A few years ago, all of this would have been extremely weird. Actually, as the Democrats around me in the theater stood to applaud Liz Cheney—the pro-life, ultraconservative daughter of Dick—it still kind of was. The former third-ranked GOP House leader was joined onstage in the Philadelphia suburbs by three young onetime Donald Trump staffers, together issuing a warning about his potentially catastrophic unfitness for office—the four horsewomen heralding the threat of the Trump-ocalypse. Attendees seemed in awe of their bravery, and every few moments clapped with vigor.

Such an alignment, everyone agreed, would have been unthinkable in some other, more normal political universe. “If you would have told me four years ago that I’d be voting for Kamala Harris in 2024, my head would have exploded,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary in the Trump administration, told me after the event. There were uncomfortable titters from some in the audience, of course, including once when the former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah Griffin spoke highly of her two former bosses, Vice President Mike Pence and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. But the broader feeling—the powerful force that is disdain for Trump—kept everyone nodding solemnly in their seat.

This shared sentiment lines up with the Democrats’ closing pitch in the final days before the election: that Trump is an exceptional threat to American democracy. Voters of all ideological persuasions should choose Harris now and disagree about policy later.

Cheney and her fellow anti-Trump surrogates have run with that message in recent weeks, sometimes even joining Harris herself on the trail. Their effort, the thinking goes, gives Republicans permission to hold their nose and vote for a Democrat, maybe for the first time ever.

It might work. In an election that will almost certainly be decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, Cheney could reach a significant-enough sliver of the electorate for Harris to scrape by in November. They’re hopeful, even, for the deus ex machina of a silent minority. “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody,” Cheney said Monday during an event with Harris in Royal Oak, Michigan. But centering a campaign on the nobler questions in politics—morality, democracy—is a risky bet when it comes to Trump, who has remained, throughout the past nine years, robustly immune to such high-minded attacks. The Cheney Strategy presumes that bipartisanship can win the day. It might be wishful thinking.

[Listen: Trump and the January 6 memory hole]

In the month since she formally endorsed Harris, Cheney has served as a traveling evangelist for the Democrats, hitting the road in America’s swing states to spread the good news about personal sacrifice and national redemption. There was that event onstage with the former Trump staffers in Philly, plus the stop with Harris in the Wisconsin town where the GOP was founded, and where Cheney declared that she “was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning.” And this week, she wrapped up a three-state series of fireside-chats with Harris. In these appearances, Cheney has repeatedly referred to Trump as “cruel” and “depraved.” She warns that if he becomes president again, the mob attack of January 6, 2021, might look, in comparison, like the peaceful lovefest that Trump falsely maintains it was.

Nothing Cheney says is more telling than her example: A Republican born and bred, she effectively relinquished her seat in Congress and what was already an illustrious political career to stand up for what she thought was right. If a Cheney can vote blue, so can you. One problem, of course, is that most of the attendees at Cheney’s events are not Republicans. They are mostly Democrats—or Republicans who have been casting ballots for Democratic candidates in one election or another since 2016.

These gatherings sometimes carry the air of a religious revival, of people desperate to commune over their almighty revulsion for Trump. They weep and cheer to see Cheney confronting the bullies in this new, disfigured GOP. At other times, the events seem like a group-therapy session. At the theater outside Philly, several people told me, unprompted, about their own family divisions over politics: marriages and relationships torn apart during the Trump era. “I lost a 40-year friendship over Trump,” Sandy Lightkep, from nearby Horsham, told me. “My family’s split in half.” They come because they appreciate the sense of unity, real or imagined. “It’s wonderful that Republicans and Democrats are finally getting together,” Nancy Moskalski, visiting from Connecticut, told me. “This is what Joe Biden always wanted.”

