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Emily Brieve, a Republican county commissioner in Michigan, voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020. Her campaign website highlighted her opposition to abortion rights. And until this year, she had never considered voting for a Democratic presidential candidate.
But to Ms. Brieve, 42, the people with whom Mr. Trump surrounds himself seem increasingly “extreme.” His running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, is “divisive” and “robotic,” ripe for caricature on “Saturday Night Live.” And after Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees helped overturn Roe v. Wade, she thought some state abortion restrictions went too far.
“I’m still not 100 percent sure how I’m planning on voting,” Ms. Brieve, of Caledonia, Mich., said in an interview. “I just know that I’m not supportive of Trump, and I won’t vote for Trump ever again.”
In a bitterly divided nation, relatively few Americans are genuinely torn between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Ms. Brieve represents a different yet crucial kind of undecided voter: one who has ruled out Mr. Trump but is grappling with whether to support Ms. Harris, write in someone else or skip the top of the ticket entirely.
In recent elections, center-right voters who have recoiled at the direction of the Republican Party — particularly college-educated suburbanites — have played significant roles in Democratic victories, helping propel President Biden in 2020 and shaping key 2022 midterm contests.
Now, in the final stretch of this campaign, Democrats see opportunities to expand that universe of voters. The party is betting that since Mr. Trump was last on the ballot, he has disqualified himself with more Americans who detest his election denialism and conspiracy theories, as well as his party’s abortion bans.
But in interviews with more than a dozen such voters and former Republican officials, many made it clear that they were weighing their anxieties about a second Trump term against unease with Ms. Harris, who ran well to Mr. Biden’s left in the 2020 presidential primary race before moderating some of her positions.
“They’ll say, ‘I couldn’t support Donald Trump,’ and you would think that then, the obvious conclusion from that first conclusion would be, ‘That means I vote for Vice President Harris,’” said Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Ariz., who is encouraging his fellow Republicans to support Ms. Harris. “For a lot of people, they just can’t get from point A to point B.”
Still, he said in a recent interview, there are signs that more “churchgoing, right-of-center people” are voting Democratic this year.
“It’s happening in larger numbers,” he said, “than it was two years ago and four years ago.”
Fighting for a narrow slice of voters
A New York Times/Siena College national poll of likely voters released last week offered glimpses of the opportunities and limitations for Ms. Harris with these voters, along with warning signs for Mr. Trump.
Nearly half of Americans surveyed considered Ms. Harris too liberal or progressive, including 15 percent of those who said they had voted for Mr. Biden four years ago.
At the same time, the national poll showed Mr. Trump doing even worse with white college graduates — a Republican-leaning constituency before the Trump era — than he did in 2020.
Certainly, limited data is available on the small group of anti-Trump, right-leaning Americans who are also undecided voters, making it difficult to precisely measure their attitudes. And in a fiercely partisan environment, there is little evidence of crossover voting in meaningful numbers.
But in a race that will be decided on the margins in a handful of states, the Harris campaign and its allies are working to win over at least a few Republicans and right-leaning independents uncomfortable with the Trump-led Republican Party.
“Republicans for Harris” events are regularly held in battleground states, the campaign has a dedicated Republican outreach director, and Republican supporters have had speaking slots at major campaign events.
“We have to convince a few million Republicans that cannot stand Donald Trump for all the right reasons to not just stay home and not vote,” said former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan of Georgia, a Republican who is involved in those efforts.
On Tuesday, the campaign announced new digital and radio ads featuring a Republican farming duo from Pennsylvania explaining their support for Ms. Harris.
Other pro-Harris groups are specifically focused on Republicans who supported Nikki Haley in the party’s primary race. On Friday, a chair of Ms. Haley’s Iowa campaign endorsed Ms. Harris in a Des Moines Register opinion essay.
Still, Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, has said she is voting for Mr. Trump. Other prominent Republican Trump critics have remained on the sidelines. And endorsements can be of limited value: Voters often retreat to their usual partisan corners by Election Day, as many did in 2016 despite Hillary Clinton’s support from some Republican former officials.
Gretchen Wolfe, 56, of Phoenix, is mulling whether to drift from her own corner.
“I have worked really hard for the Republican Party and Republican candidates, so it is hard to walk away,” she said in an interview on Sunday.
