The Deseret News‘ Samuel Benson covered our swing-state bus tour of Pennsylvania and Michigan:
There are two groups of Trump-averse Republican voters still in play, Sarah Longwell believes: those who haven’t decided if they can support Harris, and those who haven’t decided if they’ll vote at all.
Standing backstage at a chic Philadelphia theater last Thursday, Longwell — a former Republican strategist who has spent the past year conducting hundreds of voter focus groups — laid out her plan to win over both. The people in the second group, the low-propensity voters, just need a gentle nudge, she said: “That kind of person trying to decide — do they care enough to get out and vote?” she told me. “That is the kind of stuff where hand-to-hand combat and persuasion really works for friends and family,” she said.
That first group, though, is what gets Longwell excited. “There are the right-leaning, independent, soft GOP voters who are trying to figure out, can they get there on Kamala Harris? They know they’re they don’t like Trump, but, like, can they vote for her?”
Longwell thinks they can — and she thinks she can convince them. In recent months, her organization, the Republican Accountability PAC, has poured tens of millions of dollars into ads that allow former Trump voters to share their own testimonials, explaining why they won’t be backing him again. Several of those voters were flown out to Pennsylvania last week for a bus tour across the swing state, where they — alongside Longwell’s colleagues at online news site The Bulwark — told packed concert halls why they’ve decided to vote for Harris this cycle.