Local Republicans faced harassment after publicly supporting Kamala Harris. Is that ‘just how it’s going to be’?

Kristina Lange was sitting in her car outside Sugartown Strawberries Farm Stand & Country Store on Wednesday, trying to delete the latest round of hateful comments from the farm’s Facebook page while her husband Bob handled an influx of customers.

The Langes, both lifelong Republicans, were featured in a Kamala Harris ad in late September, picking corn on their idyllic Malvern farm and saying they refused to vote for Donald Trump again. Since then, the fallout has been nearly nonstop.

First came the viral posts falsely claiming the Langes were paid actors and lifelong Democrats. (In fact Bob Lange has been an elected Republican town official since 1997.) Then came the vicious phone calls, the flood of negative reviews on Google and Yelp, the unsupported accusations of pedophilia, the doctored images of Trump peeing on the Langes’ wedding photos. Some callers just screamed obscenities into the phone and hung up.

“Every day I have a feeling of heaviness,” said Kristina Lange. “Because I didn’t realize that the hate was so deep-seated.”

After a round of media attention, the Langes then became the subject of overwhelming positive support, aimed at them like a maximum capacity fire hose. A hundred customers a day showed up at the farm stand, Bob Lange said, eager to buy whatever they could. They got calls from Sweden and Australia and all over the United States, thanking them, encouraging them, placing orders for their beach plum jelly and pumpkin butter. They could barely keep up.

“It’s unbelievable. I’m so enthused with America, because I was so disillusioned before,” said Bob, who is a Willistown Township supervisor. (The Chester County GOP did not respond to requests for comment.)

In every election voters cross party lines, but the Harris campaign is highlighting her Republicans supporters, which has in some cases brought down the wrath of their political opponents. Two months ago, Matthew McCaffery, a Montgomery County GOP official who urged other Republicans to vote against Trump, was swatted (someone called police to his house with a fake emergency) and ousted from his party role. He is now appearing in Harris ads in swing states.

Both the Langes’ and McCaffery’s experiences suggest a deeply divided electorate. Negative partisanship — the idea that people are attached to their political party less because of policies or ideology and more because of a strong aversion to the other party — is particularly high, said Jim Piazza, a political science professor at Penn State. So are the current levels of national polarization and violent rhetoric.

“You have to look back to the 1850s to see similar levels,” he said. “That’s not a good sign!”

The targets of “severe hostility,” a category that includes harassment, threats, and attacks, don’t differ substantially by party, even if Democratic and independent local elected officials report significantly more insults, according to new research from the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University and Civic Pulse. Some voters and elected officials fear that harassment and threats lead directly to acts of violence. But that is not always the case.

That may be because sometimes threats and harassment can achieve the perpetrator’s goals — pushing a targeted opponent out of office, for example — without physical violence, said Sam Jones, a spokesman for the Bridging Divides Initiative.

For some who have publicly crossed party lines, the reaction has been muted. Robert Nix, a Philly lawyer and volunteer participant in Republican Voters Against Trump, helped lead statewide Hispanic outreach for Bush-Cheney in 2004 and long advised the Republican Party on how to better appeal to Latino voters. He voted for Trump in 2016.

But by 2020, he had changed his mind, and he has since appeared on anti-Trump billboards throughout the state and on national television. He has not faced the vitriol the Langes have.

“Mostly, I’ve gotten crickets,” Nix said. “I’ve been sort of shunned, and quietly dropped from all my affiliations.”

On the other side of the political aisle, Vince Sardo, of Scranton, also said he hasn’t gotten much “direct feedback” over his party crossing. A retired firefighter who was active in the firefighting union for decades, Sardo called himself a “die-hard Democrat.” In 2016, he voted for Hillary Clinton, but by 2020 he had switched to Trump. He’s door-knocking and doing interviews to urge his mostly Democratic neighbors to vote Trump.

“I’m not going to lose family or friends over politics,” Sardo said. But he added, “I feel our country is on the line.”

The Trump campaign hasn’t made party-crossing a signature message, though a spokesperson for the campaign pointed out that Trump has been endorsed by former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, as well as his former rival Nikki Haley. The campaign also noted its outreach to union, working class, Black and Latino voters, groups who traditionally vote Democrat.

The same day the ad featuring the Langes debuted, the Harris campaign held an inaugural “Republicans for Harris” event in Lancaster — a county that Trump won by 16 points in 2020.

Speaker after speaker commended the Republicans who had come out, calling them brave and encouraging them to publicly support Harris. The campaign passed out blue “Republicans for Harris” signs, although a few attendees said they worried about displaying them, citing comments a sheriff in Ohio made about recording addresses of lawns with Harris signs on them.

“It’s scary, scary, scary,” said Louis Sitler, 83, of Litiz, a registered Republican who attended with her husband. The couple lives in a retirement community where political signs aren’t permitted but they weren’t sure they’d put one up even if they were able. Outside of the event, Patrick Gerlach gave out “Vote Decency” signs, which he said were a subtler way to display support for Harris.

Ann Womble, a former GOP county chairwoman in Lancaster, is cochair of the state’s Republicans for Harris coalition. She switched her party to independent when Republicans first nominated Trump in 2016, dismayed by what she described as a politics of resentment and rage. She had hoped to see “a whole wellspring of people that would stand up and say no.” But that didn’t happen.

Last weekend, she went to check up on the Langes at their farm.

“I don’t think anything about it is run of the mill,” Womble said. “It shouldn’t be considered ‘that’s just how it’s going to be from now on in American politics.’”

Staff writer Julia Terruso contributed to this article.

This story has been updated to clarify the relationship between potential acts of violence and harassment/threats.