Day by day, the defectors are trickling out: Republican elected officials, bold-faced names from the George W. Bush administration, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, all repudiating Donald Trump.

In one burst on Monday, 50 former Republican national security officials signed an open letter rejecting Trump’s qualifications to serve as commander in chief.


The unprecedented desertion of the GOP nominee by leading members of his own party — and their embrace of Hillary Clinton — is partly organic, but for the most part it’s being midwifed by the Clinton campaign, which is beginning to reap the rewards of a behind-the-scenes recruitment effort that’s been months in the making.

That effort is expected to culminate in the unveiling of an official Republicans for Hillary group as early as Wednesday, by the campaign.

“In our lifetimes, we have not seen a nominee of a major party have so many members of his own party walk away and denounce them,” said Clinton’s senior strategist Joel Benenson. “It’s out of the realm of politics.”

One of those members, Hewlett Packard CEO and former California GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman, also plans to go even further than her endorsement last week of Clinton: She is planning to launch a group of prominent Republican business leaders backing Clinton, multiple sources told POLITICO. A spokesman for Whitman said that while the business leader plans to be an active fundraiser, recruiter and Clinton surrogate, she has no current plans of launching her own group.

“Campaigns are always looking for ways to build your coalition of voters,” said Benenson. “To the extent we can add to that by appealing to some moderate Republicans and some Republican-leaning independents — that’s worth some energy. It’s not going to consume the campaign, but it is worth the energy.”

The idea of a “Republicans for Hillary” group has been kicking around since early in the year, campaign insiders said, when it first became clear that Trump had a real shot at becoming his party’s nominee.

The campaign identified members of two distinct groups from outside of politics whose support could be especially helpful to Clinton — former GOP administration officials with national security bona fides who could speak to Trump as a global threat, and leading Republicans in the business community who could highlight the economic turmoil Trump would create as president.

Campaign chairman John Podesta and other senior officials then settled on a peer-to-peer strategy. On the business side, investment bankers Roger Altman and Blair Effron, as well as Morgan Stanley vice chairman Tom Nides and Wall Street powerbroker-turned-Google CFO Ruth Porat, were tapped as the campaign’s official intermediaries to reach out to the business community.

Armed with lists of potential targets compiled by the campaign — current and former CEOs of major companies — they made purposefully soft pitches, trying to gauge who might be open to supporting the Democratic nominee.

Overall, one person involved in the discussions said the entreaties were more like “pushing on an open door” than making a hard sell.

“They’re hardly recruiting Republicans,” said Democratic consultant Karen Skelton, who has been helping the Clinton campaign with outreach to Republicans in California. “They have their baseball mitt out and they’re catching balls.”

Clinton and Podesta have been personally engaged in some of the higher-level conversations, multiple sources with knowledge of the discussions said. Her pitch to top Republican business leaders is simple: It’s not just about what happens between now and Election Day, she explains, she wants to collaborate with the business community on Nov. 9 and beyond.

When Clinton isn’t making the sale herself, her Wall Street emissaries deliver the straightforward pitch, highlighting Clinton’s commitment to long-term investing and her shared goal of getting the economy back on a growth trajectory.

On the national security front, Clinton senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan, as well as former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Clinton foreign policy adviser Laura Rosenberger, a former State Department official, have served as the campaign’s intermediaries to those repelled by Trump’s open courtship of Vladimir Putin and mockery of Gold Star parents.

The campaign has also launched an effort to recruit prominent Republican business leaders in battleground states like Ohio to declare their support for Clinton.

Podesta installed Leslie Dach — a former aide to Bill Clinton and a former Walmart executive — last spring to serve as the campaign’s official point person for the Republican recruitment efforts across the board. It was Dach who approached skittish Republicans about speaking at the Democratic National Convention, an ask that many said was a bridge too far.

But for those who were open to the idea, Dach gave them plenty of freedom over their own words. Doug Elmets, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, said he was surprised by how much leeway he was given after agreeing to speak at the convention.

“What would you like to talk about?” Dach asked him, Elmets recalled. Elmets knew what he wanted to say: He wanted to discuss the importance of country over party, and to wrestle Reagan’s legacy out of Trump's clutches. “Great,” was Dach’s response.

Elmets’ remarks were cut for time, but other than that, he said, they were slotted into the teleprompter virtually unedited.

Michael Bloomberg’s advisers expressed the same surprise at the latitude the billionaire former New York City mayor was given in his own convention speech. Clinton officials started reaching out to Bloomberg for an endorsement last March, when he ruled out his own presidential run. Clinton and Bloomberg never spoke directly — the conversations took place at the senior staff level — and Bloomberg was still weighing the possibility of an endorsement when the campaign approached his staff with the idea of a prime time convention speaking slot.

Bloomberg put down on paper what he wanted to say and his aides sent it over to the campaign, whose answer was, basically, “that works.”



That light touch reflected the campaign’s sensitivity toward potential Republican defectors. From the start, Clinton officials decided they would never mix endorsement asks and campaign donation solicitations in their quest for Republican support: Recruiting GOP support, they decided, would be a totally separate arm from the campaign’s fundraising apparatus. It was all part of an effort to make sure the GOP dissidents did not feel exploited or pressured to go beyond what they were comfortable doing on behalf of a Democratic nominee for president.

“A lot of people were not willing to talk at the convention,” Benenson said. “We understood that. It was not something we pressured people into.”

But the process can be emotional for Republicans making the deeply personal decision to support a Democrat for the first time in their lives — and can feel like an act of bravura.

Republican strategist Kori Schake, a former senior adviser to Sen. John McCain’s campaign and a foreign policy adviser to President George W. Bush, announced she plans to vote for Clinton and was one of the foreign policy experts who signed the letter opposing Trump. But when Rosenberger reached out to her on Monday to gauge her interest in joining the official Republicans for Hillary group, she declined.

“I didn’t feel comfortable,” said Schake, whose sister Kristina works on the Clinton campaign. “I’m still navigating my way through these issues. It still feels like a distinction to say, ‘I’m going to vote for her,’ versus working on her campaign.” Former Jeb Bush adviser Sally Bradshaw told POLITICO that she never intended her party switch to become public, and doesn’t plan to be more public about her rejection of Trump at this time.

For others, the conversion has been more complete. For Matt Higgins, a proud lifelong Republican who served as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s press secretary and was deeply involved in McCain's 2008 presidential bid, the moment of truth came courtesy of his 9-year-old son, who asked his father one evening after Trump clinched the nomination: “Since you’re a Republican, do they make you vote for the Republican?”

Deeply troubled by Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants, Higgins has since visited the Clinton campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters; speaks daily with Jared Mueller, chief of staff of the campaign’s political team; gets booked by the campaign as a surrogate on CNN; and plans to start fundraising soon for the Democratic nominee.

Clinton campaign insiders say the outreach will continue through November and that it will become easier the more Republicans jump ship from Trump. Still, there is an awareness that it will always be personal.

“Switching sides is an agonizing decision,” said Higgins. “A lot of your identity is wrapped up in it: It’s not quite religion, or a favorite sports team, but it’s somewhere on that list. You want to put your toe in the water first.”

