Kamala Harris did not enter the Fox News den to convert the MAGA faithful. She went there to appeal to the new apostates, Republican voters disillusioned with their own party generally and Donald Trump specifically.
Harris campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the vice president’s aim was to convince supporters of Nikki Haley, the other female candidate who questioned Trump’s mental fitness earlier this year, to consider doing something that even the former ambassador to the United Nations will not: break with Trump.
The Harris aide said this only after the fact, inducing eye rolls among Republicans who saw it as an obvious attempt to put the best face on things. Had he even watched the same interview?
She regurgitated talking points instead of answering questions about the border crisis, the critics said.
She all but accepted responsibility for each of President Biden’s mistakes, those opponents insisted.
She left Bret Baier genuinely confused at one point with a complete non-sequitur, they jeered.
But maybe, just maybe, Harris did hit all her intended marks. When it comes to Haley supporters, said Evan Roth Smith, pollster at Democratic Party-aligned polling organization Blueprint, “policy is a tough sell.” The vice president is a Democrat after all, and even disaffected Republican primary voters remain Republicans – most of them anyway.
No amount of moderation can convince them that Harris became a fiscal hawk or an immigration hardliner overnight. “There isn’t a lot of pull towards the Democratic Party for Haley voters,” the pollster said, “but there’s a hell of a lot of push out of the GOP from Trump.”