As United States Vice President Kamala Harris crisscrosses the country – and especially key battleground states – ahead of the November 5 election, an unlikely cheerleader has accompanied her on several occasions: Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming and daughter of ex-Vice President Dick Cheney.
The senior Cheney has long been pilloried by Democrats for his central role in pushing for – and executing – the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on grounds that turned out to be fake. And Liz Cheney has embraced her father’s neoconservative legacy throughout her career.
Yet a shared animus for Donald Trump, the former president and Republican Party nominee for the presidency, has brought Cheney into Harris’s camp. Cheney has been joined by many prominent, old-school Republicans in criticising Trump and endorsing Harris.
But what’s in it for Harris? Can Liz Cheney’s enthusiastic support help her win Republican voters in a race poised on a knife’s edge? Or could it end up hurting Harris’s prospects?
How is Cheney supporting Harris?
In recent weeks, Harris and Cheney have jointly held a series of town hall sessions in the vital battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, under the banner “Country over Party”. Harris and Trump are separated by less than one percentage point in each of the three states.
Cheney has been a staunch critic of Trump and supported the former president’s second impeachment after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
“I know the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the Constitution,” Cheney said at a recent rally. “You have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump, who, it’s not just us predicting how he will act. We’ve watched what he did after the last election. We watched what he did on Jan 6.”
In an event in Wisconsin, she said: “I watch how our presidents have operated and even when there have been presidents that we have potentially disagreed with on issues, they’ve respected the Constitution.”
Harris, too, has characterised Trump as someone unfit for the role as president.
“Donald Trump is an unserious man but the consequences of him being president of the United States are brutally serious,” stated Harris.
What voters are still up for grabs?
A recent Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted between September 30 and October 15, 74 percent of voters in battleground states have already decided who they’re going to vote for. But the remaining 26 percent of voters are still undecided.
Seven battleground states – also known as swing states – are expected to determine the outcome of the election. Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, where Harris and Trump are in close contests, collectively account for 93 Electoral College votes – that’s a third of the 270 votes needed to win the 538-strong Electoral College, and so, the election.
It’s the undecided Republican voters that Harris hopes to tap, using Cheney’s help, say analysts.
“If you’re the Democratic Party, you’re still trying to pursue a vote maximisation strategy, and that means expanding your pathways to victory,” Adolphus Belk, professor of political science and African American studies at Winthrop University, told Al Jazeera. “Particularly in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, where there are some Republican voters who supported Trump in 2016, but are now seriously considering voting Democrat.”
The January 6, 2021, Capitol riot by Trump supporters, and the former president’s often confusing positions on the reproductive rights of women – he has claimed credit for the dismantling of the Supreme Court judgement that guaranteed abortion rights but has also suggested he would oppose a national ban on abortion – are among the issues that have left some Republican voters wary of a second Trump term, say analysts.
Could Cheney’s support help Harris win this vote?
There is some evidence that suggests Harris’s strategy in building a bipartisan coalition with anti-Trump Republicans could help her campaign.
According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, 9 percent of Republican voters nationally said they would vote for Harris. More importantly, a separate Wall Street Journal poll in the second week of October found that in Arizona, where Trump and Harris are tied in a dead heat, 8 percent of Republicans are voting for Harris.
Belk notes that the Harris-Cheney strategy is nothing new for the Democratic Party. It’s part of a centrist playbook that emerged from the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) that was founded in 1985 by several high-ranking Democrats, including then-Governor Bill Clinton. Although the DLC’s last active year was 2011, the methods are the same.
“They (DLC) believe that the pathway forward was to moderate, that you maximise your votes by moving more toward the centre on the very issues that Republicans had used to punish you in presidential elections,” explained Belk.
“I think the Harris-Cheney team-up is about getting certain Republicans, including former members of the Trump administration, to signal to those Republican voters who are contemplating voting for Harris, but are maybe hesitant – to say to those people, for this contest, in this moment, you can make this choice and it’s OK.”
While Trump routed rivals in the Republican primary, there were still significant numbers of GOP voters who backed former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey, Belk noted. These voters were highly educated and typically college graduates who lean politically moderate.
When the margins between Trump and Harris are as tight as they are at the moment – less than 1 percentage point separates them in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada – a few thousand Republican votes could make all the difference for the vice president.
“They’re going after the Haley voters. And that’s why you go on Fox,” Belk said, referring to Kamala Harris’s interview on Fox News with Bret Baier on October 16. Fox is a favourite among conservative voters.
But could Cheney end up hurting Harris?
For years, the Cheney name has been almost toxic for liberals in America, associated with the foreign policy debacles of the Bush administration.
That is especially so for Arab American and Muslim voters, whose communities were more directly affected by the war in Iraq and the rising Islamophobia back home in the US.
Some analysts believe Harris risks alienating these voters – many of whom are already deeply upset with her for the Biden administration’s unflinching support for Israel’s war on Gaza – further by proudly touting her Cheney endorsement.
“There are a number of liberal and progressive Democrats that feel upset about the embrace of Dick and Liz Cheney,” Belk acknowledged.
Normally, he said, this might not be a major problem for Harris. “The way that vote maximisation strategy works is they look at it and think, if you’re a liberal, progressive Democrat, we’re kind of your only game in town,” he said. “If you’re a really conservative Trump Republican, we know you’re not going to come to us, but we can get those people in the middle because there are more of you.”
But this time, enough Arab American and Muslim voters are signalling that for them, Democrats are not the “only game in town” because of Gaza.
Last month, a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) poll showed that in Michigan, home to a large Arab American community and key battleground state, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Donald Trump received 18 percent support with 12 percent of voters backing Harris.
In an Arab News/YouGov poll released at the start of this week, Trump actually leads Harris 45 percent to 43 percent among the key demographic, nationally.
This could also affect the overall support that Harris receives from Black Americans.
According to Pew Research, African Americans account for 20 percent of the Muslim population in the US. A recent New York Times/Siena College national poll reported that 70 percent of Black male voters support Harris, whereas 85 percent of Black men supported Biden in 2020.
In short, Belk said that the Harris campaign faces tough choices.
“So it’s aid with one hand [for Gaza] and bombs with the other. The administration did try to put certain pressures on [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, but Netanyahu is not yielding to those pressures,” Belk said.
“And that conflict has gone on now for well over a year and has seemingly expanded into other nation states in the region. So that has been a great problem for this administration.”
