Liz Cheney is hitting the campaign trail with millions of dollars at her disposal to defeat Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans, aggressively taking on the MAGA movement that dominates a party where she, and her father, are no longer welcome.

Cheney has pledged to do anything she can to help Kamala Harris, and has resources to back that up — including a PAC that raised more than $3 million in the first six months of the year, according to FEC records.

It’s part of an unprecedented effort by one of the party’s former highest-ranking leaders to not only take down Trump but purge any trace of him from the Republican Party. GOP strategists and elected officials who share her opposition to the former president say Cheney’s campaign — including her and her father’s endorsement of Harris — could pave the way for members of their party to join their cause. A critical mass could be enough to move the needle in a tight election.

“It’s a true reflection of how bad Donald Trump is — to think about a Dick Cheney, who is as time-tested of a conservative Republican as anybody in the roster, to come out and take a stance to support, like myself, Kamala Harris,” said former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican Harris supporter. “Look, the Republican Party loses no matter what. If Donald Trump gets beat by Kamala Harris — like I think is going to happen — the Republican Party loses. But if Donald Trump wins, the Republican Party loses even more: We’ll lose any and all credibility that we’ve got.”

Broadly, there doesn’t appear to be a deluge of Republicans flocking to Harris. An ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 93 percent of likely Republican voters still prefer Trump over Harris — similar margins to where Trump stood in 2020. Yet the campaigns are chasing any movement at the margins in what promises to be among the closest elections in modern political history.

“I think Dick Cheney’s voice is incredibly important, because I think it will draw some more traditional conservatives to pause for a second and kind of take that in,” said former Trump national security official Olivia Troye, a Republican surrogate for Harris who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. She will also be near Mesa, Arizona, Thursday, leading a phone banking operation with Republican Mesa Mayor John Giles.

Cheney, who emerged as a prominent Trump critic in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and served as the vice chair of the House select committee that probed the riot, has in recent days renewed her war against Trump, saying that he “represents unrecoverable catastrophe” and promising in a series of high-profile interviews to do whatever it takes to defeat the former president in order to stamp out the fires of Trumpism. It’s also a bit of payback after Trump and his political operation helped orchestrate the primary that led to Cheney’s ouster from Congress.

In an interview at the Texas Tribune Festival last week, Cheney endorsed Democratic Texas Rep. Colin Allred, and said she would be “in many key battleground states very much focused on how important it is that we defeat him in this cycle,” though she said she wouldn’t be an official Harris campaign surrogate.

“I will continue to be doing everything I can over the course of the next two months here to make sure that people realize, understand, recognize who Donald Trump is and what he did and why he’s so dangerous,” Cheney said.

Her PAC in 2022 spent hundreds of thousands of dollars opposing Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Republican secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem.

Charlie Sykes, a former conservative radio talk show host in Wisconsin who is now anti-Trump, said the “one-two punch” of Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement gives conservatives wavering on Trump consent to back Harris. And while others in Trump’s administration who have broken with the former president have been reluctant to endorse a liberal Democrat, including former Vice President Mike Pence, the endorsement of someone like Dick Cheney carries significant weight.

“Both living Republican ex-vice presidents are now saying they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump. And one of them, a two-term Republican vice president, is saying he’s going to vote for Kamala Harris,” Sykes added. “That clearly creates this permission dynamic.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Other Republicans are more skeptical of the impact someone like Cheney could have on the election. The Cheneys’ support is, for instance, unlikely to move the needle with social conservatives for whom abortion remains one of the top issues — if not the top issue — in the election. While Trump has wavered on his views on abortion rights, anti-abortion advocates and their voters still see the former president as better on the issue than Harris, who they fear would uphold the status quo or possibly do more to expand abortion access in the U.S.

Pence, for instance, has said he won’t endorse Trump but hasn’t ruled out voting for him. But even if he does, Republicans who oppose Trump think it’s unlikely that he would make the leap to voting for Harris. (Pence previously said he would “never” vote for President Joe Biden.)

“She certainly appeals to the Never Trumpers,” said Barrett Marson, an Arizona-based GOP strategist. “But they are already in the column.”

The Cheneys’ support for Harris comes as Trump continues to rebuff the support of those who have previously rejected him. Earlier this year, Trump threatened to blacklist donors to Nikki Haley’s campaign, and he said he didn’t want the support of voters who “came back to” him during a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity last week.

“They say you should take everybody, but that’s not the way I’m built,” he said during the town hall.

The Harris campaign isn’t claiming that the Cheneys’ endorsements — or the support of any one Republican — will make a significant difference in the election. But the campaign has been making a concerted appeal to Republicans.

The campaign in August launched a “Republicans for Harris” organizing program, hired a former GOP congressional staffer as its national Republican engagement director and has been targeting anti-Trump Republicans, as well as other conservatives and independents, through paid media and a grassroots digital campaign. The Democratic National Convention also prominently featured several GOP officials, including former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham and Duncan.

And a group of 10 retired top military officials endorsed Harris on Monday, calling Trump a “danger to our national security and democracy,” criticizing his previous comments on the military and deriding his “chaotic approach” in Afghanistan before the U.S. withdrawal.

Her campaign has used that support — or at least, opposition to Trump — to get under the former president’s skin. A new ad released in the run-up to Tuesday’s debate features clips of former Trump administration officials — including Pence, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley — talking about their concerns about a second Trump term or their decisions not to endorse him. The ad specifically aired in Palm Beach, the home of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

There have long been signs throughout the cycle that Trump’s GOP support could be softer than advertised. Nikki Haley consistently attracted upwards of a third of Republicans in various primaries weeks and months after she dropped out. In Maryland, Republican Senate candidate Larry Hogan even ran an ad hitting Trump on his involvement in Jan. 6.

