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Former president George W Bush will not make a presidential endorsement in the 2024 race for the White House, according to his office.
The 43rd president will not join his former vice president Dick Cheney, who said last week that he would vote for Democrat Kamala Harris over Republican Donald Trump.
Cheney’s daughter, leading Trump critic and former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, has also called on fellow conservatives to vote for Harris in November.
Harris and running mate Tim Walz have courted Republicans who refuse to vote for Trump, with Harris saying in a CNN interview that she would consider appointing a Republican to her cabinet.
Bush’s office said on Saturday that neither he nor former First Lady Laura Bush would endorse a candidate or publicly share how they would vote, according to NBC News.
“President Bush retired from presidential politics years ago,” his office stated.
Bush attended Trump’s inauguration after his 2016 win over Hillary Clinton, and reportedly called his speech “some weird s***.”
A spokesperson after that election said that Bush and his wife did not vote for either Trump or Clinton.
He also refused to endorse Joe Biden or Trump in 2020 and told People that he wrote in Condoleezza Rice’s name. She was Bush’s Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009.
“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” the former vice president’s daughter said on Friday at the Texas Tribune Festival. “If you think about the moment we’re in, and you think about how serious this moment is, my dad believes — and he said publicly — there has never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is.”
Liz Cheney is pushing Republicans who are supporting Trump just for political reasons to come around to her point of view. Anti-Trump Republicans have been buoyed by the excitement surrounding Harris since she ascended to the top of the ticket.
The Harris campaign noted in a press release on Sunday the amount of support from Republicans the vice president has received, such as from Dick and Liz Cheney, her former January 6 Select Committee colleague Adam Kinzinger, former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, and former Mike Pence advisor Olivia Troye.
Kinzinger, Troye, Grisham, and Duncan all spoke during the Democratic National Convention.
The campaign added that Harris has the support of more than 230 alumni of George W Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
“As hundreds of Republican leaders have already realized, Vice President Harris is offering a New Way Forward for all Americans who reject Donald Trump’s threats to our freedom and his dangerous Project 2025 agenda,” the campaign said. “Between now and Election Day, Team Harris-Walz will continue making the case to conservative, independent, and moderate voters that they have the choice to put their country and democracy first and leave Donald Trump’s toxic chaos and division behind.”
But even as Harris tacks to the middle ahead of election day to appeal to swing state voters, a new poll shows they might not be buying what she’s selling.
A new New York Times/Siena College poll shows Trump leading Harris 48 to 47 percent. The poll states that voters see Trump as closer to the center compared to the vice president, despite Harris’s attempts to appear as the moderate candidate. Almost half of all voters view her as too liberal or progressive, according to the poll.
Harris and Trump are set to spar in their first debate in Pittsburgh on Tuesday night. The highly anticipated debate will be hosted by ABC.
