Earlier this week, some former Republican members of Congress sent an email to dozens of retired Republican colleagues with a clear and urgent topic.
“Join the Republicans for Biden,” it said. “PLEASE.”
The email invited the former lawmakers to a virtual meeting next week with members of President Biden’s campaign team — a meeting that, for many of them, would be their first official interaction with Biden’s re-election campaign since it began in last year.
Some recipients were quick to offer help. But several people who received the email said it began a private airing of frustrations among Republicans who, despite publicly supporting Biden in 2020 and in some cases risking their political futures to take on Trump, said they were largely ignored by the campaign. and an administration with which they did not always agree.
“Many of us are struggling, how can we support him when he is so far to the left?” said former Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., who supported Biden in 2020 but said he was “unlikely” to do so again.
In 2020, a steady stream of Republicans stepped forward and supported Biden, representing a narrow but important slice of the electorate: anti-Trump Republicans. That group took a hit this week when Nikki Haley, Trump’s latest rival in the Republican primary, said she planned to vote for him — a man she has often described as dangerous.
Now, even as Trump lays out a vision for a presidency that could be even more radical than his first, the Republican opposition finds itself in an uncomfortable position. Some Republicans blame Biden’s campaign, saying they have heard virtually nothing from an operation they think could use his help. And they worry that the omission represents a broader failure to bring moderate Republicans into the fold.
“Haley’s endorsement of Trump is a coup,” said former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who retired after serving on the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. “If there aren’t other Republicans out there creating a framework for allowing these people to vote Democrat, I don’t know how you expect to get many of them.”
Kinzinger said he heard from a Biden aide after filing a similar complaint late last year, but has not received formal disclosure about how he could be helpful to the campaign. He plans to support Biden, he said. “If they don’t get in touch, that’s okay. I don’t call. But for me, it’s political negligence,” he said.
‘Everyone’s kind of scratching their heads’
Trump did little to reach out to moderate Republicans or Haley voters, and during the primaries he essentially promised to blacklist their supporters. In 2020, Biden showed her Republican support on the biggest stage possible: the Democratic National Convention, where those who spoke on her behalf included people like former Governor John Kasich of Ohio and former Governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey.
It was an important moment that helped Biden’s campaign frame the threat they said Trump posed as greater than any political party. And while it’s impossible to know exactly how much any replacement moved the needle, Biden made important gains with moderate and conservative voting groups.
Some of these Republican surrogates, however, say that during Biden’s presidency his contact with them essentially stopped as he focused on bolstering his left flank. Former Rep. Susan Molinari, a New York Republican who gave a brief speech at the 2020 convention, said she has heard little from the White House or the Biden campaign.
“I’m concerned about the state of the campaign, the fact that there has been little to no contact with almost all the Republicans I know who want to help,” Molinari told me. She said the silence felt strange for the Biden she knew as a back-slapping, hallway-walking colleague when they both served in Congress.
“I think everyone is scratching their heads,” Molinari said, though he added that he nonetheless planned to help Biden in any way he could.
Campaign across party lines
Biden’s campaign said it was doing extensive work to reach voters and Republican officials, but that some of that necessarily happened behind the scenes. In 2020, many important Republican supports were not implemented until August or September.
The campaign spent seven figures on an advertising buy specifically aimed at voters who supported Nikki Haley, and plans to mobilize campaign staff members for an outreach program specifically aimed at its primary voters in swing states. This week, he called a meeting for Haley supporters. And some bipartisan campaigns are already underway.
Olivia Troye, a former Trump administration adviser, said Biden campaign officials contacted her a few months ago. “I think there is more momentum as this year progresses,” she said.
“Yes, I am supporting Biden and have been working with his campaign team,” former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a Republican who served in the Obama administration, said in an email. “I will campaign for him this year.”
It was former Reps. Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania and Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island who took it upon themselves, Greenwood told me, to call out their Republican colleagues via email this week.
“No matter how you feel about Joe Biden, we think we all understand that our democracy and the future of our nation are at stake!” their email said. “We need to support President Biden now, buying time to rebuild our party.”
