Vice President Kamala Harris bet big last week that former advisers to Donald Trump can help make her president.
Former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley and former national security adviser John Bolton have not endorsed her candidacy, but they have each made clear they oppose his. And they have played a starring role in her television advertising.
Three of her top four ad spots by spending between Oct. 7 and 17 focused on former Trump aides and other Republicans who have warned about another Trump presidency. She spent more advertising on that message than any other topic, including abortion, her own biography, policy attacks on Trump or the economy, according to the AdImpact tracking firm.
“Consider what his closest advisers have said,” Harris implored at a rally Thursday in Bucks County, Pa., as she carried the message on the campaign trail. “America must heed this warning.”
This attempt to appeal to the tiny sliver of remaining persuadable or undecided voters follows a pattern that Democrats have deployed in previous elections with mixed success against Trump. Hillary Clinton in 2016 invested heavily in fall ads highlighting offensive things Trump had said over images of children watching television or young girls looking in the mirror. Joe Biden in 2020 insisted that “character is on the ballot” in his closing spot.
But Democrats believe this effort is different, and they point to extensive testing to back up the claim. Recent public research by Blueprint, a Democratic polling operation funded by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, found the Republican critique of Trump to be the most effective of 12 tested messages this month. Notably, a straight attack without Republican voices on Trump’s character, his erratic behavior, election result denial and the Jan. 6, 2021, riots had no clear effect.
“This is really the first time I have seen the pure Trump personal attack land, and it is entirely because the messengers are Republican messengers,” said Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for Blueprint. “Simply saying the guy lacks character or is selfish or is a scam artist — none of that really moves voters. But saying that the guy is a threat is meaningful and persuasive to voters.”
Multiple senior advisers to the Harris campaign said their own internal research has tracked the same finding in polling, focus groups and other forms of ad testing. They have come to view the Republican adviser attack on Trump’s unfitness for office as one of three main tranches of their closing message, along with economic and abortion arguments.
“Every which way, the people who used to work with Trump, who are Republicans and the military and security messengers, it always rises to the top,” said Molly Murphy, one of Harris’s pollsters. “The character stuff can be a matter of opinion. And what is known to a lot of swing voters out there is there are a lot of people who don’t like Donald Trump. That is meaningfully different than people who have seen him up close having concerns about the course of the country.”
The revelation has put even current opponents of Harris’s candidacy in the awkward position of serving as uninvited surrogates.
“It’s caused me a lot of problems because people see it and think I’ve signed up to endorse Kamala Harris, which I haven’t,” Bolton said. The Harris ads show clips from Bolton’s statements on CNN that Trump will cause “a lot of damage” if reelected and that “the only thing he cares about is Donald Trump.”
But Bolton argued the ads fail to make the affirmative case for voters like him. “To bring those Republicans over, you’ve got to give them a reason to say that she isn’t radical,” he added. “They haven’t done that.”
Milley — the former top military officer who gave a speech in 2023 denouncing the “wannabe dictator” that was clearly directed at Trump — was recently quoted in a book by the journalist Bob Woodward calling the former president “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” Pence, who has declined to say how he will vote, is quoted in Harris ads saying he cannot endorse Trump because the former president attempted to put himself above the Constitution after the 2020 election by stopping the certification of electoral votes.
Marc Short, the former chief of staff for Pence, said he did not believe the spots would move a large number of voters because “most people have already made their mind up about January 6 and all of that.” But it could still be effective, he said. “What is the very, very narrow group of people who couldn’t decide after having Trump on the national stage for a decade? That’s a rare animal. Okay, then what moves that rare animal?”
Harris advisers believe that more narrow group could be decisive. As it stands the race is effectively tied and largely immobile across public polling in the battleground states, despite massive advertising spending and get-out-the-vote efforts on both sides. In addition to the senior advisers who have broken with Trump, the campaign has deployed lower-ranking officials and Republican politicians as surrogates across battleground states.
