Scoop: Former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent voted for Kamala Harris

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Axios

12 hours ago


Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) revealed he voted for Vice President Kamala Harris and blasted former President Trump in a statement first shared with Axios.

Why it matters: Dent is part of a growing army of Republican former members of Congress who have thrown their weight behind Harris rather than Trump.

Some are going as far as to actively campaign for Harris, with former Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) appearing with the vice president at a rally in the key battleground of Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

"[Harris] and I will not agree on every issue, but in her, we have a capable leader who will always put the interests of our country before her own, unlike her opponent who will always put his personal interests ahead of those of the United States," Dent said.

Driving the news: Dent, who endorsed President Biden over Trump in 2020, said Thursday that he cast his absentee ballot for Harris in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Dent offered a searing rebuke of Trump, saying that his "affection for autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jung Un, his hostility toward the free press, our allies, and anyone who dares to disagree with him are reprehensible."

"We have the opportunity – and solemn responsibility – to finally turn the page on the dark politics Trump has ushered in and elect a decent, honorable leader for President," Dent continued.

The big picture: The Harris campaign continues to ramp up its outreach to Republican and independent voters to appeal to this key bloc that could decide the election.

Harris on Wednesday campaigned in Bucks County, Pa., where she was joined by more than 100 Republicans. Earlier this month, the VP appeared at an event in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the GOP, with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).

Harris on Wednesday also participated in an interview on Fox News in a direct effort to court the still persuadable GOP-leaning voters ahead of Nov. 5.

Read more: https://www.axios.com/2024/10/17/charlie-dent-2024-republicans-trump-harris

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PA still has these "shy" / "hidden" moderate Republicans. These would be the "Dick Thornburgh GOP" (former Raygun & Poppy Attorney General) and "Tom Ridge GOP" (former first head of DHS under Shrub). The MAGats get all the press but these other people are still out there (where Brian Fitzpatrick (R) (PA-1) should have been one but isn't, as long as he supports loon 45 stuff the majority of the time).

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Does the OP mean there's a ........ Republican Underground?

https://buckscountybeacon.com/2024/10/photo-essay-kamala-harris-rally-in-bucks-county-showcases-republican-supporters-who-are-putting-country-over-party/

It was a beautiful day in Washington Crossing, but Vice President Kamala Harris warned the crowd of about 400 that there will be difficult days ahead for the country if Donald Trump were to be reelected. In a rare display of bipartisan unity, Harris was joined by more than a dozen current and former Republican officials, signaling that this election was far from ordinary—and that the stakes were higher than many Americans realized.

One of the first speakers was Bucks County’s former Congressman Jim Greenwood.

Delivering candid remarks, the 73-year-old Republican shared his dismay about the state of his party. “I’ve voted for every Republican candidate up to Mitt Romney,” Greenwood said. “And then came Donald Trump.” He called out Trump’s behavior as “malignant narcissism” and noted that while other Republicans would soon publicly endorse Harris, many more had confessed their opposition to Trump privately — fearing backlash if they spoke out.

Former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan followed with an even sharper rebuke. “I care more about the future of this country than I care about Donald Trump,” he declared. “If we [the GOP] were being honest, we wouldn’t let him run a lemonade stand.”



__________________ MUCH more at the link

Incredible that all these Republicans, locally and nationally, converged on Washington Crossing PA to support Harris-Walz. Geoff Duncan from Georgia! Olivia Troye! Kinzinger!

This is a wave of patriotism that would have made George Washington proud! Do you feel the vibe? This is a campaign accelerating down the stretch!

[BumRushDaShow]

2. These are all the Raygun Republicans

But they sat there while 45 was in office while his MAGat cabal not only threw Raygun under the bus, but shifted the bus forward and back, forward, and back, to make sure he became total roadkill.

Gingrich heralded the start of the loon era in 1994 and Citizen's United, along with the Koch funding in 2010, helped to propel the GOP into complete madness.

I post the below often -

The Man Who Broke Politics

Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements.

Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue

Updated on October 17, 2018

[snip]

On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.” For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.

The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”

But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

[snip]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/

The past 30 years have defined them as a party of selfishness, anger, and hate, which totally consumed them. And then it was eventually too late to stave off the further descent because those remaining "moderates" were primaried in favor of the loons or were taken out by our side.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Newt and Rush were hand-in-glove Bros

They sure brought the anger.

[UpInArms]

4. When he divorced his catholic wife by disavowing his marriage as she was dying of cancer

His nasty mother said “oh, Newty wouldn’t do that.”

He is a pos through and through.

[eShirl]

5. may a purple wave wash away the orange menace