(C) Common Dreams
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Kamala Harris chases the disaffected Republican vote [1]

['Https', 'Www.Semafor.Com Author David-Weigel']

Date: 2024-10

Over the summer, a group of former Nikki Haley supporters who now back Kamala Harris told her presidential campaign how she could close the deal with frustrated Republicans.

Harris could “emphasize ironclad support for Israel’s security.” She might “commit to appointing at least one reasonable Republican to a high-level Cabinet position.” And why not talk about “energy dominance,” after picking a “moderate” running mate?

The Haley Voters Working Group didn’t get everything on the list; Harris bypassed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, picking the more progressive Tim Walz as her running mate. But this week, Harris campaigned alongside Liz Cheney, and Walz told a debate audience that she’d have an “an all [of the] above energy policy” and keep “producing more natural gas and more oil.” And the vice president said in her first major interview in August that she’d include a Republican in her cabinet.

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Mission accomplished.

“They’re moving toward policies the center of the country embraces,” said Robert Schwartz, the co-founder of Haley Voters for Harris, and now a senior advisor to the Haley Voters Working Group. “There were some things on the list that they were gonna do anyway, but it’s been fun to see them move in our direction.”

To the frustration of progressive Democrats, most of them biting their tongues until the election, the Harris-Walz campaign entered the election’s final stretch with the party’s most conservative messaging in years.

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Harris didn’t just stand with Cheney; she called the former House GOP conference chair “an extraordinary national leader” and “true patriot.” She didn’t just recant her old pledge to ban fracking; she told Pennsylvania media that she cast “the tie-breaking vote to open up more fracking leases.” And she’s promised to maintain the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”

The Trump campaign has labeled all of this a ruse — a San Francisco liberal’s makeover, just in time for early voting. Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung derided Cheney this week as “a stone-cold loser” shilling for “a weak, failed and dangerously liberal” Harris. In swing states, the campaign and its allied PACs continue to pound Harris over progressive positions she took during her doomed 2020 presidential campaign, but abandoned in the White House.

They are matched by paid Democratic messaging that has reintroduced Harris as a “border state prosecutor” who’ll deliver a “middle class tax cut,” and by interviews and speeches where the Democratic ticket boasts that they own guns and — in Harris’ case — won’t hesitate to use them.

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[1] Url: https://www.semafor.com/article/10/04/2024/kamala-harris-chases-the-disaffected-republican-vote

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