With just under four weeks until Election Day, former Rep. Liz Cheney was in Glenside, Pennsylvania, Wednesday night, talking about another day — one that happened 1,372 days ago: Jan. 6, 2021.
That was the day a violent mob overran police at the Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election — a day that turned a lifelong Republican like Cheney into a swing voter — and it’s a day that Cheney hopes will convince other Americans like her to oppose Donald Trump and support Kamala Harris.
“Every single one of us has a responsibility and an obligation to remember the facts,” Cheney said as she addressed the crowd in Montgomery County. “To remember that on Jan. 6, of 2021, when Donald Trump woke up, his intention was that he would stay in office despite having lost the election.”
As the 2024 election nears, Democrats and Harris-sympathetic Republicans are leaning in on their Jan. 6 messaging.
Last Thursday, at a splashy event at the alleged “birthplace” of the GOP, Cheney — who famously lost her seat in Congress for serving on the Jan. 6 Select Committee — endorsed Harris. At last week’s debate, Tim Walz sparred with JD Vance about election denialism, a moment Democrats widely heralded as the Minnesota governor’s best. And on Friday, Joe Biden told reporters in the briefing room that he’s “confident” the election will be “free and fair” — he just isn’t convinced it will be “peaceful.”
But as much as Democrats and moderate Republicans appeal to voters on Trump’s “threat to democracy,” as much hand-wringing as they do over Jan. 6, it’s unclear just how many swing voters are actually distressed about the day — or even informed.
Take it from Harry Dunn, the former Capitol Police officer who was present on Jan. 6. Dunn recently ran for Congress, and lost, in a solidly blue seat during a Democratic primary.
“I get caught up in this somehow, but inside the beltway, here in D.C., we think that everybody pays attention to Jan. 6,” Dunn told NOTUS on Wednesday. “And with just the news in general, a lot of the independent voters, they just don’t know what happened.”
Dunn has traveled the country trying to change that reality as a surrogate for Harris and on behalf of his Democracy Defenders PAC. And when Dunn tells swing voters about Jan. 6, he said it becomes “a big deal” to them.
But he said he knows he’s fighting an uphill battle, a battle where even the people who should know about the attack on the Capitol hardly know anything at all. Dunn — who is something of a #Resistance celebrity in Washington — recalled doing an interview in Wisconsin where the reporter had no idea he defended the Capitol Building.
“This is a reporter!” Dunn told NOTUS. “They’re a little more abreast upon what’s going on than the average voter. There’s so many people out there that aren’t aware of what really happened. So those are the people that I’m talking to, and they can’t believe it.”
Dunn said there were plenty of reasons the people he encounters on the trail aren’t knowledgeable about Jan. 6. For one, it happened nearly four years ago. For another, Trump and his MAGA acolytes have tirelessly worked to change the narrative of that day, embracing the rioters as patriots who have been unjustly targeted by corrupt liberals.
Democrats themselves have found other, more current issues they can use to cast the GOP as antidemocratic extremists, like their nonstop talk about Project 2025.
Recent polling shows voters care about democracy. In Gallup’s survey of top voter issues, the consulting organization included “democracy in the U.S.” as one of its 22 options for the first time. For Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters, Gallup found it was the No. 1 issue — 58% ranked the issue as “extremely important.” But it did not register in the top five issues for Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters.
Even in Nevada — a state at the forefront of recent election denialism — a spokesperson for the state’s Democratic Party said the issue requires “some defining and some reminding” to resonate.
“A lot of people see Jan. 6 maybe as an isolated event, right?” the spokesperson said.
“Because it’s not something that is necessarily right in front of people every single day,” this person continued, “there does take some reminding sometimes.”
For Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump aide who turned on the former president after Jan. 6 and is now a co-host on “The View,” it’s worth delivering the reminder, even though she acknowledged that the day was losing some of its electoral impact.
“It’s a shame,” she said, “but it’s a reality that the events of Jan. 6 certainly aren’t a top issue for most American voters.”
“When I talk to people, it feels like, to them, it’s so much more distant than just four years ago,” she added.
Farah Griffin spoke alongside Cheney and two other former Trump aides, Cassidy Hutchinson and Sarah Matthews, at the Glenside event.
In a conversation with NOTUS earlier on Wednesday, Farah Griffin framed Jan. 6 as a critical proof point about Trump’s dangerous character during his nearly 10 years in public life, particularly for college-educated suburban women.
“For many of them,” she said, “it’s simply a bridge too far.”
Harris, too, has cast Jan. 6 as a bullet point on Trump’s antidemocratic résumé, just another reason the former president should not return to the White House. That’s a slightly different approach from Biden, who often spoke in sweeping terms about the sanctity of American democracy.
Where Harris often litigates the case against Trump, Biden preferred to talk about safeguarding the republic.
But Harris’ approach may be more effective. Another former Trump official, Stephanie Grisham, has taken up the vice president’s strategy — and she suggested at a Harris event in Phoenix last week that Jan. 6 was just the beginning of Trump’s threat to democracy.
“Why should we remind people about Jan. 6?” she asked. “It’s because of who will join him in office this time around. I know, and it’s true, we were a crazy administration. But it’s not going to be anything like what he has learned now.”
She continued that Trump “knows what powers he has.” And when Trump and his first administration came into office, no one really knew how to do anything.
“We couldn’t find the bathrooms or lights,” Grisham said. “We knew nothing when we joined, let alone the powers he had.”
If anyone is a target for that argument, it’s voters in Montgomery County, which produced both Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and a man arrested for beating a police officer with a metal flag poll on Jan. 6. It’s the voters here who just might bring their undecided friend to listen to Cheney and some former Trump aides as they plead with voters not to send their old boss back to the White House.
But as a former GOP Rep. Jim Greenwood — who helms Republicans for Harris in Pennsylvania — told NOTUS on Wednesday, the person swayed by Republicans sounding the alarm about Trump might not exist.
“If they were focused on that issue,” Greenwood said of swing voters, “they’ve already, probably made up their mind.”
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS. Jasmine Wright, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.