A senior official with Joe Bidenpresidential campaign held a call with Nikki Haley supporters on Wednesday, just hours after the former UN ambassador announced she would vote in favor donald trump.
The Zoom meeting involved Biden’s deputy political director, Juan Peñalosa, and members of the Haley Voters Working Group, a nonprofit made up of former Haley supporters. And although it was scheduled before Haley’s announcement, the message conveyed didn’t change.
Peñalosa emphasized that the campaign will continue to quietly reach out to current and former Republican elected officials who do not support Trump. The goal would not just be to win votes or campaign donations, but also to offer support to Biden.
“They said they will have prominent Republican replacements, like [former Georgia Lt. Gov.] Geoff Duncan, but there are others that have not been announced,” said Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Haley Voters Working Group. “They plan separately for Republican volunteers in swing states to talk to other Republicans.”
The Daily Beast first reported the call.
Haley’s decision to support Trump didn’t come as a big surprise to the Biden campaign, which never expected the former South Carolina governor to support the current president.
But there was some hope among Never Trump Democrats and Republicans that Haley would withhold her support for the former president, having remained silent about his leanings in the months since she suspended her campaign.
The Biden campaign has, largely behind the scenes, tried to woo the millions of voters who supported Haley even after she dropped out of the Republican primary. She spent more than $1 million on TV and digital ads featuring Trump badmouthing Haley, especially in Pennsylvania. Biden campaign finance chairman Rufus Gifford and campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg are leading private efforts to attract high-dollar donors to Haley. And the campaign also plans to organize volunteers and anti-Trump Republican voters in swing states to talk to other Republican voters about supporting Biden, which will be part of what the campaign sees as a “relational” organizing push.
Peñalosa “underlined that [Biden’s team] he knows he needs to earn their votes,” Schwartz said. “He said he was raising concerns and contributions to the campaign and that he was very willing to respond to the call and thought other Biden people might come on this call.”
Members of Haley’s Voter Working Group, which includes former members of Haley’s state leadership team and former leaders of the Women for Haley coalition, have raised several policy concerns with Peñalosa, including Biden’s approach to the border.
“The common theme was that they feel homeless and need a reason to vote for Biden,” Schwartz said. “A lot of them aren’t there yet.”
Haley said she planned to vote for Trump during an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington, noting that while Trump “wasn’t perfect,” Biden “was a catastrophe.”
In response, the Biden campaign focused on Haley’s voters rather than Haley herself.
“Nothing has changed for the millions of Republican voters who continue to vote against Donald Trump in the primaries and care deeply about the future of our democracy, standing strong with our allies against foreign adversaries and working across the aisle to make things happen . for the American people,” Biden spokesman Michael Tyler said in a statement.
Lauren Egan contributed reporting.
