MSN
Several people who once occupied the White House are now energetically crisscrossing the country on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris: Bill Clinton was recently in North Carolina, Barack Obama will head to Georgia on Thursday and his wife, Michelle, will be in Michigan on Saturday for the start of early voting.
Even former president Jimmy Carter, who is receiving hospice care at age 100, marked a ballot for Harris during early voting in Georgia this month.
On the other side of the race, the only former president campaigning for Donald Trump is Donald Trump himself. Many of the people who have led the Republican Party in recent decades have largely distanced themselves from Trump, a fissure he has not publicly lamented and seems to openly embrace.
Former party leaders have long played a role in paving a candidate’s way to the White House, often helping generate excitement in the intense closing weeks of the race. Harris’s campaign, reflecting a relatively traditional approach, is seizing that playbook, using Democratic icons to generate buzz.
Trump, in contrast, has a long history of insulting and clashing with his party’s former standard-bearers. The absence from the campaign of figures such as former president George W. Bush and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney reflects their distaste for Trump, but also plays into his self-characterization as a norm-busting political outsider, uninterested in the stamp of approval of even his own party’s elites.
“With all due respect, I worked for George W. Bush. I don’t think there are a lot of people in the MAGA movement who were waiting to hear whether George W. Bush was endorsing anybody,” said Sean Spicer, a Republican strategist who served as Trump’s White House press secretary. “I think if this was three cycles ago, we would be having a very different conversation.”
The dynamic shows how much the GOP has been overtaken by antiestablishment passions, Spicer said. “The constituency isn’t looking for party elders for their blessing,” he said. “Nobody at the [Republican National] Convention was like, ‘Where’s Mitt Romney?’”
It is not clear how these strategies will play in a race where Trump, despite having served as president, is positioning himself as a rebel, and Harris, despite her role as potentially the first woman to occupy the Oval Office, is presenting herself as a bulwark against Trump’s norm-shattering.
Harris, seeking to bolster that image, has collected endorsements not only from Democratic leaders but also from a range of GOP figures and former Trump administration officials who are alienated from the former president.
On Monday, Harris pinballed across three battleground states with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who denounced Trump’s actions as beneath the office of the presidency and told fellow Republicans why Harris would be the first Democrat she has voted for. Cheney’s father, former Republican vice president Dick Cheney, also endorsed Harris, though he has not campaigned for her.
“It’s not about party, it’s about right and wrong,” said Liz Cheney, who represented Wyoming in the House. “I certainly have many Republicans who will say to me, ‘I can’t be public.’ They do worry about a whole range of things, including violence, but they’ll do the right thing. And I would just remind people, if you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody.”
Strategists say messages like that can reassure voters — including, Democrats hope, the thin slice of the electorate that is still undecided — that like-minded people embrace Harris’s policies.
“It signals to voters, and it signals to Americans, that this is a team effort … particularly for Kamala, part of her message being that she is building a broad coalition,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist and a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “When [Harris] says, ‘There’s a place for you,’ and you see everyone from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter to Liz Cheney, you see all different voices and faces who are saying, ‘We are part of the coalition.’”
