Joe Biden put Republican voters who supported President Trump four years ago front and center on Night One of the Democratic convention, a tactic Republican operatives said could help move fence-saddling Republicans into Biden’s corner.
In a series of home-made cellphone videos, rank-and-file voters, who identified themselves as Republicans who backed Trump in 2016, said they regret their choice and plan to support Biden this November. The videos bolstered the theme of unity that tied together the first session of Biden’s nominating convention Monday evening. Republican operatives concede that it might be an effective way to make GOP voters disappointed in Trump feel comfortable supporting the former vice president.
“I think the real people will be a lot more persuasive than lobbyists or sour-grapes former opponents or an elitist lefty” like former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, said a veteran Republican strategist who backs Trump and is rooting for him to win a second term.
Whitman served in President George W. Bush’s cabinet and is from a prominent Republican family.
In endorsing Biden and speaking at the first night of the largely virtual Democratic convention, she was joined by Susan Molinari, a former Republican congresswoman from New York; Meg Whitman, a former eBay CEO and Republican candidate for governor of California in 2010; and ex-Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who lost his bid for the GOP presidential nomination to Trump four years ago.
“In normal times, something like this would probably never happen,” Kasich said in a prerecorded speech from Ohio. “But these are not normal times.”
Republican insiders were not impressed. They argue that endorsements from elite, establishment figures who have little influence or stature in the party are unlikely to convince GOP regulars to vote for Biden — even if they are unhappy with Trump’s leadership amid a coronavirus pandemic and economic downturn.
But they acknowledged that hearing from “real people” who share their concerns about the president could make a difference. The videos, spliced together by convention organizers, featured about a half-dozen self-identified Republicans urging a vote for Biden not on policy grounds, but because, they claim, the former vice president will return “decency” to the White House and return political life in the United States “back to normal.”
“I’ve been a long-standing Republican,” said a man identified as Michael from Rhode Island. “I’m telling you — you’ve got to vote for Joe Biden.”
“I have voted for and campaigned for Republican campaigns since the Reagan years,” added a woman identified as Debra from Wisconsin. “But I won’t be voting for Donald Trump in November.”
The videos are similar to those being used by Republican Voters Against Trump in a battleground advertising campaign. The group, run by Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller, Republican operatives who oppose Trump, has compiled thousands of such videos for its effort. Longwell praised the Biden campaign for using the videos in the convention, saying that presenting the former vice president as a “uniter” is an effective way to reach GOP voters on the fence about reelecting the president.
Doug Heye, a Republican strategist periodically critical of Trump, agreed that this approach — specifically relying on the validation of rank-and-file voters, as opposed to bitter GOP establishment figures — could pay dividends for Biden in the fall.
“I went home to North Carolina in 2016 and heard frequently from Republicans and independents that they were voting for Trump because they couldn’t vote for Hillary — but they would have voted for Biden,” he said. “Now that we have Trump in practice instead of Trump in theory, those voters could be real.”
