Nearly 100 Republican and independent leaders endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president today, including one-time 2020 Republican presidential candidate Bill Weld and the former Republican governors of Michigan and New Jersey.
The latest Republican-led effort to oppose the re-election of President Trump also includes current and former Republicans in the key battleground state of Michigan that will help decide the outcome of the Nov. 3 election, the group’s members said.
Called ‘Republicans and Independents for Biden’, the group is headed by Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey who has become one of Trump’s fiercest critics and who spoke at the recent Democratic National Convention in support of Biden.
“Biden is a decent man, he’s a steady man,” Whitman told Reuters. “Trump is trying to paint the world of Joe Biden as horrific – but that’s Trump’s America now.”
She accused Trump of betraying conservative values by undermining the rule of law and national security, lying, dividing Americans along racial lines, and failing the country in his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts, briefly and unsuccessfully challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican nominating contest. Another leading member of the group is Rick Snyder, a two-term governor of Michigan who left office in 2019.
Snyder decried what he called Trump’s divisive and bullying tactics, adding: “Having worked with Joe Biden and Donald Trump when I was Governor, I believe Biden is the clear choice to put our country back on a positive path.”
Whitman, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under Republican President George W. Bush, said the group will target voters in a handful of battleground states, particularly suburban women and voters who do not like Trump but still hesitate to back Biden.
The group launches a website on Thursday and plans to campaign, buy advertisements and place opinion pieces in state and national media in support of Biden.
“Donald Trump’s daily assaults on our nation’s founding principles pose an existential threat to the future of the Republic,” the group will declare.
The impact of this unprecedented campaign by members of a political party to oppose one of their own running for re-election as president remains to be seen. Polls show that Trump still enjoys nearly 90 percent approval among the Republican rank and file.
Biden has received public endorsements from a huge roster of Republicans, including about two dozen former House and Senate members, nearly 75 former national security officials in Republican administrations, a group of former Republican Justice Department officials, and hundreds of aides to the three Republican presidential nominees immediately before Trump: Mitt Romney in 2012, McCain in 2008 and George W. Bush in 2004 and 2000.
Over this same period, a former chief of staff and a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security have both recorded testimonials for the Republican Voters Against Trump group declaring the President unfit to serve.
Tim Murtaugh, communications director for Trump’s campaign, said the president has unprecedented support among “real Republican voters.”
Biden’s campaign has been trying to build a broad coalition of liberals, moderate Republicans and independents. When he accepted the Democratic nomination at the convention in August, Biden said if elected he would be a president for all Americans, not just for the Democratic base.
Whitman’s group is affiliated with and will be funded by The Lincoln Project, which by the end of June had raised nearly $20 million, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Its members come from around the country but about a fifth are from Michigan, which Trump won by less than a percentage point in 2016.
“I think the biggest value is that it shows it’s OK to vote for Joe Biden for Republicans,” says Wes Gullett, a former Arizona state director for the late Sen. John McCain, who has endorsed Biden. “There are a lot of Republicans sitting there thinking: Is all this stuff true about the Democrats? But now all these Republicans are publicly endorsing Joe Biden. That doesn’t usually happen.”
They include former U.S. Republican congressmen Joe Schwarz and Dave Trott, and former Republican state representatives Doug Hart and David Maturen.
What makes the defections from Trump especially noteworthy is that the vast majority of Republican renegades are not only indicating they don’t intend to vote for Trump but are also taking the long next step to avow that they will vote for Biden. That’s unusual.
“It’s extraordinary,” says John J. Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican congressional aide. “Even in 1964 you had some Republicans who didn’t support Barry Goldwater, but not all that many went ‘all the way for LBJ.’ Maybe with the exception of 1972 with Democrats for Nixon, I can’t remember this many prominent figures in a party crossing lines to support the other candidate.”