As Democratic icons stump for Harris, GOP elders keep distance from Trump

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.’”

Still, Trump does enjoy the active support of many Republican leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), whose narrow majority includes many members from districts that voted heavily for Trump. Other prominent Republicans, from Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to Gov. Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota, have also embraced the former president.

But this election marks Trump’s third as his party’s standard-bearer, and each run has showcased a notable clash with other top Republicans.

In 2015, Trump blasted Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who was held prisoner for five years by the North Vietnamese and was the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2008. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

The disdain has run both ways. Seven years ago, Bush mounted what many saw as a takedown of Trump during a speech in New York after Trump was elected. “Bigotry seems emboldened,” he said. “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.”

In response, Trump said Bush had “a failed and uninspiring presidency.”

Trump has also tangled with Romney, whom he has repeatedly characterized as “failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney.”

In February, Romney said he would not vote for Trump, although he declined to endorse the Democratic ticket. “Having a president who is so defaulted of character would have an enormous impact on the character of America,” Romney said. “And for me, that’s the primary consideration.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has privately called Trump a “despicable human being,” a “narcissist,” “stupid” and “ill-tempered,” according to a new book by Associated Press journalist Michael Tackett. Trump in turned has regularly insulted McConnell, calling him an “old crow.”

But McConnell also endorsed Trump this year, saying he had earned the nomination of the Republican Party.

In contrast, Harris has had a conveyor belt of former presidents and other top Democrats, deeply alarmed by the prospect of a second Trump presidency, line up to campaign with her or vouch for her since President Joe Biden passed the torch in July. During a speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, Michelle Obama said Harris was the inheritor of the movement that started with Barack Obama’s election.

“We did it before, y’all, and we sure can do it again. Let us work like our lives depend on it, and let us keep moving our country forward and go higher,” the former first lady said.

Trump does not lack for surrogates, although they are the less-traditional kind. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) do not fit neatly into either party’s orthodoxy. That arguably gives Trump a hearing from nontraditional voters.

“The cool thing about the Trump surrogates is that it’s a new audience and a new constituency,” Spicer said. “And the people who follow Kennedy are rabid. These are nontraditional Republicans and voters who will be new to the Trump orbit.”

Musk, who has a net worth of $269 billion, announced that a super PAC he created for Trump will hand out $1 million daily in a lottery for registered swing-state voters who sign a petition put out by the PAC’s voter recruitment drive. Critics have questioned the legality of the effort.

Trump has also tried to play defense. When Liz Cheney appeared with Harris on Monday, for example, Trump portrayed the Cheneys as recklessly pro-war, apparently seeking to erode Harris’s support among Arab Americans unhappy with the U.S. role in the Middle East.

Harris’s surrogates have unleashed freewheeling attacks against Trump and tried to shore up her support among crucial constituencies. Barack Obama, for example, chided Black men considering not voting for Harris because of what he has deemed latent sexism.

“My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama said. “That seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”

“Part of it makes me think, and I’m speaking to men directly … well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

He has also needled Trump on the campaign trail as the Harris campaign leans more heavily into questions about Trump’s mental fitness, talking about the Republican nominee’s sometimes meandering speeches and his asides on such subjects as the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.

“He called himself ‘the father of IVF,’” Obama said during a rally in Arizona last week. “I do not know what that means. You do not either. He said January 6th was ‘a day of love.’ … You would be worried if your grandpa was acting like this. No, no, I’m not joking. You would, right? You’d call up your cousins and you’d say, ‘Have you noticed?’”