A two-time Trump voter who is worried about border security, she said she was still deciding between him and Ms. Harris, whose spending policies she questions. She trusts him to better handle foreign policy but finds his divisive style increasingly hard to overlook.
“I don’t vote with my uterus, but when you have a candidate — and now not just a candidate, but a team — who continue to make comments and have actions that demonstrate they do not believe women are equal to men, it is really hard to support that,” she said.
Ms. Wolfe added: “Holding my nose and voting for him one more time is just reinforcing bad behavior. We don’t do it as parents but we’re going to do it as voters?”
Polls generally show Ms. Harris with a significant edge among women, and Mr. Trump leading with men. Voters trust him more on the economy, a top issue for many Americans.
Even if Mr. Trump loses ground with some moderate voters who reluctantly backed him in 2020, it is possible he will make new inroads with other constituencies, or turn out other Americans who are not regular voters. Some of Ms. Harris’s supporters also believe that some voters will be privately reluctant to vote for a Black woman.
But in a close election, any erosion in past coalitions could be damaging — and Mr. Trump has hardly moderated his message to reach voters in the middle.
Asked what the campaign was doing to try to win back some of those voters, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, replied in a statement, “If Americans want lower taxes and inflation, a secure border, and a peaceful world, there’s only one option,” calling Ms. Harris “dangerously liberal.”
‘Acquiescing to voting for Harris’
In some ways, Ms. Harris’s performance at this month’s debate seemed tailor-made to reach traditional Romney Republicans.
She blasted Mr. Trump as “weak and wrong on national security and foreign policy,” using language long favored by hawkish Republicans. She invoked the legacy of Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, whose son Jimmy is supporting her.
And she highlighted the backing she has received from Republicans including former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Representative Liz Cheney.
“If I believed her last night, I would probably be telling you today that I’m voting for her,” Juliana Bergeron, who served for years as the Republican national committeewoman from New Hampshire, said in an interview the day after the debate.
Ms. Bergeron, who voted twice for Mr. Trump, said she was appalled by his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, considers him disrespectful to women and is planning to support the Democratic congressional candidate Maggie Goodlander this year.
But in a follow-up interview on Monday, Ms. Bergeron, 71, said she had decided to leave the top of the ticket blank. It will be her first time not voting for the Republican presidential candidate, she said, illustrating a potentially significant problem for Mr. Trump — and a missed opportunity for Ms. Harris.
“There are a lot of people who aren’t going to vote for her because they can’t figure out what she really believes,” she said, noting the progressive policies Ms. Harris supported during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential run.
During that primary, Ms. Harris took left-leaning positions such as supporting a ban on fracking. She and her campaign have said she no longer holds some of those views, including those on fracking, but she has not explained her evolution at length. (Mr. Trump has reversed himself entirely on key issues and can sometimes sound incoherent.)
“I still couldn’t tell you to this day if she is as progressive as I think she is in my head,” said Christopher Cartagena, 36, of West Palm Beach, Fla. “I don’t know because she actually hasn’t elaborated on her policy positions.”
Ms. Harris’s team has said her positions have been shaped through her time spent governing in the Biden-Harris administration.
And in a statement, Mia Ehrenberg, a campaign spokeswoman, said Ms. Harris “believes real leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus,” pointing to the administration’s bipartisan accomplishments on issues like infrastructure.
“As president, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress,” she said.
Mr. Cartagena said he considered himself a conservative who values “strong foreign policy and law and order,” making Mr. Trump, the first American president to be convicted of a crime, a nonstarter. He had a harder time embracing Ms. Harris than he did Mr. Biden, he said, noting that he had regarded the president as a more moderate candidate.
Still, Mr. Cartagena added, Ms. Harris has seemed to position herself toward the center.
“Given the direction that Trump really is going and what he’s doing to electrify his base in a really negative manner, I’m kind of acquiescing to voting for Harris,” he said.
In Phoenix, Ms. Wolfe said she hoped to make a decision within the next two weeks, weighing her longtime party loyalty against her weariness with Mr. Trump.
“I’m so sad about my choices,” she said.
The post These Voters Are Anti-Trump, but Will They Be Pro-Harris? appeared first on New York Times.