Before a Harris-Cheney appearance in Chester County, Pennsylvania, earlier this week, I met two women who seemed to reflect the improbable alliance of the pair that would soon be onstage. “I just remember there was a time when I could have a discussion with a lot of my Republican and conservative friends,” Tanya Cain, who wore a navy-blue KAMALA HARRIS sweatshirt, told me. “We have to break this, whatever this is, and move forward.” Cain laughed. “If you would tell me Liz Cheney was gonna be in my politics—” The woman next to her, Susan Springman, broke in: “I never thought Harris would be in my politics either!” A lifelong Republican voter wearing a black turtleneck and pearls, Springman had voted for Trump in 2016 but now regretted it. “MAGA has to go, and whatever that means, I am willing to go with it to destroy that and to move forward with something else,” she said. She’d also persuaded her Republican husband to read Cheney’s book Oath and Honor, she said; he’d be voting for Harris too.

Democrats are banking on hopes that people like Springman aren’t such rare birds. That similar aisle-crossing comity is happening all around the country, under the radar. It’s totally fine, they say, if only a few Republicans are showing up to these events—they believe the important thing is the message it sends. Perhaps Cheney’s efforts will help remind voters of the violent attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election. “It’s about driving a news cycle that reinjects the memory of what happened and tries to put the stakes back at the center of the conversation,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump publication The Bulwark who has appeared on the trail in support of Harris, told me.

The Cheney Strategy reflects a Harris-campaign pivot. For the first weeks of her presidential bid, Harris’s line about Trump was, primarily, that he was responsible for taking away women’s reproductive rights. When Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joined the ticket, the pair focused on communicating to voters that Trump and the MAGA Republicans were “weird.”

[Read: The swing states are in good hands]

Harris has worked hard to introduce herself, define her campaign, and deliver a message that sets her apart from Biden. For a while, she seemed successful, pulling ahead of Trump in several key swing states. But the polls have been tightening for weeks, compelling Harris to adopt something closer to Biden’s final pitch from 2020: that Trump is a reckless would-be dictator, whose reelection could bring about the end of American decency and democracy. “Brat summer is over,” as Vox’s Christian Paz put it. “‘Trump is a fascist’ fall is in.”

A closing argument about January 6 was the natural next move in this high-stakes election, Longwell told me. “They’ve decided that’s their closing pitch, to sort of go for those undecided voters,” she said. “Strategically, that’s correct.”

Most registered Republicans will vote for Trump, but it’s true that many conservative-identifying voters have concerns about his character. Whether enough of those exist to change the election result is debatable. Longwell and her Never Trump allies point to the GOP primary contest for evidence: Nikki Haley received 157,000 votes in Pennsylvania, even after she’d dropped out of the race, and she got 14 percent of the vote in pivotal Waukesha County, Wisconsin. “Trump has actively avoided courting any of those people,” Griffin, the former White House aide, told me. “So our belief is that there are people that you can reach—a sizable number of Republican voters—who will be willing to either cast their ballot this one time only for a Democrat, or at minimum, not vote for him.”

The gender gap in voting intention is wider than ever. College-educated women and suburbanites, in particular, are recoiling from Trump, and recent polling shows that women voters in general are 16 points more likely to support Harris. “Republican women can tip this election,” Brittany Prime, a self-identified moderate Republican and a co-founder of the anti-Trump organization Women4US, told me. Her group has identified nearly 400,000 “MAGA-exhausted” women in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, who, the group believes, can be persuaded to vote for Harris in November. Prime sees that effort as a twofold push. First, they assure voters that backing a Democrat “doesn’t mean you aren’t a Republican anymore,” she said. The second part of the message is that “no one’s going to find out, I promise.”

Some of the Republican women that Prime’s organization is talking to have requested that no mailers or ballots be sent to their home, she told me, because they don’t want their husband to find out. They plan to “go into the voting booth, vote their conscience, and never admit to it,” she said. When you talk to anti-Trump Republicans about this clandestine sisterhood, they will share stories about sticky notes in bathroom stalls reminding women that who they vote for is secret. Back in 2016, pollsters identified the “shy Trump voter” phenomenon, which referred to the poll respondents who were unwilling to admit that they were voting for Trump—and thus went unrepresented in surveys. Prime and other anti-Trump conservatives are hopeful that a similar phenomenon happens again, but in reverse: the shy anti-Trump voter. “We could be surprised on Election Day and the days after that there’s a silent majority, a quiet groundswell” in support of Harris, she said.

