for the course is to show up to a constituency and serially berate them. He said again that American Jews who vote for Kamala Harris “should have their head examined.” He took it as a given that Jews have a dual loyalty to the United States and to Israel—the oldest antisemitic trope in American politics. And he whined that “I haven’t been treated right” by American Jews.
But don’t worry—it wasn’t all about attacking Jews. He attacked Muslims too! He boasted that if elected, he’ll bring back the Muslim travel ban to keep out people from “infested” countries. That is plainly fascist language.
After the debate, I wrote a column arguing that this was the beginning of Trump’s unraveling. I’ve gotten my share of predictions wrong over the years, and we still have 46 days to go, but so far, that one is looking pretty good. In the last few days, Trump:
First of all, asshole, a guitar isn’t a “privilege.” It’s something you earn by learning how to play it, like I have. But learning a musical instrument requires having an attention span of more than five seconds, so that’s out of the question for Trump. He couldn’t learn the kazoo.
Second, his reference point shows his age, does it not? How far removed is Trump’s invocation of someone who was at his peak of popularity nearly 70 years ago and died nearly 50 years ago from Bob Dole’s famous........