In Arizona, Harris Makes Her Case to Republicans — With Bay Area Volunteer Support

PHOENIX — Standing in front of posters declaring “Country Over Party,” the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, pointed to a young woman sitting at the front of the room.

“Isn’t it amazing to have a leader in our country that we can point our young people to and say, emulate this person?” Mayor John Giles asked the crowd of several hundred Republicans, many of them Mormons, attending this luncheon event.

They responded with hoots and cheers — and just a few minutes later, enthusiastically welcomed the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, on stage.

“I was raised to believe that hard work is important. It is important to look out for each other. It is important to understand that the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us,” Harris told the group. “There are some powerful forces that are trying to divide us as Americans.”

Harris acknowledged that the conservative crowd might not agree with her on everything. But, she said, they agree on some fundamentals — including the value of empathy.

“There’s this kind of backward thinking coming from some folks that suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down. Instead of what we know, which is the real measure of the strength of [a] leader is based on who you lift up,” she said to cheers.

This event, at a golf club in Scottsdale, just outside Phoenix, is one of many ways the Harris campaign is trying to broaden its coalition with just weeks left until Election Day — and with polls showing the presidential race is locked in a dead heat. Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada are key battlegrounds for the campaign’s efforts to reach out to groups they need to peel away from former President Donald Trump to win: disaffected Republicans, independents and Latinos.

But the Harris campaign isn’t doing it alone. About 25 minutes away, in a tiny strip mall, volunteers gather every day around noon. They’re preparing to walk Phoenix neighborhoods, often in triple-digit heat, knocking on doors to engage undecided voters and those who might not be planning to vote at all. It’s a joint effort between an Oakland-based group, Seed the Vote, which recruits and trains California volunteers and a union-affiliated, Arizona-based group called Worker Power. Seed the Vote has sent 3,000 volunteers out this election season.

Roxy Moran, 28, traveled from her hometown of Pleasanton to do this work. Currently, between jobs, she doesn’t want to sit out an election she believes will determine not just America’s next four years but the next generation.

Moran said that while Trump continues to emphasize immigration, the issues voters most frequently discuss with her are abortion rights and the economy.

“Reproductive rights — it’s a big rallying call for a lot of people in Arizona. And even if they don’t agree with you on some other things, most people are like, this is so important,” she said. “The economy is huge. You know, everyone wants to talk about the cost of living.”

El Cerrito resident Vanessa Warheit is a canvass lead with Seed the Vote. She took a leave from her day job as a climate policy advocate to decamp to Arizona for the final weeks of this campaign. Warheit said that even in a swing state like Arizona, where campaign signs blanket the streets and political ads bombard the airwaves, some people manage to tune it all out.

“I don’t know how they managed to avoid the maelstrom of toxic political ads. But I think partly it’s because they’re so toxic… it’s incessant,” she said. “A lot of people just tune them out because they’re like, it’s too toxic. I can’t deal. I don’t want to, and I’m not going to pay attention.”

With competing attack ads making claims of all kinds, many people just don’t know what to believe, Warheit said.

“They just try to stick their heads down and just hope it’ll all go away,” she said.

Part of Moran and Warheit’s job is to educate voters — not just about Harris’ policy proposals but also about the rest of the Arizona ballot, which includes a race for U.S. Senate, key legislative races and a ballot measure that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution. Currently, abortion is illegal in Arizona after 15 weeks.

Surprisingly, both women said the issue of reproductive rights appears to be crossing traditional political lines and making Harris more attractive to voters who hadn’t seen it as a priority before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“In terms of support for abortion, it’s across gender lines,” Warheit said. “And it’s interesting because a lot of us before we got here sort of assumed that we were going to need to use kind of coded language like ‘reproductive rights.’ And for the most part, the words ‘abortion access’ resonate.”

It’s not the only issue that seems to be attracting strange bedfellows. At the GOP luncheon, the audience nodded along and clapped at Harris’ mentions of the Affordable Care Act and its mandate to cover people with preexisting conditions — legislation Republicans spent years trying to dismantle. However, an Arizona hero, the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, cast the deciding vote in 2017 to save the ACA — something that both Democrats and Republicans in the state remain incredibly proud of.

When Mayor Giles introduced the vice president, he acknowledged the unlikely coalition.

“I think many of the people in this room were initially attracted to this campaign because, frankly, we were anti-Trump,” he said. “We have very quickly become pro-Kamala, right? Kamala Harris will be a great president of the United States. Absolutely phenomenal.”

Giles said Harris would prioritize the middle class, protect personal freedoms and promote “justice and equality” at the southern border. But he framed all those issues in terms of moral clarity and the U.S.’s role in the world.

“Many of us have an apparently unusual memory that lasts longer than four years. We can remember the humiliation that our country suffered for four years under a Trump presidency. And we’re committed to not letting that happen again,” he said. “(Harris) is someone who is aware of the moral leadership role that our country has traditionally held in this country and around the world.”

The vice president echoed that message in her remarks, stressing her commitment to including a diversity of voices in her administration. She promised to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet and told the group she also plans to create a bipartisan policy council to advise her if she’s elected.

“What we are as a democracy (is) at play in this election,” she said. “Each of you have had the courage to say, hey, we may not agree on every single thing — that’s also what a democracy looks like. But foundational, first principles cannot be in question. Not for the sake of our children, not for the sake of our future and well-being, not for the sake of our standing in the world.”

Country, not party, must be Americans first identity and priority, Harris said.

Whether she can convince enough voters in swing states like Arizona that she’s right could mean the difference between a Harris or Trump presidency come 2025.