Biden makes his play for anti-Trump Republicans he hopes can give him a second term
CNN
Donald Trump hasn’t shown much interest in reaching out to Republicans who hate him.
Donald Trump hasn’t shown much interest in reaching out to Republicans who hate him. But Thursday, 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.
Filings from special counsel Jack Smith laying out never-before-seen evidence in the election subversion case against Donald Trump – including interview transcripts and notes from an investigation that counted among its witnesses former Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows – are now in the hands of a federal court.