On Monday, with 15 days to go until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris toured the three most pivotal swing states in the contest—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—with former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney. The Harris campaign’s foregrounding of a conservative surrogate, whose surname Democrats long have equated with villainy, may frustrate some on the left.
Harris and Cheney would be among the first to concede that they have little in common besides not wanting Donald Trump to become president again. But in their campaigning, along with other work that Cheney has been doing for the Harris campaign, they’re on a very specific mission: To convert some of the last slivers of persuadable voters to land on Harris’ side.
Going by public polling data and public acknowledgements from the Harris campaign, the election is excruciatingly close, with Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania especially being on a knife’s edge. Though the vast majority of the country has made up its mind—and made it up a long time ago—there are still small pockets of voters in the seven swing states who are undecided either between Harris and Trump, or between voting and not voting itself. These voters include, particularly, young men, Black men, Hispanic men, college-educated suburban women, and non–college educated white women. We’re talking about groups that comprise a percentage point of the electorate here, a point there. In their restless last couple of weeks, the Harris campaign has been aggressively microtargeting specific groups with messages custom-tailored to them as they try to find the last few, likely decisive votes from an otherwise frozen contest.
“Our persuasion and undecided universe spans gender, race, age and education levels. But one thing they do have in common is that they are very hard to reach,” Meg Schwenzfeier, the Harris campaign’s chief analytics officer, said in a statement to Slate. “They are not watching traditional news platforms or other programming with large, mainstream audiences. So, to talk to them, we have to take a layered approach—we have to be on TV, non-traditional platforms, doorknocking, billboards, digital ads, mail— everything really. This is a real advantage we think we have over the Trump campaign— we are reaching those last undecided voters everywhere they are—in a way the Trump campaign doesn’t have the infrastructure to do.”
Cheney has been enlisted to help with what the Harris campaign sees as one of the relatively “bigger” remaining persuadable blocs. These are Republican, college-educated, suburbanite women (and some men), a group that’s moved sharply in Democrats’ direction in the Trump era, but which the Harris campaign believes can be wrung for more. The key thing Cheney said at one of these rallies was intended to make them feel comfortable with what can feel like a transgressive act.
“I certainly have many Republicans who will say to me, ‘I can’t be public,’ ” Cheney said on Monday. “They do worry about a whole range of things, including violence, but they’ll do the right thing. And I would just remind people, if you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody.”
The applicable campaign jargon for what Cheney is doing here is trying to create a “permission structure” for Trump-weary Republicans to make that final leap to Harris. Cheney—or, to use another currently newsy figure, John Kelly—serve as validators, providing reassurance to like-minded voters that it’s all right to support a Democrat. If Liz Cheney can bring herself to do it, in other words, so can you.
Will this work? Who knows. Does it have to? Probably.
While the campaign works on persuading that pool of voters to choose Harris instead of Trump, there’s another multifront campaign to convince some to choose Harris instead of not voting at all.
There’s a pronounced gender gap in this election, which isn’t especially surprising in a race between a man and a woman while abortion rights are a central issue in the campaign. Much has been written about the Harris campaign’s softness among Black men, Hispanic men, and young men in general, a downcast cohort without much trust in the political process.
Ben Mathis-Lilley
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Much of Democrats’ diminishing vote share among young men and men of color was baked into the cake before Harris ever stepped foot in the race; these tectonic plates have been shifting a bit more every four years. Harris will, however, still win Black men and young men, and so it’s critical that what votes she loses relative to 2020 in margin are offset with turnout.
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The Harris campaign is not going to reach these men she needs to turn out with additional appearances on The View. To meet them where they are, Harris’ team has been advertising on sportsbooks and fantasy sports sites; on video game sites like IGN; and during college football, NBA, NFL, and MLB playoff broadcasts. Tim Walz has been on The Rich Eisen Show to talk about the Minnesota Vikings. There was some chatter that Harris may appear on the grandaddy of all targeted male media endeavors—The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the country—though it hasn’t come to fruition. (She has, however, appeared on The Howard Stern Show and Charlamagne tha God’s The Breakfast Club, both of which have large male audiences.)
Trump, meanwhile, will appear on Rogan, and appears on a new young male–focused influencer’s program seemingly every day. Some Democrats tend to laugh off these stupid interviews, ones in which Trump asks what cocaine does or gets in a custom Cybertruck. But they may laugh less if they provide Trump the winning margin.
You could say that the more niche the targeted groups are, the tighter the election is. There’s a good chance that your cousin in one of seven swing states, who doesn’t care about any of this but is bombarded by targeted advertising whenever he goes to set his fantasy lineup, could decide the election. Same with his mother. Know, in these frenetic last couple of weeks, that if you see something that seems unusual for the tail end of a campaign—such as a day of hopscotching about with Liz Cheney—there are probably mounds of campaign research pointing to that as the necessary move in the moment.
That doesn’t mean it will work.