PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Vice President Kamala Harris is getting significant support from some high-profile Republicans. But there is a group of Republican women who have been quietly working for the Democratic ticket since before Democrats were doing any cross-party outreach — and they’re focusing their efforts on Pennsylvania.
“The primary goal is to defeat Trump,” says Stephanie Sharp, a Republican from Kansas.
She didn’t start out campaigning for Kamala Harris. Harris wasn’t even the candidate yet when she helped start Women 4 Us. But she knew she wasn’t alone in her concerns about what could happen to American democracy and reproductive rights in a second Trump term.
Sharp was worried enough that she went to Washington, D.C., for a meeting of fellow Republicans in February, and she realized Republican women, in particular, shared her concerns.
“Lack of respect for the institutions of government. Women are the ones that run our households and businesses and schools, and so we’re very much institutionalists; following the rules. There are rules in place for a reason.”
The founders are from red states so they’ve targeted swing states, and they’ve focused on Pennsylvania as the largest swing state, sending out surveys and using the data for targeting get-out-the-vote efforts.
“We know how to speak to these women because we are these women,” she said.
“We know these women are Trump-exhausted. Now it’s our job to get them to the polls.”
Co-founder Renee Lafair says the group has put everything on the line for Harris since July.
“The night before we launched, both of my co-founders were trying to figure out how much of their business they were going to lose,” Lafair said. “So there are real costs to being public and being brave enough to state to the world, ‘We need to defeat Donald Trump.’”
Sharp says some GOP women don’t want their neighbors, bosses — even their husbands — to know how they’re voting, so part of the Women 4 Us pitch is an emphasis on the sanctity and privacy of the voting booth.
In one ad, about a woman who listens to political opinions at work, she says, “In the voting booth, it’s my opinion that counts — because it’s my family’s future on the line, my reproductive rights at stake.”
Women 4 Us has moved into Pennsylvania, for this final week of the campaign, hoping to get 10,000 to 20,000 Republican women to vote for Harris.
“We’re going to vote for us, and nobody has to know that,” Sharp said. “Because, when we vote for us, we’re voting for our families and our daughters and our sons. And in Pennsylvania, you’re voting for the rest of us in the 43 [non-swing] states.”