Earlier this week, several former Republican lawmakers sent a clear, urgent email to dozens of retired GOP lawmakers.
“Please join Republicans in supporting Biden,” the message read.
The email invites the former lawmakers to meet virtually with members of President Biden's campaign team next week, for many of them their first formal interaction since Biden's re-election campaign began last year.
Some recipients were quick to offer their cooperation, but the emails also sparked private expressions of frustration among Republicans who felt they had been largely ignored by the Biden campaign and administration with whom they didn't always agree, despite publicly supporting Biden in 2020 and in some cases risking their political futures to take on Trump, according to people who received the emails.
“A lot of us are struggling with how we can support him when he's moved so far to the left,” said former Rep. Chris Shays, a Connecticut Republican who supported Biden in 2020 but said he was “unlikely” to do so again.
Republicans came forward in droves to support Biden in 2020, representing a small but important segment of the electorate: anti-Trump Republicans. That segment was dealt a blow this week when Trump's final rival in the GOP primary, Nikki Haley, said she planned to vote for Biden, whom she has frequently called dangerous.
The GOP opposition is nervous at a time when Trump's presidency could signal he will be an even more radical president than his predecessor. Some Republicans have accused the Biden campaign of hearing too little from activists who need its help, and worry that Biden's absence means it has failed to bring moderate Republicans into the fold.
“Haley's support for Trump is a blow,” 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. “I don't know how other Republicans expect to get much out of those people if they don't create an authorization mechanism for them to vote Democrat.”
Kinzinger said he had been contacted by Biden aides after airing a similar complaint late last year but had not received any formal outreach about how he could contribute to the campaign. He said he plans to support Biden, saying, “If they don't outreach, that's fine. I don't care. But to me, that's political malpractice.”
“Everybody's just scratching their heads.”
Trump has made little effort to reach out to moderate Republicans or Haley's supporters, and during the primaries he promised to effectively blacklist her supporters. In 2020, Biden touted his support for the Republican Party on the biggest stage of all, the Democratic National Convention, where former Ohio Governor John Kasich and former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman spoke on his behalf.
It was a key moment for the Biden campaign in positioning Trump as posing a greater threat than any other party, and while it's impossible to know exactly how much impact each surrogate had, Biden picked up significant support among moderate and conservative voters.
But some GOP surrogates say their outreach has effectively stopped as Biden has focused on strengthening his left flank during his presidency. Former New York Republican congresswoman Susan Molinari, who spoke briefly at the 2020 convention, said she has heard very little from the White House or the Biden campaign.
“I'm concerned about the state of the campaign, where there has been little to no communication with almost all of the Republicans I know who have said they want to help,” Molinari told me. The silence is out of character for Biden, she said, with whom he and his colleagues slapped each other on the back and had conversations across the floor during their time in Congress.
“I think people are just scratching their heads,” Molinari said, but added that he still intended to support Biden in any way he could.
Non-partisan election campaign
The Biden campaign said it has been conducting an extensive outreach effort to reach out to Republican voters and government officials, some of which has necessarily been done behind the scenes: In 2020, many of the GOP's major endorsements weren't announced until August or September.
The campaign plans to spend seven figures on ad buys targeted specifically at voters who support Nikki Haley, send campaign staff to outreach efforts specifically targeting primary voters in battleground states, and convene a meeting for Haley supporters this week. And a bipartisan campaign is already in the works.
Olivia Troye, a former Trump administration aide, said Biden campaign officials had been reaching out to her for months. “I think the pressure will increase as the year gets underway,” she said.
“Yes, I support Biden and have worked with his campaign team,” Chuck Hagel, a Republican who served as defense secretary in the Obama administration, said in an email. “I intend to campaign for him this year.”
Former Reps. Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania and Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island took on the task of convening their fellow Republicans via email this week, Greenwood told me.
“Regardless of how you feel about Joe Biden, I think we all understand that the future of our democracy and our country is at stake! We must now support President Biden and buy ourselves time to rebuild our party.”
