Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris for president.

Cheney spoke at the first of three joint events with Harris in the suburbs of three swing states aimed at luring moderate Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has emerged as the Democrats' most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumored to be under consideration for a seat in a potential Harris Cabinet.

At the first event in Malvern, a suburb of Philadelphia, Cheney, against a blue backdrop that read “A New Path Forward” and a red one that read “Country over Party,” suggested that Republican-led states since then The Supreme Court ruling went too far in restricting abortion. The 2022 Dobbs decision abolished it as a constitutional right.

“I think there are many of us across the country who have been pro-life but have watched what has been going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and watched state legislatures pass laws “That leave women unable to get the health care they need,” said Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

“I don't think this is an issue that cuts across party lines, but I think we're seeing people come together and say, what happened to women, when women are faced with situations in which that they can't get?” Care that they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, suing to get access to women's medical records… that's unsustainable for us as a country and that has to change.”

Harris nodded repeatedly and applauded in response. The audience also applauded warmly.

It was a remarkable attempt to build an approval structure for conservatives to support Harris, who has made reproductive freedom a centerpiece of her campaign and vowed to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade if approved by Congress. By contrast, Cheney has an A rating from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that rates members of Congress based on their anti-abortion credentials.

Monday's three events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin took place in counties that Nikki Haley won in the Republican presidential primary. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had sought to neutralize abortion as a campaign issue by supporting state autonomy and rejecting calls for a national ban.

Cheney has been vocally anti-Trump since the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and served as vice chair of a congressional committee that investigated the attack. Her recent support for Harris fueled speculation that she could play a role in a future Harris administration.

Earlier this month, Harris said during an appearance on the popular daytime talk show The View that she would differ from Joe Biden if she added a Republican to her Cabinet. She was asked by radio host Howard Stern if that might be Cheney, but avoided a direct answer. Cheney's appointment would carry significant political risks given her restrictive foreign policy and her father's role in instigating the Iraq War.

Trump has often tried to portray Harris, a native of deep-blue California, as a radical liberal, but in her appearance against Cheney, who lost her House seat after co-chairing a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack , she struck a measured tone.

She promised to “invite good ideas from everywhere” and “cut red tape,” and she said “there should be a healthy two-party system in the country.” “We need to be able to have these good, intense debates about substantive issues,” she said.

“Introduce!” Cheney replied.

“Let’s start there!” Harris said as the audience clapped. “Can you believe that’s an applause line?”

Voters in Chester County, which includes Malvern, narrowly voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, but the district was won by Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points in 2016 and by Biden by 17 points in 2020.

The discussion was led by Sarah Longwell, who leads the group Republican Voters Against Trump, and lasted 40 minutes, including two questions from the audience.

Harris said Trump has “used the power of the presidency to demean and divide us” and “people are exhausted by it.” The vice president added: “People all over the world are watching. And sometimes I worry a little bit about whether we as Americans really understand how important we are to the world.”

Cheney praised Harris, saying, “I’m a conservative. I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is loyalty to the Constitution. In this race you have to choose between someone who has remained loyal to the Constitution, who will remain loyal to it, and Donald Trump.”

Cheney said she was concerned about allowing a “completely unpredictable, completely unstable” Trump to lead foreign policy. “Our opponents know they can play Donald Trump,” she said. “And we can’t afford to take that risk.”

But some observers questioned the wisdom of campaigning with Cheney in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, given her aggressive foreign policy and her father's role in instigating the Iraq War. Because of the Biden-Harris administration's handling of the Gaza crisis, many of these voters are now hesitant or abstaining from voting.

Trump made the comments on Monday, writing on his Truth Social platform: “Arab voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the worst vice president in the history of the United States and a person with a low IQ, has launched her campaign with 'Stupid as one.' Stone' leads.” Was Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man who pushed Bush to ludicrously go to war in the Middle East, also with every Muslim country known to mankind in wants to go to war.”

More than a hundred former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris last week in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from where General George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the Revolutionary War. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that the patriotic choice was to vote for Democrats.