The problem with a quiet groundswell, though, is in its name. All of these hopeful anecdotes are impossible to translate into hard data about voter numbers and behavior. And some on the left are frustrated with Harris’s closing strategy, partly, because it’s an appeal to Republicans. “She’s trying to win without the base,” as Naomi Klein, the progressive author and columnist, put it this week.

A consistent drumbeat about practical, pocketbook policies would be better, other critics argue. After all, Democratic candidates in close House and Senate races are running campaign ads about abortion. A recent survey from the Center for Working-Class Politics found that voters responded better to “economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative” than to warnings about Trump. “Ironically,” Dustin Guastella, a research associate with the group, wrote this week, “if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it.”

[Read: The everyday warfare of voting in America]

Most Americans already know what they think about Trump. As New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who was once a Trump critic and now supports him, put it rather cynically on CNN this week, “With a guy like [Trump], it’s kinda baked into the vote.” Sure, Trump referring to his critics as “the enemy from within” is despicable. So is Trump’s statement as president, reported by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, that he wished he had generals like Hitler’s. But voters have been hearing stories about Trump’s authoritarian inclinations and norm violations for years, and the polls still show an impossibly tight race. Almost four years after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol—and amid his four indictments and felony conviction—Trump’s favorability rating is higher now than at any time during his presidency.

After Cheney and the former Trump staffers finished speaking onstage in the Philadelphia suburbs, the audience responded with sustained applause, and the attendees I interviewed for feedback shook their heads in wonder. “It’s just amazing. I was impressed by these young women,” Ann Marie Nasek, a lawyer from Glenside, Pennsylvania, told me. It’s so difficult to understand the other side, she explained—why her neighbors and family members, who are, by all accounts, good and decent people, still support Trump, despite everything. “I wish this whole room was filled with Republicans,” she said, looking around.

On Tuesday, seven days before Election Day, Harris will deliver a speech from the Ellipse, the park behind the South Lawn of the White House where four years ago Trump rallied his supporters before they descended on the Capitol. Harris’s intention is obvious: conjure the dark imagery of the day that a defeated American president attempted to cling to power, just as voters make their final deliberations. Less clear is whether enough of those voters care.

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I hesitate to speak for other Never Trumpers, but we’ve gotten used to losing, haven’t we? In three consecutive presidential elections, our doughty gang of dissidents has failed spectacularly in its attempts to shake Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP. At this year’s Republican National Convention—that great festival of Trumpian celebration—Never Trump Republicanism was invisible, for the second convention in a row. Never Trump writers and pundits have frequently contributed to national media outlets (including here in The Atlantic), but in the GOP itself, the group has been derided and purged.

Now some Never Trumpers are finding a place elsewhere: Last night in Wisconsin, I was invited to moderate a discussion between the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, and her new ally Liz Cheney. The two had spent the day on a campaign tour through the so-called blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Seeing them together felt surreal: As I said at the event, Harris and Cheney make an odd couple—and their alliance is a sign of a not-at-all-normal election. It also marks a crucial shift in the focus of the Democratic case. When Harris launched her campaign this summer, she leaned heavily into a message of joy and good vibes. Her vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, rose to prominence by calling the Trumpists “weird,” rather than an existential menace, as Joe Biden had argued during his campaign. But then the polls tightened, and Harris brought in Liz Cheney.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how unlikely this development is. Among many Democratic voters, the name Cheney is radioactive, going back to the years of her father’s vice presidency; Liz Cheney herself spent years as a fierce right-wing ideological warrior and party loyalist, rising to the leadership ranks of the House GOP. Cheney was not an original Never Trumper. Unlike those of us who have been publicly expressing our concern since he came down the golden escalator in 2015, Cheney says she voted for Trump twice, and in Congress, she backed his administration more than 90 percent of the time. Then came January 6. Although her disillusionment with Trump had obviously been festering for some time, the insurrection led to Cheney’s full-throated denunciation. Her willingness to sacrifice her standing with the party and her seat in Congress made her a symbol of principled GOP resistance. Her role as vice chair of the Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol made her the most famous Never Trumper in the country.