Former Florida Rep. David Jolly, who left the Republican Party in 2018 and is now an independent, also received the email and said he was surprised by the outrage over it from other retired lawmakers.
“It's really woken me up to the level of anger and disgust towards Biden,” Jolly said. “I'm really disappointed in the direction of Biden's policies.”
Greenwood said he privately told Biden about Republicans' disappointment, suggesting they would chime in. “My answer to them is, 'Look, I'm a Republican. I'm not 100% in agreement with the Biden administration's policies, but I don't see any other option,'” he said.
The Republican chorus of supporters of Biden could change in 2024. A spokesman for former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who supported Biden in 2020, said Snyder will not endorse him in this year's presidential race and will instead focus on his race for the Michigan House of Representatives. Kasich and Whitman did not respond to requests for comment.
Some Biden 2020 supporters say they're still undecided about what to do. Former Rep. Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Republican, said he still holds out hope that Biden will somehow withdraw from the race and be replaced by someone, in his words, “normal.” (His modest suggestion? Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island.)
Meanwhile, Mr. Shays, the maverick from Connecticut, said he is keeping his eye on third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Times' editor-in-chief explains five lessons he learned from Trump's Bronx rally
I've been to a number of Trump rallies. Yesterday Sam DolnickThis was his first time attending the event, which took place in the Bronx. We asked him to share his experiences, reversing roles as editor and writer.
The crowd was diverse. Trump rallies are typically overwhelmingly white, but in the Bronx, which is predominantly black and Latino, I spoke with a black grandmother from Queens who voted for Obama, a young Dominican who resents immigration, and a black architect from Harlem who was attending a rally for the first time. She wanted to make sure that the news media, which she made it clear she didn't trust, wouldn't portray the rally as a whites-only event. “Is this like a KKK rally?” she told me. Some told me the Democratic Party wasn't doing enough to improve their everyday lives. “The word diversity isn't going to get us anywhere,” said Harlem architect Z. Jackson. “The South Bronx is 20 years behind. And then Donald Trump showed up.”
It's a party. It was a perfect summer evening and the crowd was excited, even joyous. At the park's entrance, a concession stand set up speakers and blared clips of Trump's speeches like a greatest hits album. Strangers in line high-fived and took selfies together. People broke out into impromptu chants and complimented each other's MAGA gear. It felt like a rock concert or a playoff game. Several people told me they felt like they were part of something important and exciting. But what was being celebrated was Trump's call for mass deportations of immigrants, which elicited jubilant chants of “send them back.”
Conspiracies and lies. Up close, Trump's ability to spread falsehoods and instill them in his supporters was astonishing. Of the migrants, he said, “You look at these people, you know who they are. They're physically fit. They're between 19 and 25 years old. They're almost all male, and they look to be of fighting age. I think they're organizing an army. They're trying to get us out from the inside.” I then asked one woman what she thought about the false claim of a secret army. She countered, “How do you know they're not?” Many of the voters I spoke to cited YouTube, TikTok, and X as their main sources of information.
Criminal Cases: So What?Closing arguments in Trump's criminal case begin next week in a courtroom a short subway ride from the rally. Everyone I spoke to dismissed the trial as a witch hunt, frivolous, or both. Many complained about the judge. Some pointed to previous presidents with whom he had extramarital affairs. No one mentioned the crime Trump is actually accused of – falsifying business records as part of a cover-up. “Everybody makes mistakes,” one young man from the Bronx told me. “I guarantee I've made a lot of mistakes, and we all need to be forgiven.”
To this crowd, Trump's ideas didn't seem so radical. Trump's proposed solution to the immigration crisis is to create mass detention facilities and deport millions of immigrants. Nearly everyone I spoke to expressed frustration with the Democrats' handling of the immigration crisis. One woman, outraged that immigrants are being put up in local hotels, said she had never heard of New Yorkers getting free hotel rooms. Another complained that an immigration center has taken over her neighborhood in Queens. Many in the crowd said they don't believe Trump's border plan is racist. “Immigration control is not racist,” said Andres Block, a 27-year-old YouTuber from the Bronx. “It's the same in every country in the world.”
