Conservatives Need More Than ‘Permission’ from the Harris Campaign to Vote for Her

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

 

You get the sense that Democratic partisans are almost embarrassed by the Harris campaign’s explicit overtures to disaffected Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. It’s fine, explain Kamala Harris’s allies in media and, indeed, the campaign itself to irascible left-wing partisans, who resent the tacit admission that their side lacks the raw numbers to secure victory in November. Harris isn’t ceding her progressive bona fides. Rather, the campaign is just giving Republicans the “permission” they need to vote Democratic.

 

In surrounding herself with erstwhile GOP lawmakers like Liz Cheney, the Harris campaign has “sought to build a permission structure for Republicans to vote for a Democrat as the Harris campaign focuses heavily on appeals to conservative women in the suburbs,” the New York Times reported. CNN agreed. As a “hardline conservative” nonetheless endorsing Harris, Cheney “created a permission structure of personal empowerment for suburban Republican and independent women to snub Donald Trump,” reporter Stephen Collinson posited. Channeling the sentiments of the Democratic base, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart rued the lamentable state in which the Left finds itself. “Do we have to do that?” he asked of the Harris campaign’s embrace of one of the Democratic Party’s onetime tormentors. “I think Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney give permission to those folks who want to find a reason to do the right thing,” Minnesota governor Tim Walz replied.

 

Democrats feel dirty, and they assume the Republicans to whom they’re appealing are similarly revulsed by all this sordid fraternization. As Collinson noted, an explicit feature of this messaging campaign involves telling women who are contemplating a vote for the Democrat that “they don’t need to tell anyone about it.” That language is popping up all over; there are admonishments to remind women it’s a secret ballot and no one needs to know precisely how they voted. Cheney herself echoed the admonition. “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody,” she told a room full of Harris voters to a discordant round of applause.

 

The Harris campaign itself appears willing to acknowledge that, for some, casting a ballot for its candidate violates a taboo. Hardly a display of confidence.

 

We must assume that the Harris campaign believes committing the time and resources to GOP outreach will bear fruit. But the voters it is targeting do not need and are not soliciting anyone’s “permission.” No one has to hold their hand and gently guide them to the conclusion preferred by the Harris campaign. They need a reason to vote for Harris, and she hasn’t given them many.

 

As the vice president’s unsatisfying performance in a recent interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier illustrated, Harris will not make any policy concessions to voters with conservative political instincts. Beyond demonstrating — really, implying — that the arch-progressive persona she crafted for herself in 2019 was a fabrication, the Democratic presidential candidate will cede no ground to the Right. As the reaction to her GOP outreach tour among Democrats suggests, Harris’s left flank will not let her get away with that kind of creative campaigning. This dynamic leaves Harris with few avenues to persuade her skeptics. So, instead of giving the Republican women “permission” to vote for Harris, the candidate and her supporters are resorting to moral blackmail.

 

“If you wouldn’t hire somebody to babysit your kids, you shouldn’t make that guy the president of the United States,” Cheney said in closing one of her town-hall-style appearances alongside Harris. You wouldn’t want to be thought of as a neglectful parent, would you? “He lost the election, he tried to overturn it and seize power, and then he sat in his dining room and he watched the attack on television,” Cheney said of the “depravity” inherent in Trump’s conduct on January 6. “As a mother, I want my children to know that there is someone sitting in the Oval Office who they can look up to.” You don’t want to have to stare into your reflection in the mirror and rationalize a vote that ratifies that sort of behavior, do you? “If you stand for country, democracy, and the rule of law,” Harris’s campaign wrote of its own outreach efforts, “our campaign has a place for you.” Who doesn’t “stand” for those values? You certainly do . . . right?

 

For GOP voters who find the former president’s shtick uninspiring and his imperious demeanor frightening, these are compelling messages. But they are abstract arguments that are unlikely to overcome more tangible considerations. They do little to assuage voters who have seen their purchasing power erode over the course of the Biden administration. They do not satisfy those who have watched with dismay as armed conflicts proliferate abroad. Harris can talk up the irresponsibility of Donald Trump’s plan to hasten Social Security’s trajectory toward insolvency all she wants, but she will do nothing to alter the doomed course on which America’s entitlement programs are chugging along.

 

Conservative voters are conservative not just because they revere the constitutional order. They also prefer a suite of policy proposals that they believe will meaningfully contribute to their quality of life. Voters who believe these two imperatives conflict with each other in this election are more agonized over their vote than partisans on either side of the aisle care to acknowledge. But suggesting that those GOP voters who defer to informed self-interest are heedlessly sacrificing America’s civic heritage won’t make them more receptive to Democratic arguments.

 

To believe that there is some untapped well of Harris support among center-right voters is to exhibit faith in the unseen. The Democratic campaign functionally admitted as much. As CNN reported following a conversation with Harris campaign adviser David Plouffe, the campaign will not “rely” on disaffected Republicans to deliver victory, but they “could help deliver a bigger win than public or internal campaign polls are showing so far.” Maybe the Harris/Cheney theory of the race is correct, and these Americans aren’t admitting to anyone — not to their friends and family, not to pollsters, not even to themselves — their voting intention. But it doesn’t seem like it. And the drawn faces on Harris’s Republican allies on that stage betray the futility of the exercise.