The Independent‘s Andrew Feinberg covered our swing-state bus tour of Pennsylvania and Michigan:
[Dave] McHenry is one of what RVAT organizers — and Democratic campaign officials — hope will be a critical number of Republican voters across the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who will pull the lever for a Democrat in November.
The group — which is run by longtime GOP strategist and former Log Cabin Republicans head Sarah Longwell — has spent the last few years running focus groups of Republican and conservative voters and testing what messages are most effective for convincing them to turn on their own party.
Seeking crossover voters from the opposing party is a time-honored tactic in American presidential politics. When Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential race, and when he won 49 of 50 states over Walter Mondale four years later, he did so with the help of so-called “Reagan Democrats” in places like Macomb County, Michigan.
Longwell’s group (combined with the efforts of other groups of anti-Trump Republicans) made a big dent in Trump’s numbers in 2020, when President Joe Biden carried around 5 per cent of Republicans. This year, they are hoping to bring as many as 10 per cent on board to the Democratic bandwagon, including by pulling in disaffected Republican primary voters who supported ex-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley earlier this year.
According to one RVAT staffer, it’s Haley’s former supporters who could make a big difference in Pennsylvania, a state that Harris must carry if she wants to maintain her easiest path to the White House.