If Trump gets another four years we won’t have any allies. A lot of people on list are foreign policy types. “They can see Trump for what he is: in way over his head, divisive, angry, self-obsessed, a guy with no self- control and no business running the most powerful country on earth,” Salter told me. Mark Salter, for many years McCain’s closest aide as his longtime chief of staff, spoke for the organizers of many of these efforts when he said it was not difficult recruiting former colleagues who, like him, still consider themselves staunch Republicans to sign a statement endorsing Biden. 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. Just since the start of the Democratic National Convention last month, 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.
#POLITICATS ENDORSEMENTS TORRENT#
That doesn’t usually happen.”Ī steady stream of GOP endorsements this year for Biden – highlighted by the early emergence of The Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump, two groups trying to peel away GOP voters from the President – has surged into a torrent over the past two weeks. “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. “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. The common hope of these organizers is that their public embrace of the former vice president will help blunt the efforts by Trump to convince Republican-leaning voters tilting toward Biden that Democrats are “socialists” committed to undermining the nation’s fundamental values.
#POLITICATS ENDORSEMENTS PROFESSIONAL#
That could be happening again: Almost everyone on these long lists of Republican defectors is exactly the sort of White college-educated professional that Biden, polls show, is on track to win at numbers unmatched by any previous Democratic nominee. Nixon, the 37th President (1969-1974) Hulton Archive/Getty Images But the few previous comparable examples of partisan crossover all signaled a shift in the political alignment that saw a voting bloc previously connected to one party shear off and drift toward the other. Generally, campaign professionals and political scientists alike agree that endorsements don’t move many voters, especially in presidential races, where so much other information is available about the candidates. “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.” Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican congressional aide.
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.
View Trump and Biden head-to-head polling But probably no presidential candidate has entirely matched Biden’s level of crossover endorsements since Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide reelection in 1972 was boosted by the massive “Democrats for Nixon” operation headed by John Connally, the former Democratic governor of Texas and Lyndon B. In recent decades, experts say, only Bill Clinton in his winning campaign of 1992 and Ronald Reagan in his 1980 landslide attracted anything approaching this level of support from leading members of the opposite party’s coalition. The public support for Biden significantly exceeds the number of Republicans who officially endorsed Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump in 2016. That doesn’t guarantee the former vice president victory in November, but history suggests it could signal a lasting break in the Republican coalition that provides new opportunities to Democrats for years to come. Joe Biden is attracting more crossover endorsements from prominent members of the opposing party than any other presidential candidate from either side in decades.
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