The Kamala Harris campaign is transparently eager to win over “normie” Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley over Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries—the kind that hates authoritarianism abroad and election-stealing at home.
We know this because of the emphasis put on Republican supporters of Harris during the Democratic National Convention. The Harris-Walz campaign gave important speaking slots to former Representative Adam Kinzinger, former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, former Trump administration Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, former vice-presidential homeland security and counterterrorism advisor Olivia Troye, Mesa, Arizona Mayor John Giles, and former Jeb Bush adviser (now co-host of The View) Ana Navarro.
In her nomination acceptance address, Harris also used carefully calibrated language and positioning designed to appeal to open-minded Republicans. She spoke of charting “a new way forward—not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.” She promised to “put country above party and self.” She defined herself as “realistic” and “practical,” eschewing ideological labels. She touted how she helped bring “together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades” and pledged to sign it. Squarely eyeing those hawkish Haley voters, she thundered, “I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump. Who. Are. Rooting. For. Trump.”
But now that the party in Chicago is over, Harris has more work to do. A new You Gov/The Economist poll, sampled after the convention with Harris leading Trump by a tenuous two points, showed Harris winning five percent of the Republican vote and slightly trailing Trump with independents 27 to 26 percent, with a hefty 28 percent chunk—a plurality!—undecided. Meanwhile, Harris has almost entirely consolidated the Democratic vote with a 94 percent share, leaving only two percent for Trump, with the rest undecided. She can’t do much more with the base to boost her lead to a comfortable level beyond juicing turnout. In all likelihood, she needs a little more swing.
How can Harris sharpen her pitch to on-the-fence Republicans and right-leaning independents without leaning so far to the right that she upsets her base?
She can publicly pledge to appoint a Republican to her cabinet.
Such a concrete commitment to bipartisanship would quickly generate headlines appealing to swing voters and could become a stump speech staple without navigating any thorny policy thickets.
It would also give Harris an easy answer to what will likely be a common question: How would you be any different than Joe Biden?
Biden, somewhat surprisingly considering his long record of bipartisanship, did not have any Republicans in his cabinet. Yet a modicum of cross-pollination in a cabinet is historically common. Every president, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama, had at least one cabinet member from the opposite party for some time during their administrations. Obama appointed three Republicans to his cabinet, including Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel and former CIA Director Robert Gates as secretaries of defense and his Illinois colleague, Representative Ray LaHood, as transportation secretary.
This streak ended with Donald Trump, though he did have a registered Democrat, Gary Cohn, as his top economic advisor, and appointed a politically unaffiliated Obama administration official, David Shulkin, as his first Secretary of Veterans Affairs.(Some suspicious conservatives viewed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a bipartisan political donor, as a latent Democrat, but he was a registered Republican.)
Biden ran on a promise to restore bipartisanship, and he eventually fulfilled it by signing bipartisan bills addressing infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing, gun safety, postal service reform, Ukraine aid, and the debt ceiling. But he started his term on a partisan note, appointing no Republicans to his cabinet and quickly exploiting the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation procedure to jam through the American Rescue Plan Act. With the nation’s politics still darkened by Trump’s polarizing shadow, Biden is rarely credited with bringing bipartisanship back (except, perhaps, by yours truly.)
If asked how she would be different than Biden, Harris could say while Biden deserves credit for working with congressional Republicans on a wide range of issues, that she could do more to unify the country by following the example of Roosevelt and Reagan and Obama and many other presidents when forming her cabinet.
And if asked who would be considered and for what positions, she need not give a firm list but point to the accomplished Republicans—who addressed the Democratic convention or otherwise formally endorsed Harris as examples of possible candidates prepared to put country over party. Some of these just so happen to come from swing states, such as Georgia’s Duncan, Arizona’s Giles, and former Representatives Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania and David Trott of Michigan.
Trump is adopting a Bizarro version of this strategy, naming former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to his transition team, and suggesting Kennedy could get a cabinet post. Kennedy, after suspending his presidential campaign, is trying to convince his anti-vaccine supporters to join Trump, claiming that the man who wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act would “Make America Healthy Again.” Since Gabbard left Congress, cut ties with the Democratic Party, and became a Fox News personality, she sounds more like a garden-variety MAGA mouthpiece, accusing her former colleagues of promoting “anti-white racism” and “open borders.”
I am skeptical either figure commands much genuine support, let alone support that would blindly follow them into Trump’s camp.
Kennedy’s poll numbers were already in decline before he quit, evidence that his early double-digit support in polls was more about being a vehicle for dismay with Trump and Biden and less about Kennedy’s stew of conspiratorial nonsense.
Gabbard’s 2020 presidential primary campaign—in which she was criticized for associations with authoritarians and Islamophobes—flamed out quickly, peaking with a 3 percent performance in New Hampshire. Perhaps it’s a crude comparison, but Gabbard scraped up 273,940 votes in her presidential primary bid, while Haley earned 4,373,783. Kennedy and Gabbard may light the fires of crank podcasters such as Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, and Bret Weinstein, but I suspect Harris is targeting a much larger pool of voters.
Furthermore, people who agree with Kennedy and Gabbard may see Trump as a bridge too far. Marianne Williamson, who also ran quixotic presidential campaigns in 2020 and 2024, said last week that she is “in 100 percent agreement” with Kennedy’s views on “childhood diseases,” “food safety,” and the “high rate of chronic illness,” but “under no circumstances am I going with Donald Trump” and deemed Harris the remaining “viable option.”
Turning Point’s Charlie Kirk, the far-right activist spearheading Trump’s get-out-the-vote efforts, gushed that the race now boils down to “the Unity Party versus the Uniparty” with a far left-far right horseshoe coalition taking on the Establishment figures in both major parties. However, another way to frame the choice is the Normal versus the Weird, and Normal has a long-held advantage in such contests.
If Harris promises to work with normal, rational, pro-democracy Republicans, including in her Cabinet, she will show swing voters how far she is willing to go to sideline the forces of chaos without making any additional policy concessions or sacrifices that could rile her base. It’s adding without subtracting, which is how elections are won.
