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Harris focuses on Nikki Haley’s primary voters in closing weeks of campaign
In the final stretch before the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on a three-state tour across battleground states to court swing voters — with a particular focus on those who backed former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary earlier this year.
Harris’ pitch was remarkably similar to the foreign policy warning about Trump that Haley delivered when she was a presidential candidate.
“If Donald Trump were president, Vladimir Putin will be sitting in Kyiv — and understand what that would mean for America and our standing around the world,” Harris told Oakland County voters in Michigan on Monday. Claiming Trump would surrender Ukraine to Russia, Harris added, “that is signaling to the President of Russia he can get away with what he has done. Look at the map. Poland would be next.”
As a candidate in Michigan earlier this year, Haley warned of the potential consequences of Trump’s failure to treat Putin as a threat.
“Once they take Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next,” Haley said. “Those are NATO countries that immediately put America at war.”
Both Harris and Haley also stressed the need to support American allies, denouncing Trump and Republicans’ views on an isolationism they say would move the U.S. closer to war.
“Isolationism, which is exactly what Donald Trump is pushing to pull out of NATO and abandon our friends,” Harris said Monday. “Isolationism is not insulation. It is not insulation. It will not insulate us from harm in terms of our national security.”
Haley criticized Trump in similar terms. “Look at the situation that the Republican Party is putting us in and that Donald Trump is encouraging — it’s this isolationist approach,” Haley told Michigan voters earlier this year. “America can never be so arrogant to think we don’t need friends.”
On Monday, Harris characterized Trump’s relationships with dictators as a threat to democracy, a point Haley also made on the campaign trail.
Trump, Harris said, “is so clearly able to be manipulated by favor and flattery including from dictators and autocrats around the world, and America knows that that is not how we stand.”
The former U.N. ambassador in January said of Trump, “You don’t befriend dictators and thugs who want to kill us.” She added, “When I was in the administration with him at the U.N., I literally had to sit him down and tell him to stop this bromance that he had with Putin.”
Harris and Haley may stand on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but Harris is tapping into their common views on foreign policy and America’s role in the world to help persuade undecided moderate Republican and independent voters in suburban areas.
In the counties where Harris campaigned on Monday across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Haley earned tens of thousands of votes during the Republican primaries — even after she dropped out of the presidential race. A senior Harris campaign official said the campaign believes this is an indication of suburban voters’ discontent with Trump. The vice president has been relying on Republicans to help make her appeal to these voters, including former Rep. Liz Cheney, an outspoken critic of Trump who has endorsed Harris and campaigned with her this week. Harris also hit the trail with other Republicans and former Trump aides earlier this month.
In 2020, Joe Biden won Michigan by less than 155,000 votes. In her race against Trump during the primaries, Haley won nearly 55,000 votes in Oakland County, Michigan.
Haley dropped out of the presidential race before the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin primaries, but nonetheless, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Haley received 9,000 votes, about 24% of the GOP primary votes in the county. President Biden’s margin in Pennsylvania was just 80,000 votes in 2020, and it was even smaller in Wisconsin — a mere 20,000 votes. Haley received 9,000 votes in Waukesha County, Wisconsin.
While Harris tries to woo former Haley supporters, Haley herself is ready to campaign for Trump, despite her warnings about him months ago.
According to a source familiar with the planning, Haley’s team has given the Trump campaign availability dates for a potential joint campaign event, and the two teams are working to schedule an appearance before Election Day.
Last month, Haley told CBS News’ “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” she was happy to be helpful to the campaign if needed.
“To me, the stark contrast between a Trump and Harris administration are what led me to say, yes, I need to, you know, I’m going to be voting with Trump, and I’m going to speak at the convention,” she said. “Do I agree with his style? Do I agree with his approach? Do I agree with his communications? No. When I look at the policies and how they affect my family and how I think they’re going to affect the country, that’s where I go back and I look at the differences.”
In an interview with “Fox and Friends” last week, Trump said “I’ll do what I have to do” when asked if he’d be requesting Haley’s help, but he reiterated that he “beat her badly.”
The secretary of state’s office was the target of an unsuccessful cyberattack earlier this month, the agency confirmed to CBS News on Wednesday.
An official with the secretary of state’s office said the attack was an attempt to crash the absentee voting website, and it was discovered when the agency noticed a spike in attempts to access the site nine days ago, on Oct. 14. There were over 420,000 attempts made from around the world, which the official said was a coordinated attempt to make the website crash.
Security experts were ultimately able to thwart the attack. The secretary of state’s office said it still does not know who was behind the attack but suggested it may have been a foreign country.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the office, wrote Thursday evening in a social media post that “this was a big win for our cyber security team and our partners. We work everyday to protect Georgia voters and our systems.” In a separate post, he said, “The attack was detected and mitigated quickly.” CNN first reported the cyberattack attempt.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the cyberattack and worked with the Georgia secretary of state’s office in the aftermath of the incident, sources confirmed to CBS News. The FBI has not responded to a request for comment.
Georgia voters have also been showing up for early voting, which began on Oct. 15. Early voters shattered records this year for the presidential election, the secretary of state’s office said, more than doubling early voting figures from 2020 on the first day, with 310,000 ballots cast, compared with 136,739 on the first day of early voting in 2020.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger predicted there would be record turnout in Georgia this year, telling CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” Sunday, “You look at the turnout — we’re almost pushing 1.4 million who’ve already voted early or who we’ve accepted their absentee ballots.”
Nicole Sganga and
contributed to this report.
Boeing machinists on Wednesday voted to reject a new labor contract proposal and continue a costly weekslong strike that halted production of some of the embattled company’s top-selling planes, resulting in furloughs and layoff announcements for thousands of workers.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers announced on social media that 64% of members voted to reject the deal.
“The strike will continue at all designated picket locations,” the union said.
The vote comes more than a month after 33,000 union members overwhelmingly rejected a negotiated offer and walked off the job on Sept. 13.
The IAM on Saturday had said it had brokered a tentative deal with Boeing that included cumulative raises of almost 40% over four years, significantly more than the prior negotiated offer.
The new contract offer also includes a $7,000 ratification bonus and a larger company contribution to retirement plans. It did not bring back a defined benefit pension that was frozen a decade ago and that many wanted to return to.
Contract talks broke down earlier in the month, but the company and union resumed bargaining in recent days, with Julie Su, the acting labor secretary, traveling to Seattle to meet with both sides.
If workers had voted to accept the contract offer, they would have had to return to work on Oct. 31, according to the union.
Boeing can’t produce any new 737s so long as the strike that shut down assembly plants in the Seattle area continues. One major Boeing jet, the 787 Dreamliner, is manufactured at a nonunion factory in South Carolina.
As machinists cast their ballots, Boeing reported a massive third-quarter loss of more than $6 billion, with the airplane manufacturer hit by the five-week-old strike and charges tied to its commercial aircraft and defense programs.
Boeing is struggling to right itself after manufacturing troubles and multiple federal investigations after an in-air panel blowout in January.
In August, the company brought in Kelly Ortberg, a seasoned aerospace executive, as its new CEO with the mandate to right Boeing’s safety and manufacturing issues. Ortberg, who earlier this month announced job cuts of 10% of the company’s workforce, or 17,000 employees, on Wednesday wrote in prepared remarks he delivered to investors Wednesday that Boeing is “at a crossroads.”
“The trust in our company has eroded,” he wrote. “We’ve had serious lapses in our performance across the company which have disappointed many of our customers.”
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