Harris plans to campaign Monday with former representatives Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes in the suburbs of Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former press secretary who has endorsed Harris, said the Democratic campaign has asked her to tape local TV and radio interviews and attend events in swing states. Much of her argument, she said, is to convince people who are surrounded by Republicans — and traditionally view themselves as conservatives — that they really don’t want four more years of Trump.
“When you’re actually talking to people, the thing that has been for me, most impactful: ‘Hey, I’m not a disgruntled employee. I’m not angry. I just really know him and I’m able to give so many real life examples of some of the stuff he’s done or said.’”
Sarah Matthews, a former Trump spokeswoman who quit on Jan. 6 and is now campaigning against Trump, has also been traveling with the Harris campaign. “People are just tuning in. It’s not too late,” she said. “There were a lot of people in the White House who know better than anyone. They were in the Situation Room with Trump. They saw his decision-making. They saw how unfit he is.”
Other close Trump aides have so far refused to speak out, even though their concerns about Trump’s fitness for office are well known. An August Washington Post survey found that only 24 of the 42 people who served as Cabinet-level officials under Trump had endorsed his reelection. Fifteen had made no comment. Pence, Bolton and Esper said they would not support his reelection without endorsing Harris.
Former chief of staff John F. Kelly, for instance, is not expected to weigh in during the final days of the race, according to a person familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Kelly believes Trump is unfit to be president and has long expressed those views, but grew frustrated that his public comments have not moved the needle.
“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up,” he told The Washington Post last year.
Barr, who once compared voting for Trump to “playing Russian roulette with the country,” endorsed Trump’s reelection in April.
In the face of the onslaught, Republicans have encouraged Donald Trump to deploy his former rival for the Republican nomination, former U.N. secretary Nikki Haley, to counter the effort. She was a sharp critic of Trump’s during the nomination fight, calling him “unhinged” and “diminished.” She later endorsed his candidacy.
A Fox News host asked Trump on Friday if Haley would campaign for him. “I’ll do what I have to do,” he responded. “Nikki Haley and I fought, and I beat her by 50, 60, 90 points. … I beat Nikki badly.”
Trump often gets frustrated by public criticism from his former advisers and has told donors his biggest regret in his first term is his personnel choices.
“All of these so-called Republicans are driven by their hatred for Donald Trump rather than their love for our country. For most Americans, this election poses a binary choice between a successful, former president in President Trump and a failed Vice President in Kamala Harris, who is the most radical Democrat to ever lead their party’s ticket. Anyone who wants to make America great again, secure our southern border, restore law and order and bring down inflation only has one option on the ballot, and that option is President Donald J. Trump,” said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman.
The Trump advertising strategy last week was more evenly divided between messages on taxes, Biden administration failure, her past support for banning natural gas fracking and her support of providing transgender medical procedures for those in prison. One of the ads focusing on the transgender attack, which Trump advisers hope to use to paint her as out of touch with voter concerns, received more spending than any other spot, accounting for $13 million of the $41 million Trump’s campaign spent between Oct. 7 and 17, according to AdImpact.
The Harris campaign spent $55 million during that same period, with a major focus on all of the swing states, including what one Harris adviser described as a 1,280-point purchase in the week than ends Tuesday in the Raleigh, N.C., media market. As a rough approximation, 100 ratings points allows all viewers in a market to see a spot once.
One digital ad running in that state, which was recently battered by a hurricane, shows two former Trump administration officials discussing how Trump handled disaster response during his presidency, including one incident in which he resisted providing support for forest fires in California for political reasons, causing advisers to prepare a briefing showing how many Californians voted for him.
“We are going to drive that message however we need to drive it,” said Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager who is overseeing much of the advertising effort.
Harris has been aided in that task by a coalition led by Future Forward, the primary independent group advertising in support of her, which spent an additional $79 million between Oct. 7 and 17, overwhelmingly focused on economic concerns and Harris’s plans to improve them, according to AdImpact.
“You have got to think of it as a multiweek story,” said David Plouffe, a top strategist for Harris, about the Republican-focused messaging attack. “Raising the risk of a Trump second term is an important piece of business. It is not our only piece of business. But it is an important one.”