Ex-Michigan GOP Leader Says He’ll Vote For Kamala Harris

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has a new bipartisan ally in Michigan, a closely watched battleground state, after a former boss of the state’s Republican Party said he would vote for her, while another has outlined why Michiganders should reject GOP nominee Donald Trump.

Gary Reed, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said he’ll vote for Harris for president because “Trump and his allies have done grave damage to the Republican Party ― both in Michigan and nationally.”

“If we ever want our Republican Party back, it has to start with Donald Trump losing on Nov. 5,” Reed wrote Tuesday in a letter to the editor in the Lansing City Pulse. “That’s why I’m voting for Kamala Harris.”

Elsewhere, Rusty Hills, a former Michigan GOP chair, made the case for why Trump is inferior to other former Republican presidential candidates, in an op-ed titled “Trump’s no Gerald Ford. He’s not even George W. Bush.”

Ford, who died in 2006, was the only politician from Michigan ever to serve as U.S. president.

Writing in the Detroit Free Press, Hills, who teaches at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, highlighted Trump’s lies, anti-immigration rhetoric and pro-Russia positions among a series of criticisms.

“Why would any Republican in Michigan who voted for Gerald Ford ― or Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W, Bush, Sens. John McCain or Mitt Romney ― ever cast a ballot for someone like Donald Trump?” he went on. “The answer is clear ― they shouldn’t.”

Hills did not say whether he intends to vote for Harris.

Retaining Michigan ― part of the bloc of states known as the “blue wall” ― is crucial to Harris’ chances of winning the White House, after Joe Biden took Michigan from Trump four years ago.

In 2016, Trump won Michigan by a slim margin, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the state since the 1980s.