A growing number of prominent Republicans have come out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the November election, sounding the alarm over the potential dangers of a second Trump term.
The list includes former vice president Dick Cheney, several people who served directly under Trump and hundreds of officials in the George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations who articulated their positions in open letters.
The Harris campaign has discreetly sought some of these endorsements, while the Trump campaign has criticized and attacked those who crossed the partisan divide — even as his latest bid for the Oval Office is backed by only half of those who worked in his Cabinet, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Defections from the Democratic Party to the Trump camp have been far smaller in scale. Trump has scored the endorsement of two prominent former Democrats, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom he added to his transition team in August.
Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, a center-right online publication that opposes Trump, said the number of high-level Republican endorsements of Harris was unprecedented. She added that this lack of support for Trump — including from his own vice president, Mike Pence, who in March refused to endorse the former president — “sends an important signal to conservative-leaning swing voters.”