“This man scares me.”
A lifelong Republican, a young man in a suit and tie, speaks about his decision to endorse the Democratic candidate for president.
“Now maybe I’m wrong. A friend of mine just said to me, ‘Listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn’t mean he’s going to act irresponsibly.’ You know that theory, that the White House makes the man. I don’t buy that. You know what I think makes a president — I mean, aside from his judgment, his experience — are the men behind him, his advisers, the cabinet. And so many men with strange ideas are working for [the Republican candidate].
“I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party — either they’re not Republicans or I’m not.”
It could be an ad for the 2024 election. But the year was 1964, and the ad, “Confessions of a Republican,” reflected the alarm Barry Goldwater’s extremism inspired in moderate Republicans.
An unprecedented number of high-level Republicans, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, citing factors chillingly similar to those in “Confessions of a Republican.”
“There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney said. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”
“I don’t know if anybody is more conservative than I am,” Liz Cheney said. “And I understand the most conservative value there is to defend the Constitution.”
More than 230 Republicans who worked for the late President George H.W. Bush, President George W. Bush, U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney or U.S. Sen John McCain acknowledged their disagreements over policy in an open letter endorsing Vice President Harris.
“We have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable. At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”
Cross-party coalitions
The contingent of Republicans who have endorsed Harris is notable for its size and for the urgency of its method, but such coalitions of strange bedfellows have been instrumental in every significant presidential victory in recent history, particularly in times of turmoil.
A significant factor in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in the 1932 election was the support of influential Republican Sens. Hiram Johnson of California, Bronson M. Cutting of New Mexico, Robert M. La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin and Republican activist Henry A. Wallace — who joined Roosevelt’s cabinet and later became his vice president.
In fact, a white Republican in Roosevelt’s cabinet was one of the era’s staunchest advocates in the federal government for racial equality. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes had been a stalwart of Chicago Republican politics and president of the Chicago NAACP. Ickes ended segregation in the cafeteria and restrooms of his department, including the national parks around the country.
It was Ickes who convened the “Black Kitchen Cabinet” that included National Urban League Executive Director Eugene Kinkle Jones, who took a leave of absence to serve as an adviser on Negro Affairs for Roosevelt’s Department of Commerce.
Cross-party coalitions also were instrumental in the landslide elections of Republican presidents. The former Democratic governor of Texas, John Connally — acknowledging that “I don’t think he possesses the greatest warmth, the greatest charisma any campaigner ever had” — spearheaded Democrats for Nixon because Democratic candidate George McGovern’s proposed cuts to defense spending and reduction in armed forces stationed in Europe “frankly are quite frightening.”
Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat himself, attracted so much support from Democrats that the term “Reagan Democrats” long outlived his own landslide 1984 reelection.
The one thing that unites conservatives who have endorsed Harris, no matter their policy differences, is respect for the democratic process and the rule of law. They are confident Harris shares that faith and respect.
Her opponent, who already has pledged to weaponize the Department of Justice to prosecute his critics and even use the military against them, clearly does not.
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.
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