Kamala Harris’s pursuit of Republican voters may backfire

As the United States presidential election nears, Vice President Kamala Harris has escalated outreach to Republican voters. Over the past several weeks, she has been accompanied by former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney at campaign events in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and more recently by former President George W Bush’s daughter, Barbara.

On October 16 after Harris held an event with former Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, she gave an interview to Fox News, saying: “I invite ideas, whether it be from the Republicans who are supporting me, who were just on stage with me minutes ago, and the business sector and others who can contribute to the decisions that I make.”

Many prominent Republicans have endorsed Harris, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, and late Senator John McCain’s son Jim. She has also gained the approval of 200 staffers of former Republican presidential nominees.

Trying to encourage this momentum, Harris’s campaign even established Republicans for Harris chapters in several swing states.

However, Harris’s pursuit of Republican voters may not bring the results she hopes. At the grassroots level, things remain hopelessly polarised. Prominent endorsements notwithstanding, few members of the opposition party will cross “enemy lines” to back Harris. In fact, her rightward sway may actually cost her more Democratic votes than the Republican ones she gains.

In a poll released on October 25, just 4 percent of Republicans said they intended to vote for Harris. The same percentage of Democrats said they would vote for Republican candidate Donald Trump. In other words, Democrats for Trump are just as much of a thing as Republicans for Harris. This makes the prediction that “millions of Republicans” will cast a ballot for Kamala Harris utterly fanciful.

Some may argue that Harris is trying to sway Republican voters specifically in swing states. But even there, the numbers do not differ dramatically.

According to New York Times/Siena polls, Harris is winning 7 percent of registered Republicans in Arizona while 6 percent of the state’s Democrats back Trump. In Pennsylvania, these numbers are 12 percent and 10 percent respectively. In Nevada, Harris is getting 6 percent of registered Republicans and Trump is getting 10 percent of the Democrats. The margin of error for all these polls is 3 to 4 percent.

While Harris is running after the few Republican voters who may flip, she is alienating many others on the progressive side. According to the Pew Research Center, progressives constitute roughly 12 percent of the Democratic base. The millions of votes who went for Senator Bernie Sanders, a prominent progressive, in the Democratic primaries in 2016 suggest this group may be even larger.

Harris’s swing to the right is definitely not well received by progressives. Her promise to sign “the toughest bipartisan border” bill in decades has earned rebukes from immigration advocates. Likewise, her unequivocal support for Israeli aggression is a cold shoulder to proponents of peace and basic human rights. On healthcare, after endorsing universal coverage during her 2020 run, Harris has now stopped well short of that.

Given their political commitments, progressive leftists won’t flip to Trump, but they may vote for a third party or stay home, which would hurt Harris, especially in the battleground states.

Chasing Republicans is, therefore, unwise. And history proves it. Democrats pursued them hard in 2016 as well. Before that presidential election, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer claimed that: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Needless to say, Schumer was wrong. Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton lost to Trump in a historic, humiliating upset. The only state Schumer mentioned that Clinton won was Illinois, a Democratic stronghold that also happens to be where she was born.

As the former secretary of state campaigned in deeply red states like Nebraska, her “blue wall” crumbled. No Democrat since Walter Mondale in 1984 had lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that was the biggest loss in American presidential history with Mondale only winning his home state of Minnesota.

Harris would have had a higher chance of winning if she had not pursued voters whom she cannot win and instead focused on those whom she can: independents and progressives and key groups within them.

A recent poll from AtlasIntel shows Trump ahead with independents by 8.5 points. The two most important issues for independents are the economy and crime, and Harris could have easily appealed to them on these points without swinging so far to the right and chasing after endorsements from neoconservatives and others on the hard right.

Furthermore, independents also embrace positions that are more moderate. Independents overwhelmingly favour marriage equality, expansion of Medicare and marijuana legalisation – issues that progressives also care about.

Harris could have also won back some progressives by walking back some of her right-wing rhetoric and changing her posture on US foreign policy and more specifically, Israel.

Like her running mate, Tim Waltz, Harris has been fully in Israel’s corner. She has refused to distance herself from the complicity of President Joe Biden’s administration in Israeli militarism, occupation and terror. That complicity has only mounted in recent weeks as the White House, which she is part of, oversees Israel’s “General’s Plan” of ethnically cleansing northern Gaza through bombing, starvation and expulsion of civilians. Biden’s last-ditch effort to push for a short-term truce and release of Israeli-American captives would not change voters’ perceptions of where Harris stands.

This aggressive posture has especially alienated Arab and Muslim Americans. The latter accounted for under 1.5 percent of registered voters in 2022, but their distribution gives them disproportionate power, which they already demonstrated with the uncommitted movement they led during the Democratic primaries.

While people tend to focus on Michigan, Muslim voters are also a significant group in Georgia and Arizona. Their numbers far outstrip Biden’s razor-thin margin of victory in those states in 2020. Even in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where Biden won more comfortably, Muslim Americans alone can make the difference. That’s not even taking into account the many Arab voters who aren’t Muslim.

As per usual, the American duopoly is treating voters to a choice of bad vs worse. But merely being the lesser of two evils won’t be enough for Harris to win.

Still, as November nears, she’s chasing voters who don’t want her and shunning those she needs the most. It’s not even just Arabs and Muslims. Scores of voters across demographic groups are disgusted by the Gaza genocide and desire more progressive politics. Harris does not intend to deliver those policies and may suffer electorally for it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.