Former and potentially future President Donald Trump is performing quite well with his fellow Republicans and also looks to be winning over Independents for the November election. President Joe Biden's reelection campaign hasn't given up on trying to appeal to anti-Trump Republicans, though, as they've now hired former Rep. Adam Kinzinger's (R-IL) chief of staff, Austin Weatherford to lead Republican outreach.
As CNN reported last Thursday, also mentioning some other names [Emphasis added]:
But Thursday, on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, President Joe Biden will take the first step in trying to win over voters his campaign believes could be the Holy Grail for them in the election, announcing a new national Republican engagement director in what will be a monthslong ramp up into the convention and beyond.
Beyond adding former Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s chief of staff Austin Weatherford as the leader of Republican outreach, operatives in Biden’s headquarters in Wilmington have been digging in on focus groups and polling for clues – particularly about the consistent 20% who kept turning out for Nikki Haley in Republican primaries long after she gave up on her campaign. They muse about Haley-supporting suburban moms focused on national security. They insist there are middle of the road voters exhausted by Trump’s attacks on the Constitution and restoring decency who are ready to find Biden palatable.
CNN’s interviews with two dozen Republican officials and aides, as well as multiple people in the White House and Biden campaign, detail the sometimes stilting, always-a-little-awkward conversations underway between liberal, mostly younger aides and frustrated, mostly older Republicans that go far beyond the generic statements about welcoming Haley voters and a few small but targeted online ads that the campaign has publicly announced.
Senior Biden adviser Anita Dunn has already met with several potential allies like Cassidy Hutchinson, the former assistant to Trump’s chief of staff who turned on the former president in her testimony to the January 6 committee, according to people told about the meeting. Several campaign aides spent last Wednesday on a Zoom call with two dozen Republican former members of Congress, hearing out their complaints and asking them to get involved.
Others who have turned on Trump, like his short-tenured communications director Anthony Scaramucci, have been consulted. Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman, is being deliberately given space to get to what many expect will eventually be a rip-roaring fulfilment of her promise to do what she can to keep Trump from getting back into the Oval Office.
That the Biden reelection campaign thinks it's a "holy grail" to bring on the staffer of a particularly anti-Trump former congressman who retired rather than lose after his seat was pretty much redistricted out of existence shows how desperate they are. Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) is also mentioned, another anti-Trump figure who is hardly taken seriously by the party. She lost her primary to now Rep. Harriet Hageman by almost 40 points in August 2022.
The Biden team has already tried appealing to those who supported former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who finally ended her primary challenge against Trump on March 6. They won't get much help from Haley herself, though, as she already said last month that she is supporting Trump over Biden.
Another name mentioned is Cassidy Hutchinson, the darling of the now former January 6 Select Committee, which Kinzinger and Cheney both served on. Her testimony in late June 2022 was problematic from the start, but the more we find out, the more discredited she becomes. We now know that the Secret Service wanted to testify right away to counter Hutchinson, but that they were "rebuffed" until the day before those midterm elections.
In a tactic that will almost surely not work, there's mentions about trying to bully other anti-Trump Republicans into speaking up more. There's lamentations about former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, as well as former Vice President Mike Pence not getting involved. That Howard Stern questioned Biden as to how come former President George W. Bush and former Gov. Jeb Bush, who ran against Trump during the 2016 primary, aren't getting involved is also mentioned.
Has-beens like former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman and former Rep. Claudine Schneider (R-RI) are downright delusional and nasty about it:
Christine Todd Whitman, the Republican former New Jersey governor and Environmental Protection Agency administrator under George W. Bush, who is planning to vote for Biden as she did four years ago, said the “neither” answer is not acceptable.
“They should understand that’s the worst possible response, because what you’re saying, is ‘I don’t care, I’m going to be just fine,’” Whitman said, arguing the only excuse is people who might be scared of getting attacked or doxxed or swatted from going public. “All that does is empower people that you don’t want to be empowered.”
But Whitman, who in 2020 was the national chair of Republicans and Independents for Biden, has not heard from the Biden campaign this time.
...
“Who are the real Republicans – the Maggots or people like me, who believe in markets, who believe in family, who believe in a military that is strong but also diplomacy? I maintain that I’m the real Republican and the Maggots are not. They are the RINOs,” said Claudine Schneider, a former Republican congresswoman from Rhode Island, using a derogatory riff on MAGA and the “Republicans in Name Only” acronym Trump often uses for Republicans who don’t support him.
Schneider said traditional Republican values should point to Biden. While she said she has heard the complaints he has veered too far left, investments like infrastructure and the CHIPS and Science Act are what her fellow Republicans should support – and also, she added, because “he, I believe, can be trusted. He has integrity. And that cannot be said of the other guy whose life is all about lying and cheating.”
Do these people actually think that this will help Biden in the long-run? It could quite possibly backfire and help Trump. Not only do people not like Democrats using a weaponized and politicized justice system to go after Trump--who was just recently found "guilty" on all 34 felony charges in an NYC hush money "trial"--they don't like being referred to as "Maggots."
When Brian Stelter, formerly of the network, posted the news, he was met with plenty of mockery.
glad they didn't try to go with anyone who would be effective.
— Corinne Clark Barron (@corinnec) June 6, 2024
It’s laughable to think that Kinzinger connects with any Republicans not named Cheney. pic.twitter.com/nn6Mg39t8K
— Emily Chapple (@blonde4thewin) June 7, 2024
Wow. Just…wow.
— Brad Slager - Scrubbing Down In a Bloodbath (@MartiniShark) June 6, 2024
Biden thinks that he will be helped by signing on a guy who worked for the second-most reviled politician in his own former party, second only to Liz Cheney.
Kinzinger appealed to Democrats, so all this will do is secure votes Biden already had.#Masterstroke https://t.co/upYULVZHH3
Fantastic news!
— Illinois Tea Party Conservative (@IL4Liberty) June 7, 2024
This spends money and won’t sway any voters. https://t.co/ZjBduMQr3S
hahahahahahahaha https://t.co/tll3m00hr4
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) June 6, 2024
User Varad Mehta summed up the story perfectly, including and especially when it comes to Schneider. The Republican Party is Trump's party now, and voters seem to be okay with that. They certainly were with the primary, and they just might be with the general election, less than five months away.
LOL at this female Seymour Skinner impersonator. And then she wonders why her kind have been thrown off a cliff. pic.twitter.com/HQ4ZuRtGZp
— Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) June 6, 2024
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