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Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, Nation
Kamala Harris first appeared in the campaign with Liz Chaney Ripon, Wisconsin, birthplace of the Republican Party, one month and two days before the 2024 election. The point of the visit was to show conservatives that they can break with Donald Trump’s Republican Party over their concerns about the former president’s election denial, authoritarian rhetoric and embrace of global overlords. Republicans, Cheney argued, could vote for the Democratic presidential nominee as “Country over Party” — just as the former House Republican Conference chairman, who broke with Trump over his refusal to accept the 2020 election results, planned to do . .
The media liked the story. Great attention was paid to the event. Cable channels started working. Heavy essays major national newspapers had written about the prospect of Harris pulling in enough Republican votes to overturn Trump’s bid for a second term.
Unfortunately, while many Democratic strategists were thrilled to have Cheney on board as a Harris supporter, Republicans couldn’t help but care. Cheney’s strategy was an utter failure, adding few if any votes to the Democratic total, alienating voters who dislike the former GOP’s neoconservative extremism, and stealing valuable time from a painfully short campaign schedule. While that’s certainly not the only explanation for why the Democrats fared as badly as they did, Cheney’s detour was a political fiasco.
That reality was writ large in the aftermath of Ripon, the east-central Wisconsin town where abolitionists, land reformers, and utopian socialists founded the Republican Party in 1854. A Republican stronghold for 170 years, but also a student town that has shown good measure in the past enthusiasm for Democrats like Barack Obama, Ripon seemed ripe for a cross-party appeal. But that’s not how things happened on election day.
On November 5, Trump won 53.8% of the vote (2,097 ballots). in Ripon Township compared to 45 percent (1,753 ballots) for Harris.
It was a worse result for the Democratic Party ticket than in 2020, when Joe Biden won 46.6% (1,820 ballots), compared to 51.7% (2,019 ballots) for Trump.
But Ripon was definitely an anomaly.
No, unequivocally and unequivocally no.
After the rally in Ripon, Harris returned to Wisconsin event from Cheney in Waukesha County in the vote-rich suburb of Milwaukee. The Republican district has seen some swing toward Democrats in 2020 and 2022, and the Harris campaign believed a visit to the region by their candidate and Cheney — on a day when they also appeared together in Pennsylvania and Michigan — could be beneficial. year It didn’t happen.
While much of the attention was focused on the prime-time debate at the Sharon Lynn Wilson Center for the Arts in the upscale suburb of Brookfield, Trump’s vote share remained steady in Waukesha County — by 59 percent.
In a state where Trump lost by about 20,000 votes in 2020 and won by about 30,000 votes in 2024, his lead in Waukesha County each year was about 55,000.
So all that time with Liz Chaney, he voted little, if at all. And it was even worse all over the country.
In 2020, according to NBC News’ estimated exit poll date, 14 percent of self-identified conservatives said they voted for Biden, while five percent of self-identified Republicans said they did the same.
In 2024 nine percent of conservatives said they voted for the Democratic ticket, while only four percent of Republican voters said they supported Harris.
So the idea that spending day after day with Liz Cheney — while publicly trumpeting the support of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and other right-wing Republicans — benefited Harris is wrong.
Even before Harris began speaking in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania with Cheney, conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, an astute observer of GOP patterns, observed that “The universe of undecided and persuasive voters in the respective swing states is small. Those familiar with Cheney’s arguments about Trump’s unfitness for office must have already bowed. How many more voters can be convinced by her official endorsement of Harris? Dozens? Hundreds? It is possible.”
Goldberg’s skepticism was confirmed by the results of exit polls. But that wasn’t the worst for Harris and her fans.
Unfortunately for Democrats, Cheney’s embrace came at a price too rarely noted in analyzes of the party’s post-Nov. 5 election defeat. With President Biden delaying his decision to end his re-election bid until the end of July, at a time when the Democratic Party’s poll numbers have collapsed, Harris has just 107 days left to launch a presidential bid.
Every day was precious and every signal sent was significant. The days spent with Cheney and the resources spent promoting support from neoconservative Republicans cost Democrats in two ways. They sent a signal to potential Democratic voters, many of whom recalled the Iraq war and other Cheney projects, that the campaign’s focus was right-wing advocacy. They ate up time that could have been spent canvassing in union halls at the workplace. class communities with figures like United Auto Workers president Sean Fein and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. They burned up time that could have been spent having honest, if difficult, conversations with Arab Americans, students and others about Gaza. They closed off opportunities to reach Latino communities in swing states. The list goes on and on.
But the bottom line remains: every minute Kamala Harris spent with Liz Chaney was wasted.
