Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell joined the #NeverTrump effort Wednesday, less than a week before voters in his home state cast their ballots in Ohio’s winner-take-all Republican primary. Blackwell will serve as a senior spokesman for Our Principles PAC, an outside group leading the charge against Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, the Washington Examiner has learned.
Blackwell, a noted conservative activist, has a long record in Republican politics in Ohio. He previously served as mayor of Cincinnati, was state treasurer and secretary of state, and challenged former Ohio Congressman Ted Strickland in the Buckeye State’s gubernatorial race in 2006. He now serves on the Board of Directors for the National Rifle Association, free-market advocacy group Club for Growth and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
In a statement about his newest position, Blackwell called Trump “an existential threat to conservatism” and “one of the most divisive figures in modern political history.”
“Donald Trump is dragging the nation into the political gutter,” Blackwell claimed, adding that Trump is “not an electable candidate in a general election.”
“A vote for Donald Trump is in effect, a vote for Hillary Clinton,” he charged, calling attention to recent polls that show Republican women indicating “they could likely defect to Hillary Clinton if Trump becomes the GOP nominee.”
“[T]he people who support Donald Trump are simply paving the way for Hillary and Bill Clinton to move back into the White House,” he added.
In an op-ed set to be published Thursday, Blackwell builds on Our Principles PAC’s recent lines of attack against the New York billionaire. He slams Trump’s “established track record of flipping on core issues of top concern to conservative voters,” his insubstantial understanding of foreign policy and his eagerness to negotiate — or, as Blackwell describes it, “compromise on principle itself.”
“Trump as a Republican president would remake the GOP into a party that no longer aspires to constitutional government, and his strong-man tactics — following Obama’s lawlessness — would forever move the presidency into an office where presidents claim whatever power they need and engage in the most appalling demagoguery to get there,” Blackwell writes.
As spokesman for OPP, Blackwell will likely add to the group’s seven-figure ad buys against Trump with a steady steam of criticism of the billionaire in various media appearances. In recent weeks, the group has hit the GOP front-runner on his now-defunct Trump University and circulated a memo to dozens of high-profile Republican operatives, pundits and campaigns that contains a detailed playbook of tactics the group claims can be used to defeat the White House hopeful.
“Our research shows, overwhelmingly, that putting out information, in [Trump’s] own words, and then asking voters a few questions such as — ‘How much do you really know about Donald Trump?’ ‘Can we Trust him?’ — is the most effective route to highlighting his conservatism of convenience and moving voters to other candidates,” former Mitt Romney aide Katie Packer, who founded OPP, wrote in the memo.
“Telling voters Donald Trump is a liar, a fraud, a liberal is counterproductive,” she claimed.
