One of George W. Bush’s twin daughters issued a late endorsement of Kamala Harris on Tuesday, exactly a week before Election Day.
Barbara Bush, 42, told People in a statement that it was “inspiring to join friends and meet voters with the Harris-Walz campaign in Pennsylvania” over the weekend, revealing that she’d gone as far as campaigning for the Democratic ticket. She’s long supported progressive causes, but it’s the first time the conservative family scion has outright endorsed for a Democratic presidential candidate.
“I’m hopeful they’ll move our country forward and protect women’s rights,” she said, referring to Harris and and her running mate Tim Walz.
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The former first daughter shared a photo with the magazine that showed her smiling as part of a group of Harris-Walz canvassers in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.
She’s the latest child of a prominent Republican official to reveal she’s voting blue this election. Susan Ford Bales, the daughter of Gerald Ford, and former Rep. Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, both announced they’ll be voting for Harris.
The younger Cheney, 58, was among the first to praise Bush for her decision to do the same.
“Thank you, Barbara Bush, for standing for truth, decency, and freedom,” Cheney wrote in a post on X.
Former President Bush, who served in the Oval Office between 2001 and 2009, said last month that he and his wife, Laura, would not endorse a presidential candidate or publicly reveal how they’d vote. The former president said the previous two election that he refused to vote for Trump and went as far as writing in Condoleezza Rice in 2020.
While the former president, 78, is keeping quiet this time around, more than 200 staffers who worked for prominent Republicans—including Bush and his father, as well as Mitt Romney and John McCain—came together to issue a joint endorsement of Harris in August. The group penned a letter that warned a Trump return to the White House would “irreparably damage our beloved democracy.”
Bush, a Dallas native who attend Yale and Harvard, has been outspoken previously on abortion in the past, breaking with her family’s longtime party at a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood during Trump’s first year in office.
“I am proud to stand with Planned Parenthood not only because women, regardless of where they are from, deserve to live dignified, healthy lives, [but] … because it’s a really good investment,” she said at the event, reported The Texas Tribune. “We know that when women are healthy, their families and their children are healthier, too.”
Abortion is among the biggest issues driving voters to the polls after the U.S. Supreme Court, which includes a trio of conservative Trump appointees, overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ruled there is no federal constitutional right to abortion.
