As the United States presidential election approaches, Vice President Kamala Harris has stepped up her focus on Republican voters. In the past few weeks, she has been accompanied by former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney to campaign events in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and more recently by former President George W Bush’s daughter Barbara.

On October 16, after Harris held an event with former Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, she gave an interview to Fox News, saying, “I invite ideas, whether it’s from Republicans who support me, who were on stage with me in a few minutes ago. , and the business sector and others who can contribute to the decisions they make.”

Many prominent Republicans have endorsed Harris, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Congressman Adam Kinzinger and the late Sen. John McCain’s son, Jim. She also garnered the endorsement of 200 staffers of former Republican presidential nominees.

Trying to encourage this momentum, the Harris campaign even established Republicans for Harris chapters in several swing states.

However, Harris’ pursuit of Republican voters may not yield the results he hopes for. At a basic level, things remain hopelessly polarized. Despite the prominent endorsements, few members of the opposition party will cross “enemy lines” to support Harris. In fact, her drift to the right may actually cost her more Democratic votes than the Republican votes she wins.

In a survey ISSUED on October 25, only 4% of Republicans said they planned to vote for Harris. The same percentage of Democrats said they would vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump. In other words, Democrats are for Trump as much as Republicans are for Harris. This makes the prediction that “millions of Republicans” will vote for Kamala Harris is totally fanciful.

Some might argue that Harris is trying to influence Republican voters especially in swing states. But even there, the numbers don’t differ dramatically.

According to the New York Times/Siena polls, Harris is winning 7 percent of registered Republicans in Arizona, while 6 percent of the state’s Democrats support Trump. In Pennsylvania, those numbers are 12 percent and 10 percent, respectively. In Nevada, Harris gets 6 percent of registered Republicans and Trump gets 10 percent of Democrats. The margin of error for all these polls is 3 to 4 percent.

While Harris is running after the few Republican voters who might return, she is alienating many others on the progressive side. According to the Pew Research Center, progressives make up about 12 percent of the Democratic base. The millions of votes that went to Sen. Bernie Sanders, a prominent progressive, in the 2016 Democratic primaries suggest that this pool could be even larger.

Harris’ swing to the right is certainly not well received by progressives. Her promise to sign the “toughest bipartisan border” in decades earned rebukes from immigration advocates. Also, her unequivocal support for Israeli aggression is a cold shoulder to advocates of peace and basic human rights. On health care, after advocating for universal coverage in her 2020 run, Harris has now stopped well short of that.

Given their political commitments, progressive leftists won’t turn to Trump, but could vote for a third party or stay home, which would hurt Harris, especially in battleground states.

Pursuing Republicans is therefore unwise. And history proves it. Democrats also went after them hard in 2016. Before that presidential election, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer argued that, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’ll pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you can repeat this in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin. “

Needless to say, Schumer was wrong. Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton lost to Trump in a historic, humiliating upset. The only state Schumer mentioned Clinton won was Illinois, a Democratic stronghold that also happens to be her birthplace.

As the former secretary of state campaigned in deeply red states like Nebraska, her “blue wall” crumbled. No Democrat since Walter Mondale in 1984 has lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that was the largest loss in American presidential history, with Mondale only winning his home state of Minnesota.

Harris would have had a better chance of winning if he hadn’t gone after voters he can’t win and instead focused on those he can: independents and progressives and key groups within them.

A recent survey from AtlasIntel Events Trump leads independents by 8.5 points. The two most important issues for independents are the economy and crime, and Harris could have easily appealed to them on those points without veering so far to the right and chasing the support of neoconservatives and others on the far right.

In addition, independents also adopt more moderate positions. Independents overwhelmingly favor marriage equality, expanding Medicare, and legalizing marijuana—issues that progressives care about, too.

Harris may also have won back some progressives by shedding some of her right-wing rhetoric and changing her stance on US foreign policy, and more specifically, Israel.

Like her running partner, Tim Waltz, Harris was completely in Israel’s corner. She refused to distance herself from President Joe Biden’s administration’s complicity in Israeli militarism, occupation and terror. This complicity has only grown in recent weeks as the White House he sits in oversees Israel’s “Master Plan” to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza through bombing, starvation and expulsion of civilians. Biden’s last-ditch effort to promote a short-term truce and the release of Israeli-American captives would not change voters’ perception of Harris’ situation.

This aggressive posture especially alienated Arab and Muslim Americans. The latter made up less than 1.5 percent of registered voters in 2022, but their distribution gives them disproportionate power, something they already demonstrated with the uncommitted movement they led during the Democratic primaries.

While people tend to focus on Michigan, Muslim voters are also a significant group in Georgia and Arizona. Their numbers far exceed Biden’s slim margin of victory in those states in 2020. Even in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Biden won more comfortably, only Muslim Americans can tell the difference. That doesn’t even take into account the many non-Muslim Arab voters.

As usual, the American duopoly treats voters with a choice between bad and worse. But just being the lesser of two evils won’t be enough for Harris to win.

Still, as November approaches, she’s chasing voters who don’t want her and shunning the ones she needs most. It’s not even just Arabs and Muslims. Dozens of voters across demographic groups are disgusted by the genocide in Gaza and want more progressive politics. Harris has no intention of delivering on these policies and could suffer electorally for it.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.