This week is the Democratic Party’s time to rally around Joe Biden and try to show that it has ended the battle between progressives and moderates over health care and climate policy in the service of uniting to defeat President Trump in November. But Republicans who oppose the president also are using the convention week as a platform to urge voters who typically support the GOP nominee to get behind Biden instead.
Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who ran for president in 2016 and lost the GOP’s nomination to Trump, refused to attend the 2016 Republican convention, which was held in his own state when he was governor. But this year he received a coveted prime-time slot at the Democratic convention to argue that party labels aren’t as important as backing the person who he thinks could unify the country — Biden.
Kasich said, “No one person or party has all the answers” but said Biden is “a man for our times.”
Several other notable GOP figures spoke briefly before Kasich — Meg Whitman, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard; Susan Molinari, a former GOP congresswoman who spoke at the 1996 Republican convention; and Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey. They all stressed the need to unify the country and vouched their belief that Biden has the ability to reach out to both Republicans and independents.
Earlier on Monday, Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, penned an editorial in The Washington Post detailing interactions with the president, who Taylor said cared more about his own personal political stature than policy. Taylor said Trump’s “first term has been dangerously chaotic. Four more years of this are unthinkable.” He also appeared in a video for the group Republican Voters Against Trump and said he was backing Biden.
Taylor is the highest-ranking former administration official to publicly embrace Biden while warning about what a second Trump term could mean for the United States.
