Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign will air a new ad in battleground states featuring endorsements from a retired general, former members of the Trump administration and former Representative Liz Cheney.
The ad, “Fit to Lead,” was shared by the campaign with The New York Times. It comes as Ms. Harris, locked in a close race with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, has been seeking to give Republicans and conservative Democrats who dislike Mr. Trump but are wary of her a permission structure to support her.
With four-and-a-half weeks until Election Day, the ad also lands at a time when more voters are tuning in and paying attention. Ms. Harris’s allies have been highlighting the former president’s history of erratic behavior and the condemnation of people who worked with him.
Some aspects of the spot seem intended as much to win voters as to aggravate Mr. Trump: for instance, it begins with footage of David Muir, the ABC News anchor who Mr. Trump has complained bitterly about since he moderated Mr. Trump’s debate against Ms. Harris, one that Mr. Trump was widely seen as losing.
The spot is set to begin airing this weekend as part of an existing $370 million fall advertising spending plan by the Harris team across battleground states, although it’s unclear precisely how frequently it will air.
The spot opens with Mr. Muir noting that 100 Republicans who worked in the national security space under several G.O.P. presidents — Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and Mr. Trump himself — have backed Ms. Harris.
The retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who oversaw the joint special operations command in Iraq under President George W. Bush, is quoted saying of Ms. Harris, “She came up as a prosecutor, an attorney general into the Senate. She has the kind of character that’s going to be necessary for the presidency.”
The spot then quotes Ms. Cheney, a conservative from Wyoming and the daughter of a former Republican vice president. Ms. Cheney led the House select committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after his 2020 election loss and the attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. Ousted from congress after she turned against Mr. Trump, Ms. Cheney appeared with Ms. Harris in Wisconsin on Thursday.
Ms. Cheney said that Ms. Harris was “standing at the breach in a critical moment in our nation’s history. We have a shared commitment as Americans to do what’s right for this country. This year, I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”
The narrator closes by listing the military officials, intelligence officials and former Trump aides who “agree — there’s only one candidate fit to lead our nation and that is Kamala Harris.”
The Harris team believes there is an opening for voters to be receptive to such a message right now, but the Trump team has consistently argued otherwise, saying it thinks any undecided voters already have the information the ad shares. A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ad.
On Truth Social, at 12:29 a.m. on Friday, Mr. Trump mocked Ms. Cheney, writing, “Liz Cheney lost her Congressional Seat by the largest margin in the history of Congress for a sitting Representative. The people of Wyoming are really smart!”
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