The great error that much of the media made with its coverage last week of the visit by Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney to the Wisconsin birthplace of the Republican Party came in the form of a suggestion that Cheney, the possessor of one of the most prominent names in contemporary Republican politics, was providing Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, with a connection to the historical roots and values of the Grand Old Party.

In fact, it was the other way around.

Cheney, a former Republican congressional leader, has a history of adopting extreme right-wing stances on matters of war and peace, corporate power, labor rights, immigration, and a host of other issues that would have been anathema to the people who founded the Republican Party. She is, as well, the daughter of a former Republican vice president, Dick Cheney, who dragged the party into the neoconservative camp and made its name synonymous with tax cuts for the rich and subservience to corporations.

It is Harris—the daughter of immigrants who is running on proposals to strengthen the ability of the federal government to tackle price-gouging by monopolies, tax the rich, improve the circumstances of the working class, and advance the cause of economic, social and racial justice—who would be far more likely to arouse the enthusiasm of the people who launched the Republican Party from a schoolhouse in the eastern Wisconsin college town of Ripon.

Though she may not be so left-wing as the Ripon Republicans of 1854, Harris has views that are reasonably in sync with the first candidate they elected to the presidency. Republican Abraham Lincoln decried the “monstrous injustice of slavery” at a time when most Southerners and many Northerners accepted the original sin of the American experiment; he supported sweeping land reforms; he sided with immigrant workers; and he engaged in militant advocacy for the working class. “Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” Lincoln announced in his first annual address to the nation, in 1861. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

That’s a line often quoted by labor unions that now are among Harris’s most ardent supporters—and that for decades have opposed the anti-union policies of the Cheneys and their corporate allies. But politics makes for strange alliances. So it is that Cheney, the former Republican congressional leader who in 2021 broke with her party’s president after he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has emerged as Harris’s most prominent Republican backer.

Harris and Cheney came to Ripon with the purpose of encouraging more Republicans to join the former representative from Wyoming in backing the Democratic nominee’s presidential bid. It’s a politically significant endeavor at a point when Harris is locked in a competitive presidential race with former president Donald Trump, the authoritarian extremist who has spent the better party of a decade working to turn the GOP into a cult of personality.

Despite the former president’s tightening grip on the party machinery, millions of party members reject what Cheney on Thursday described as Trump’s “depraved cruelty.” Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley won 4.3 million votes for her primary challenge to Trump—earning substantial support in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and other closely contested battleground states. Though Haley is now a grudging Trump backer, her supporters have organized a well-funded Haley Voters for Harris campaign that is actively seeking to move disenchanted Republicans toward Harris.

Cheney appeared with Harris at a packed rally where banners declared, “County Over Party,” and where the former representative from Wyoming told wavering Republicans, “In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty.”

Trump’s response to this threat has been to label Harris as “a radical left person.” Like most contemporary Republicans—along with a lot of Democrats and members of the media—Trump imagines that the Republican Party has always been conservative. But that’s a political fallacy.