Kamala Harris was never in danger from any of the tough questions Fox News’s Bret Baier asked her—until the final round of their 27-minute interview Wednesday night.
The vice president knew what she was getting into when she agreed to join the Republican-leaning network. Baier’s high-pressure interrogation of her record on immigration was to be expected. It could also be discounted: no Fox-watcher invested in that issue was ever going to vote for Harris. Her missteps in the eyes of those viewers were irrelevant to her mission.
That mission was to court Republican institutionalists, those who respect the national-security establishment and military brass, remain fond of Dick Cheney, and harbor doubts about Donald Trump but haven’t yet defected to the Harris-Walz ticket.
Neoconservative pundits who have already migrated into the Democratic camp insist there are millions of these potential Republicans for Harris. Her campaign evidently believes them. And it has learned a simple but powerful lesson from Trump himself: go to unexpected places to connect with voters who might otherwise feel neglected.
Harris’s foray into enemy territory was copied straight out of Trump’s 2016 playbook, which saw him infiltrating Hillary Clinton’s “blue wall” in the industrial Midwest and Pennsylvania to hold rallies in places that hadn’t seen a personal visit from a candidate of either party in decades. Merely by showing up on Fox, Harris signaled to wavering Republicans that........