'They're not alone': Biden aims to unite anti-Trump Republicans at DNC
Democrats are eagerly hoisting rebel Republican politicians opposed to Donald Trump into the national spotlight in an effort to attract dissatisfied conservatives over to their side.
As the Democratic national convention has unfolded, a wave of Republicans have been given plum speaking slots and high-profile platforms to show their support for former vice-president Joe Biden, the newly minted Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
On Monday, the former Ohio governor John Kasich, former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman and former New York congresswoman Susan Molinari – all Republicans – spoke. On Tuesday, the convention schedule included an endorsement by the former Bush administration secretary of state Colin Powell and a video by Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Arizona senator John McCain. The night also included a video from Chuck Hagel, who served as defense secretary under Barack Obama despite having been a Republican senator for Nebraska.
“I think they’re just doing old-fashioned coalition building,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist who is helping lead the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump organization run by Republicans.
Alabama senator Doug Jones, a moderate Democrat, said the outreach and support from Republicans during the convention is meant to “to get folks comfortable with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris” and show that “that they are not going to lead this country in some socialist agenda”.
The inclusion of many Republicans during the biggest Democratic summit every four years illustrates the effort the Biden campaign is putting in to woo disgruntled Republican voters over to Biden’s camp.
“It’s important to let them know they’re not alone,” the Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond, a Biden campaign co-chairman, said. “It’s OK that there are Republican leaders that vote for Biden-Harris.”
Polls show Trump maintains a firm grip on most of his party. But, Democrats argue, the rebel politicians could be a gateway to a slice of the American electorate that’s attainable and potentially crucial to Biden ousting Trump from the White House.
“Nobody who thinks Donald Trump is doing a great job today is going to vote for Joe Biden,” the Democratic strategist Eric Goldman said. “What you’re going to get are people who maybe were Trump voters but people who voted for Barack Obama in the past.”
It’s not unheard of for one or two national figures of the opposing party to rally around a presidential nominee. In 2004, when he was a sitting senator from Georgia, Democrat Zell Miller gave a keynote speech at the Republican national convention. Joe Lieberman, the former Connecticut senator who was the 2000 Democratic nominee for vice-president, was a vocal supporter of the Republican senator John McCain’s presidential bid.
Biden has also long prided himself on being a politician with strong ties to both Democrats and Republicans, even in an era of intense partisanship. The Biden campaign has embraced that record. According to multiple Democrats, the campaign has been actively reaching out to Republicans for the convention. That outreach comes as a number of anti-Trump Republican groups – the Lincoln Project, 43 Alumni for Biden, Republican Voters Against Trump – also actively campaign and fundraise to push Trump out of office.
Hagel said he and the other Republicans featured at the convention are motivated by their revulsion for Trump’s actions as president.
“What I suspect Christine Todd Whitman and John Kasich and other Republicans who are supporting Biden see … is, in our opinion, what Donald Trump has done to this country and will continue to do in this country – debase the presidency, in my opinion, in every way,” Hagel said.
Hagel added: “The Republican party has allowed him to do that. They’ve enabled him. They’ve been enablers. And many Republicans I talk to in the Senate, in the House, know it. But they’re also afraid.”
Even so the Republicans who have backed Biden are uniformly out of office. None of the sitting Republican lawmakers who have fought with Trump have joined the ranks of anti-Trump Republicans.
“They hold office now. Christine Todd Whitman doesn’t. I don’t. John Kasich doesn’t. We’re has-beens. We’re out of office so we don’t have anything to lose,” Hagel said. “We don’t have anything to fear. Incumbent office holders do. If [Maine senator] Susan Collins or anybody would come out with the Democrats or appear at the Democratic national convention or say anything, they’re gone. The Trump voters wouldn’t go with them. They need the Trump vote in order to survive. But they also need more than the Trump vote. So they’re locked into a helluva tough spot.”
Jones added: “I still think that the president holds a command over the Republican Party. He has put fear into the hearts of folks. They don’t want to be the subject of his tweets.”
Republican support for Biden is crucial. Recent polling has majorities say their support for Biden is really more in opposition of Trump than in favor of the former vice-president. And while polling shows Trump trailing Biden and underwater in job approval, the final months of the campaign are more likely to be an all-out mudslinging contest than a battle of two competing optimistic visions.
“You’re talking about getting those voters on the margin,” Goldman said. “You’re talking about getting those voters who generally vote Republican but for whatever reason are turned off by the antics of the Trump administration. And every validator, especially one who’s won statewide in a contested swing state as a Republican, is a pretty good surrogate for the message that you’re trying to communicate.”
Jones, a longtime friend of Biden’s who still talks with the former vice-president, said he expects Biden and his campaign to try and compete in more conservative states because he sees a chance “to narrow the gap, as I call it”.
