More than 100 Republican officials who support Kamala Harris for president plan to join the vice president in Pennsylvania on Wednesday for a stunning public rebuke of Donald Trump, their own party’s presidential candidate.
“He just cannot be in the Oval Office again,” former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) told the Daily Beast Tuesday night during her drive up to the Keystone State for the event. And she predicted: Harris will prevail.
“I think there’s a silent majority,” she said. “I think there’s a silent group of women who will crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump and who will quietly vote for Harris.”
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The conservative former Virginia congresswoman and her fellow GOP dissidents will join Harris near the spot where George Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware River on their path to victory in the Revolutionary War to warn that a second term for Trump would pose an existential threat to America.
Former Rep. Barbara Comstock has decided to speak out.
Tom Williams//CQ-Roll Call/GettyThese Harris supporters are far from liberal.
Before becoming an elected official, Comstock, 65, worked as a congressional aide in the 1990s, digging up so much dirt on Bill Clinton that the investigation eventually led to the president’s impeachment. Now she’s going after Trump, voting for a Democrat for president for the first time in her life. She didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, when she appeared on the ballot with him, or in 2020 after she left Congress, but nor did she vote for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. (Both times she “wrote in” another name.)
Other Republicans set to join Harris Wednesday at her crucial battleground campaign event include former Trump aides, ex-New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, and a slew of former GOP members of Congress, including Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House Jan. 6 special committee. Kinzinger and Comstock have voiced the same concerns about Trump’s isolationism, particularly his opposition to helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s invasion.
“[Vladimir] Putin is the one person Trump never criticizes,” Comstock said. “He will attack every man, woman and child in the Republican Party but he won’t attack Putin.”
Comstock, a lawyer, serves on the bipartisan National Council on Election Integrity, formed to fight election disinformation in the wake of Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy in the last election. ”We’re protecting election workers from all his death threats,” she said.
After the Harris event, she plans to knock on doors and spread the word to suburban Republicans in Bucks County, a critical swing county in Pennsylvania, where Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Trump in 2016 and President Joe Biden won by a more comfortable margin in 2020. The 2024 election, which has Trump and Harris running in a dead heat less than three weeks before Election Day, could all boil down to Pennsylvania.
“People haven’t even heard of ‘Hang Mike Pence!’ because they watch Fox News,” Comstock told the Beast.
She also served as a co-campaign manager on the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. Mitt Romney, who also doesn’t want Trump to become president—but won’t go so far as to endorse Harris. (But that doesn’t mean he and others won’t quietly vote for her, Comstock said.)
The Republicans for Harris event comes days after Trump suggested he would turn the military against Americans. And on Tuesday, he refused to say whether he would peacefully concede the election this time around if he’s defeated.
Former Trump administration Defense Secretary Mike Esper said this week that the former president’s comments about using the military against American citizens should be taken “very seriously.”
In her speech on Wednesday, Harris plans to spotlight Trump’s refusal to accept the legitimate 2020 election results, according to a senior Harris campaign aide.
But there are other reasons why Comstock is swinging left to vote for the Democrat in order to defeat Trump.
Comstock, who has four granddaughters, said, “I cannot have a rapist in the Oval Office.” As a GOP congressional aide investigating Democrats in the 1990s, she said, “I was offended by Clinton. But, oh, that was nothing compared to this.”
