By Gabby Orr
White House Reporter
Politico
A left-leaning group focused on persuading religious Americans to vote out Donald Trump in November has recruited some of the president’s leading Republican agitators to assist them.
On Wednesday, Vote Common Good will launch a new partnership with the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump GOP group founded by veteran Republican strategists, to mobilize faith voters to reject Trump on Election Day.
The initiative will focus on courting white evangelicals and white Catholics — two demographics Trump won by significant margins in 2016 — who have lost patience with the president’s behavior or been disappointed with his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protest movement against racism. The efforts will be concentrated in six battleground states — North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida — where multiple polls have shown Trump trailing his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
“If there was ever a time when Republicans, especially people of faith can be moved, it’s probably now,” said Sarah Lenti, executive director at the Lincoln Project, which was co-founded by George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. “This is about doing the right thing for our country and that goes back to embracing Biblical principles, such as loving and caring for each other.”
Getting white evangelicals to peel away from Trump — much less to vote for Biden — is no easy feat. The political alliance between white evangelicals and Republican politicians dates back decades and has rarely shown signs of weakness during the president’s first term. Before this spring, the only time Trump’s most prominent conservative Christian supporters had publicly split with the president was over his push to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.
But recently, segments of Trump’s Catholic and Protestant supporters have been distancing themselves from his response to the Covid-19 crisis. The Lincoln Project and VCG hope to capitalize on that waning confidence, which has extended to Trump’s ability to handle the worsening economic crisis, public health catastrophe and civil unrest.