Trump’s Republican foes campaign for Democrats and independents

WASHINGTON – Republican opponents of former president Donald Trump are stepping up their efforts to thwart a comeback of his political movement next week, even if that means endorsing and campaigning for Democrats and independents in key states and House districts.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, arguably the most prominent Republican critic of Mr Trump, was in East Lansing, Michigan, on Tuesday evening to campaign for an embattled Democrat, Representative Elissa Slotkin, perhaps the most bold of a series of moves by Mr Trump’s opponents.

Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Ms Cheney’s only Republican colleague on the House committee investigating

the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol,

campaigned late in October in Salt Lake City for Mr Evan McMullin, the independent candidate challenging Senator Mike Lee of Utah.

Groups across the country that are nominally connected to the GOP have peppered the airwaves and Internet with pleas to vote against Republicans aligned with Mr Trump. Ms Cheney’s journey is one of the most remarkable metamorphoses of the Trump era. Once a stalwart partisan in the House of Representatives, she has gone from heading the House Republican Conference to endorsing front-line Democrats in little less than a year and a half. In August, she lost her re-election primary to a Trump-backed challenger, Ms Harriet Hageman.

A television commercial in Arizona that Ms Cheney’s political action committee financed features Ms Cheney imploring Republicans to vote against the party’s candidate for governor, Ms Kari Lake, and the GOP candidate for secretary of state, Mr Mark Finchem, because they are a threat to the country’s democracy.

“I don’t know that I have ever voted for a Democrat, but if I lived in Arizona, I absolutely would,” she says in the ad.

The power that Ms Cheney and Mr Kinzinger bring is their personal stories of defiance and excommunication.

“For vulnerable Democrats in really tight races, a lot of those voters are college-educated swing voters who value the independence of candidates, and there’s extra validation from a Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger saying, ‘Hey, this Republican opponent is beyond the pale’,” said Ms Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster who helped found the Republican Accountability Project.

Republicans are not so sure about that. Ms Cheney, in particular, has become such a lightning rod with Republican base voters that Republican campaign officials believe her presence in Michigan will do more to energise Trump voters to come out for the Republican in the race, state Senator Tom Barrett, than to persuade undecided voters to side with Ms Slotkin.

Ms Cheney’s visit to central Michigan riled Mr Barrett. On Monday, he summoned Ms Hageman, the woman who crushed Ms Cheney in the Wyoming primary in August, to a conference call with the news media. His goal was to frame Ms Cheney’s visit not around election denial, Jan 6, 2021, and the fate of democracy, but around his military service and the role Ms Cheney and her father, former vice-president Dick Cheney, have played in promoting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The Cheney family has never seen a war that they won’t send other people’s kids to go fight,” Mr Barrett said.

But in choosing Ms Hageman for a surrogate, he handed the microphone to a woman who has promoted the falsehood that the election was stolen.