Cheney is giving these kinds of Republicans a permission structure to back Harris, said pollster Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark and CEO of Longwell Partners.

“They are people who want to vote for a different Republican, and so they’re always frustrated they don’t have a different Republican to vote for. And so they know they don’t want to vote for Trump, but the question is, can they affirmatively get there on Kamala Harris?” Longwell said. “And that’s where Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney are helpful, because they set the stakes.”

Still, Republicans working to oppose Trump acknowledge that Harris — who tacked to the left on several issues during her 2020 presidential bid — is a harder sell for many Republicans than Joe Biden was. But they say the positions she is taking on a number of economic issues and her backtracking from progressive policies is giving many on the right the comfort they need to consider voting for her.

“Positive messaging on Kamala, not just negative messaging on Trump, showing people how neoconservative she sounded in her acceptance speech, sharing her talking points about small business tax breaks and getting rid of red tape — you can’t argue with that,” said Emily Matthews, co-chair of the Haley Voters Working Group, which has met multiple times with the Harris campaign to talk about how to get Republicans’ support. “It’s on paper.”

INDIANAPOLIS — Eight years ago, needing a running mate to vouch for him among skittish evangelicals, Donald Trump turned to Mike Pence, tossing an olive branch to Republicans wary of the thrice-married real estate mogul who once said he was “very pro-choice.”

It’s a different story now: To those same voters this year, according to interviews with nearly two dozen religious leaders gathered here for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, Trump’s selection is bordering on a forgettable formality — less interesting to them because they’ve already made up their minds to back him, even if begrudgingly so.

“I think evangelicals will generally, by and large, vote for him regardless of who he picks,” said Kevin McClure, a member of a Baptist church in Louisville, Kentucky, who spoke as he waited for Trump himself to beam into a meeting held on the sidelines of the convention. “Because the Republican platform currently, in the very least, has a place for pro-life priorities, even if they’re not as strong as many of us would want.”

Or as Mike Spradlin, a delegate to the convention from Memphis, Tennessee, put it: “I don't really know that it moves the needle one way or the other.”

It’s not that the vice presidential pick is irrelevant to the faithful. Many evangelicals here say they want Trump to pick someone who is sufficiently anti-abortion, or even to Trump’s right on the issue — both because that person could press their cause inside the West Wing and because he or she could be in line to inherit the MAGA movement.

Albert Mohler, a prominent evangelical theologian and president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued that Trump’s vice presidential pick could mean the difference between on-the-fence voters staying home or turning out to the polls come November. Mohler said Trump should pick someone who not only says the right things on abortion but “hopefully has a track record of defending them.”

But who, exactly, Trump picks from his shortlist is of far less concern. To most evangelicals here, the people Trump’s considering — at least the ones they know — seem to pass that litmus test.

“Who’s the Black guy?” asked Bonnie Fitch, of Carter Creek Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Kentucky.

Asked whether she was referring to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the former presidential candidate who is known for his evangelical faith, she and her husband lit up. “I just like the way he’s been speaking,” said Bonnie’s husband, Sid.

Trump’s campaign is said to be vetting eight potential candidates: Scott, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. His pick will likely be announced close to the party’s convention in Milwaukee beginning on July 15.

Trump is entering a very different kind of veepstakes now than he was in 2016. His governing style is clearer now than it was then.

“We took a risk on what he said he would do, and he came through and he delivered in that case,” said Scott Colter, the CEO of the Danbury Institute, which wants to “eradicate” abortion, as he introduced Trump’s pre-recorded video message to a room full of Southern Baptists. “And so we can debate all day long the merits of who Donald Trump is and his personality and all of those different things. But he did what he said he would do. … And I’m tremendously grateful for that.”

But who he should pick to run with him resonated less here. Mohler declined to say who he would like to see the former president pick. And other evangelicals — while namechecking Rubio most, followed by Scott — didn’t have an overwhelming favorite. Many couldn’t name more than even a few.

Several of those interviewed specifically pointed to Rubio’s youth — in addition to his conservative bona fides — as one of his assets. At 53, he is not the youngest candidate under consideration — Vance is 39. But they expressed concerns about the ability of Trump, who is 77, to complete a second term.

“I really like Rubio because I think he has the fortitude to carry on as president after Trump,” said Daryl Poe, who attends Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. “The young man from Ohio, J.D. Vance, seems to be more politically aligned with Trump than anyone else, but I don’t think he has enough time nationally to be that well known.”

Evangelicals are also aware that Trump’s MAGA base is predominantly white, and some said he should pick a running mate like Scott or Rubio to appeal to voters of color.

“A diversity candidate would be great because Trump is for everybody. I feel like that’s a common misconception that he’s just for white people, but he’s for everybody,” said Bryan Gotcher, a pastor at Oakhill Baptist Church in Evansville, Indiana. “There’s a lot of ethnic people who are rallying to him, so that’s really encouraging.”

And then there’s the issue of abortion. On Tuesday, one attendee at the convention who is to Trump’s right on the issue spent 40 minutes over lunch sharing insights with pastors about how important it is to be a voice for evangelical causes in the public square. “I honestly think we haven’t come to the end of the debate over life: We’ve come to the end of the beginning,” the attendee said.

Heads nodded.

But asked by a reporter whether he had a favorite candidate or advice for whomever Trump would pick, the attendee, who drove here from his residence about 30 minutes away, didn’t have much to say.

The man, former Vice President Mike Pence, smiled at the question. And then he slipped out the exit.