Former Rep. David Jolly of Florida, who left the Republican Party in 2018 and is now an independent, received the email. He said he was surprised by the level of invective expressed by other Congressional retirees in response to this.
“My eyes were opened to the level of anger and disgust for Biden, really,” Jolly said. “There is real disappointment in Biden’s policy direction.”
Greenwood, who said he personally told Biden about the disappointment among his Republican allies, suggested he believed people would change their minds. “My response to them is, ‘Look, I’m a Republican. I am not 100% aligned with the Biden administration’s policies. I just think the alternative is unthinkable,’” he said.
It’s possible Biden’s chorus of Republican supporters will be different in 2024. A spokeswoman for former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who supported Biden in 2020, said Snyder planned not to make an endorsement in this year’s presidential election, and in instead focus on Michigan House Races. Kasich and Whitman did not respond to requests for comment.
Other 2020 Biden supporters say they haven’t yet decided what to do. Former Rep. Bob Inglis, R-South Carolina, said he still hopes that Biden will somehow drop out of the race and be replaced by someone “normal,” as he put it. (Your humble suggestion? Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democrat from Rhode Island.)
As for Shays, the Connecticut iconoclast, he said he was looking at third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Five takeaways from Trump’s Bronx rally, from a Times boss
I’ve been to a lot of Trump rallies. Yesterday, Sam Dolnick, deputy editor-in-chief of The New York Times, attended his first, in the Bronx. In an editor-writer twist, I asked him to tell us what caught his attention the most.
The crowd was diverse. Trump crowds are typically heavily white, but in the predominantly black and Latino Bronx, I spoke to a black grandmother from Queens who voted for Obama, to young Dominicans outraged about immigration, and to a black architect from Harlem who attended his first rally. . She wanted to make sure that the media, whom she made clear she did not trust, would not describe the gathering as an exclusively white event. “Does this look like a Klan rally?” she told me. Several told me that Democrats hadn’t done enough to improve their daily lives. “Diversity is a word that hasn’t gotten us anywhere,” said Harlem architect Z. Jackson. “The South Bronx is 20 years behind. And Donald Trump was the one who showed up.”
It’s a party. It was a perfect summer night and the crowd was excited and even happy. At the park’s entrance, a vendor set up a speaker broadcasting clips of Trump’s speeches, like a greatest hits album. Strangers in line greeted each other and took selfies together. People started singing impromptu and admired each other’s MAGA gear. It felt like a rock concert or a playoff game. Several people told me they felt part of something important and exciting. However, what was being celebrated included Trump’s calls for the mass deportation of migrants, which prompted jubilant cries of “Send them back”.
Conspiracy and lies. Up close, Trump’s ability to reveal untruths and sow them in his crowds was astonishing to witness. Speaking of migrants, he said: “If you look at these people, have you seen them? They are physically fit. They are between 19 and 25 years old. Almost all are men and appear to be of fighting age. I think they’re building an army. They want to get us inside.” Later, I asked a woman what she thought of the secret army claim, which is false. “How do you know they aren’t?” she snapped. Many voters I spoke to cited YouTube, TikTok or X as their main sources of information.
Criminal case: so what? Closing arguments in Trump’s criminal case will begin next week, in a courtroom just a subway ride from the rally site. Everyone I spoke to called the trial a witch hunt, reckless, or both. Many complained about the judge. Others pointed to previous presidents who had affairs. No one cited what Trump is actually accused of: falsifying business records as part of a cover-up. “We all make mistakes,” a young man from the Bronx told me. “I promise I made a lot of mistakes. Therefore, we all need to be forgiven.”
To this crowd, Trump’s ideas didn’t seem all that radical. The solution he proposes for the migration crisis is to create mass detention centers and deport millions of immigrants. Almost everyone I spoke to complained about the Democrats’ handling of the immigration crisis. One woman, resentful that migrants are housed in local hotels, said she had never heard of a New Yorker getting a free hotel room. Another complained about a migrant center that she said encroached on her Queens neighborhood. Many in the crowd said they didn’t believe Trump’s border plans were racist. “Immigration control is not racism,” said Andres Brock, 27, a YouTuber from the Bronx. “That’s every country in the world.”
