RALEIGH, NC (AP) – Jay Copan does not hide his disregard for the modern Republican party.
A staunch Republican voter for the past four decades, the 69-year-old quickly lamented having voted in 2016 for Donald Trump. When Trump ran for re-election last year, Copan appeared on North Carolina road billboards and urged other Republicans to support Democratic rival Joe Biden.
Nearly three months into the new administration, Copan considers himself a “Biden Republican,” relieved by the new president’s calmer leadership style and vaccine distribution efforts. Copan is the kind of voter Biden has when he pushes an agenda that almost all Republicans oppose in Washington.
As Biden meets Monday with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to discuss his huge infrastructure plan, he bets Republican Party elected leaders will make a political miscalculation. The party base remains overwhelmingly loyal to Trump, but Biden believes Republican leaders overlook Americans who want commitment and action.
The question is whether there are enough Republicans like Copan.
“I really want there to be a good two-part system,” said Copan, a senior American Gas Association official. His vote for Biden as president was the first for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976, but it probably won’t be the last. “I think there are a lot of people like me out there.”
The ranks of Republican crossings may be smaller than expected. Only 8% of Republicans voted Democrats in the November presidential race, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide poll.
“If there are Republicans voting for Biden, they wouldn’t vote for Biden, they’re never Trumpers,” said Phillip Stephens, a former Democrat who is now a Republican vice president in Robeson County, about 90 miles south of Raleigh. The county voted twice for Barack Obama, but went for Trump in 2016 and again last year.
In the early months of Biden, Stephens sees the president cater more to the left than to conservative Democratic voters.
During last year’s campaign, Biden sometimes courted Republicans at the risk of alienating the democratic left. Several prominent Republicans obtained oral positions during the Democratic National Convention, such as former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Several Republican groups also openly supported Biden. Republican voters against Trump spent $ 2 million on billboards in the swinging states, with Republicans opposed re-electing the president of their own party. This is how the radiant image and glasses of Copan, 3.6 meters high, ended up on the billboards with the words: “I am a conservative. I value decency. I’m voting Biden. “
As president, Biden has expressed his openness to work with Republicans. But it also helped promote in Congress the greatest expansion of the social safety net in a generation as part of a coronavirus stimulus and relief package that didn’t get even a Republican vote. He now calls for spending billions more on infrastructure, pushing for a proposal aimed at attracting people from both sides.
So far, Biden has enjoyed broad, relatively bipartisan support, with 73% of Americans approving of their response to the coronavirus and 60% approving of their management of the economy. Still, favorable ratings don’t always translate into votes: of the more than 200 counties that supported Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016, only about 25 returned to Biden in November.
Limited crossover power is true even in places where Democrats were bright spots. Biden launched the Republican stronghold for a long time in Kent County, Michigan, which includes Grand Rapids, the hometown of Gerald Ford. But those gains were based more on the increasingly younger local electorate than any measurable increase in conservatives who supported Biden.
Joe Farrington ran in Congress as a “working class Republican” and owns a bar in Lyons, Michigan, about 50 miles east of Grand Rapids, Ionia County, where Trump won nearly two-thirds of the vote. . During the candidates ’debate, he called Trump“ a bit of an idiot ”and finished fourth in a primary race at five.
He says Biden is doing the right thing in terms of infrastructure, social issues and the environment. Still, Farrington said he will remain loyal to the Republican party, even if he runs again in Congress in 2022 as opposed to much of what he stands for. “We have to change that from within,” he says.
Scott Carey, a former general counsel for the Tennessee Republican Party, wrote an opinion in October saying he was voting for Biden. So far he has been mostly satisfied, but he is not about to become a born Democrat. He is concerned about tax increases and the extension of government.
“I don’t see myself becoming a big Harris, nor surely a fan of Bernie or anything like that,” Carey said of Vice President Kamala Harris and Liberal Senator Bernie Sanders. If Biden decides not to seek a second term in 2024, Carey said, he would be more excited about Republicans, including “some rulers I’ve never heard of who would rise after Trump and make us good government policies again.”
Others, however, say they have left the Republican Party for good.
Tom Rawles is a former Republican county supervisor in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and was critical of Biden, who carried the swing state of Arizona. After voting for Biden, Rawles registered as a Democrat.
“I’d rather fight philosophically within the Democratic Party than for the Republican Party character, because there aren’t any,” Rawles said. He is 71 years old and said he does not expect the Republican Party to return to the principles it can support during its lifetime.
Rawles and his wife spent months before the election sitting on their driveway along a busy suburban Phoenix road, raising Biden signs for four hours a day. Some drivers stopped to chat or offer water. Others made rude gestures or shouted that they were intruders from the fierce blue California.
“Some people were shouting,‘ Go home! “,” Rawles recalls. “And we’d say, ‘We’re on our way in. Where do you want us to go?'”