Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has rallied Republican endorsements in Wisconsin, a key swing state that has been central to its efforts to attract voters from around the world who are skeptical of Donald Trump.
In the past week, Harris received public support from retiring Republican Sen. Robert Cowles, the longest-serving member of the Senate, and Shawn Reilly, the former Republican mayor of Waukesha, one of the state’s largest Republican strongholds.
The battleground state, where elections are regularly decided by razor-thin margins, is a top priority for both campaigns, with Harris, Trump and their running mates set to stop there in the final full week of the presidential race.
In addition to the two endorsements Harris received that gained national attention, several other local Republicans, from former sheriffs to members of the Legislature, have endorsed Harris in recent weeks. The wave really started last month when former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a longtime staple of national Republican politics and now a fierce Trump critic, endorsed Harris at an event in Wisconsin, a state where she has now met twice with her has been. .
“I was a Republican before Donald Trump started spray tanning,” Cheney joked during her first visit to Ripon last month. “I’m telling you, I’ve never voted for a Democrat, but this year I’m proud to cast my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Ripon, in Fond du Lac County, is recognized as the birthplace of the Republican Party in 1854. It and the site of Cheney’s other event this month in Waukesha County also have a more modern character: Both places are home to large groups of voters who opposed Trump during the GOP presidential primaries.
Cheney’s events were deliberately held in the two countries as part of a broader Harris campaign strategy to target voters in the suburbs, where Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s last Republican challenger this year, performed better in the primaries . That effort has expanded to other swing states, including North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
“Our Republicans for Harris program brings that unifying, inspiring message to anti-Trump Republicans, moderates and independents,” Austin Weatherford, the national Republican engagement director for the Harris campaign, said in a statement. “We know these are votes we must earn, and we continue to work hard every day to win over the millions of Republicans who are willing to turn the page on Donald Trump’s chaos, extremism and divisiveness.”
Co-chairing the effort in Wisconsin is Tracy Ann Mangold, a longtime Republican activist in the state who said she is loyal to the U.S. Constitution above any political party.
“It was weird. The Republican Party used to be the major party; now it’s the Democrats,” she said. “I am a very strong person for the Constitution, and if you have one party that demonizes the Constitution and one person that discredits our Constitution, they do not belong in the Oval Office.”
Mangold’s group has worked directly with the Harris campaign to find more Republicans who could publicly support Harris, to try to knock on the doors of Republicans who could be persuaded to run her and to organize large phone bank events to promote those potentially cumbersome voters to reach.
“I host phone banks and emails every Wednesday night to people we think would vote for Harris,” she said.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. When Cheney first visited the state, the country issued a statement calling her “irrelevant.”
“Another incompetent Harris administration is the last thing Wisconsinites want or need, regardless of Liz Cheney’s opinions,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in the statement.
Several other Wisconsin Republicans have joined the effort to support Harris in recent weeks, including former state Assembly member Sheehan Donoghue and Steve Michek, the former sheriff of rural Iowa County.
There has also been a concerted effort for Harris-affiliated canvassers in Wisconsin to knock on doors and contact Republicans or conservative-leaning independents directly. In those interactions, the goal of the reporting is to focus on what they see as Trump’s more extreme views.
“We hear a lot about Donald Trump’s extremism on January 6, protecting our institutions, things like that,” Timothy White, Harris’ press secretary in Wisconsin, said of the issues raised by knocking on the doors of persuasive Republicans and independents .
Reilly’s endorsement in particular made waves and was seen as a big win for Harris. Waukesha County, home to the namesake city he leads, is the largest Republican-leaning county in the state and part of a three-county bloc in suburban Milwaukee, with Ozaukee and Washington serving as turnout engines been for the Republicans. in previous elections.
The three counties, called the “WOW” counties, produced 15% of all votes for Trump in a 72-county state in 2020.
“It’s a vote against Trump,” Reilly told Milwaukee’s WITI-TV. “I am terrified that Donald Trump will be our next president for all the reasons I stated: he has already been impeached twice.
“He has been convicted of crimes, and this is not what the United States needs,” he added.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