And there she was Monday night with a Democrat she had once denounced as a dangerous radical. The usual alignments of right and left and Democrat and Republican simply don’t apply anymore, because Donald Trump poses a unique danger to the entire American order. “We’ve never faced a threat like this before,” Cheney said, “and I think it’s so important for people to realize this republic only survives if we protect it, and that means putting partisan politics aside and standing up for the Constitution and for what’s right and loving our country.”

This is what Never Trumpers have been shouting into the GOP void for the past nine years. And in the last two weeks of the campaign, Harris and her team have decided to make it their closing argument. Although Harris now frequently refers to Trump as “an unserious man,” she also warns that the “consequences” of his return to power are “brutally serious.” Sounding that alarm also has meant reaching out to the battered remnants of the Never Trump movement. (Bulwark’s publisher, Sarah Longwell—a leading figure of the Never Trump movement—moderated the Harris-Cheney event in Pennsylvania.) Why the Never Trumpers? Because they have been making the case for years that voting against Trump isn’t a betrayal of party principles. They are particularly well positioned to argue that it isn’t necessary to embrace Democratic policies to vote for Harris, because the stakes are so much higher than mere party politics. And that’s an argument that Harris is now trying to make to swing voters. The question is, will that argument actually persuade these voters in the way Harris hopes it will?

The majority of Republican voters across the country will vote for Trump, and Cheney’s involvement is unlikely to move many of them. Harris also faces challenges in persuading conservative voters to overlook her past stances on issues such as transgender health care, the Green New Deal, and immigration. Meanwhile, the largest known group of undecideds is unsure about voting at all.

But this election could come down to a sliver of a percent, and the Harris campaign has decided to make a concerted play for disillusioned and discarded Republican voters in places like Waukesha County, where we met Monday night. In April’s GOP presidential primary, Nikki Haley won about 14 percent of the vote in Waukesha County. Some of those voters were in the audience Monday when Cheney made it clear to them that voting for a Democrat was okay because Trump should never be allowed in any office of public trust again. Perhaps her words will give a few Republican voters the cover they need to make a decision that might feel like a betrayal but is in fact an act of loyalty to country above all.

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Trump: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The improbable coalition that is Harris’s best hope There’s no coming back from Dobbs.

Today’s News

The Israeli military said that one of its air strikes in early October killed Hashem Safieddine, a top Hezbollah leader who was a potential successor to Hezbollah’s recently assassinated longtime leader. Hezbollah did not immediately respond to the claim. A federal judge ordered Rudy Giuliani, a former Trump lawyer and former mayor of New York City, to turn over his New York apartment and his valuable personal items to the two Georgia election workers he defamed. A federal appeals court upheld the conviction of Couy Griffin, the Cowboys for Trump leader who was found guilty of a trespassing charge that was used against many other January 6 defendants.

Evening Read

Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta at home with her children in Santa Cruz, California Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic

This Influencer Says You Can’t Parent Too Gently

By Olga Khazan

The kids held it together pretty well until right after gymnastics. At the end of a long day that included school, a chaotic playdate, and a mostly ignored lunch of sandwiches, the parenting coach Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta picked up her twins from the tumbling gym around 5:30. The two 8-year-olds joined their 6-year-old sister inside Chelsey’s silver minivan.

Chelsey, an energetic 41-year-old, promotes gentle parenting, a philosophy in which prioritizing a good relationship with your kid trumps getting them to obey you. I was tagging along with her family for a few days to see how her strategy—stay calm, name emotions, don’t punish kids for acting out—works in practice.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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