Republicans for Harris launches in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Republicans who oppose former President Donald Trump and feel betrayed by their party’s embrace of the far-right MAGA movement launched a Republicans for Harris coalition on Aug. 5 in an effort to convince GOP voters in the commonwealth to back the Democratic candidate for president in the November election.

The Pennsylvania initiative to defeat Trump is part of a national Republicans for Harris collective, the formation of which Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign announced on Aug. 4. Republicans for Harris groups also launched in North Carolina and Arizona on Aug. 5, and the campaign said more will follow in other battleground states.

A number of high-profile Republicans and independents are leading the initiative, with the Pennsylvania coalition being helmed by former U.S. Rep. Jim Greenwood and former Lancaster County GOP chair Ann Womble. 

“I have supported every single Republican candidate for president, from Richard Nixon all the way through to [Mitt] Romney,” said Greenwood, a lifelong Republican who represented Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District in the Philadelphia suburbs from 1993 through 2005. “I made an exception, and continue to make an exception, when it comes to Donald Trump. And that is because, in my view and in the view of professionals, Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist and a pathological liar and a conman who is unfit to be the president of the United States.”

During a call with reporters, Greenwood, Womble and Dr. Andrea Fellerman-Kesack, a clinical pathologist and a registered Republican who is a member of Pennsylvania’s Republicans for Harris, described feeling as though they no longer have a political home in the current GOP.

“Like Jim, I am no RINO [Republican in name only], but with the rise of Trump, I too was in a position of not even recognizing the party that could nominate a person like that to be the president of the United States, even though I didn’t think he was going to win,” said Womble, who served as the Lancaster County GOP chair from 2012 through 2014.

Womble was a registered Republican from the time she was 18 until she became an independent eight years ago following the rise of Trump. She still considers her political philosophy to be center-right.

“Today’s party, though, is unrecognizable to me, and it is unrecognizable to thousands of voters throughout Pennsylvania,” Womble said. “Under Trump, he’s turned this party that used to stand for solid principles — American, patriotic principles and worldwide American leadership principles — into simply a cult of personality, and that was on display at the Republican National Convention. It was obvious that this is a party now whose activists are just simply devoted to one man, not a set of principles.”

In the three months leading up to the Nov. 5 election, Greenwood and Womble will oversee a team of Republicans who will conduct outreach efforts among GOP voters in Pennsylvania, with a particular focus on those who backed former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley in the April 2024 primary. More than 158,000 Pennsylvania Republicans cast their ballots for Haley, despite the fact that Haley had dropped out of the race nearly two months prior to the primary.

Greenwood, Womble and Fellerman-Kesack pointed to Trump’s felony convictions and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters as two reasons they don’t support him.

“Never more so than on Jan. 6 of 2021 was his lack of character, lack of integrity and self-serving ambition more evident,” Greenwood said. 

On that day, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College in the 2020 presidential election. The riot followed a monthslong campaign by Trump of false claims that the election process had been fraudulent and that he in fact had won. Throughout his 2024 campaign, Trump has continued to spread lies about the 2020 election and repeatedly attacked election workers, which experts say undermines the public’s faith in the election process. 

Fellerman-Kesack, who grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania and registered as a Republican when she was 18 years old, said she is campaigning for Harris in part because of the vice president’s support for reproductive rights.

“My first presidential election was voting for Ronald Reagan, and I voted for a Republican president in every election until recently,” Fellerman-Kesack said. “As a woman, a mother and a physician, I’m horrified by Donald Trump’s extreme attacks on women’s reproductive freedom and terrified of what he will do if he’s elected for a second term.”

Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who would go on to be part of the court’s right-wing majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, and the former president has repeatedly bragged about the role he played in ending the country’s constitutional right to abortion. Project 2025, a plan created by former Trump administration officials, among others, of far-right policies to be instituted should Trump be reelected, includes a national abortion ban.

During the Aug. 5 press call, Greenwood and Womble noted that they are supporting other Democrats in November as well. Greenwood said he is backing U.S. Sen. Bob Casey over Republican Dave McCormick, and Womble said she has donated money to Janelle Stelson, a Democrat running against U.S. Rep. Scott Perry.

“We’re in strange times,” Womble said. “The stakes have changed quite dramatically; they’re quite different, very different than what they used to be. Defeating this authoritarian-style, strongman-style politics in this country is imperative, and so, if it means opposing and not voting for and actively working against members of the party that I used to belong to, I’m happy to do it and I will do it.”