Trump, Biden campaigns see big fundraising surge as 2020 race heats up
Fox News political analyst Juan Williams and Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt react to the numbers as the DNC releases a new ad blaming the president for racial division.
Longtime Republican operative Matt Borges is on a mission to help Democrat Joe Biden defeat President Trump in November's general election.
Borges – the Ohio GOP chair from 2014-2017 – is teaming up with former officials from the Bush and Trump administrations to launch a super PAC to turn out disaffected Republican voters for the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee.
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“In order to get our country and our party to heal, the first step is to beat Donald Trump in November,” the former veteran of the George W. Bush White House and Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign told Fox News on Wednesday.
Also part of the team setting up The Right Side PAC is Anthony Scaramucci, who was fired after just 10 days as White House communications director and who later became one of the president’s most vocal critics.
Borges said, for now, he and Scaramucci will be the public face of the new group, but that they would be announcing other names in the weeks and months to come. News of the PAC launch was first reported by Axios.
The group’s mission is to reach out to Republican voters in the key general election battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. Borges explained that the PAC will use digital, direct mail and calls to “reach out to those Republicans who have soured on the president and who are concerned about the direction of the country.”
Borges told Fox News that it will be a “multi-million dollar effort” but that his group won’t be pouring their resources into TV ads – which he said would complement but not step on efforts by other anti-Trump GOP groups such as The Lincoln Project and Republicans for the Rule of Law.
“I don’t think there’s another group out there that’s focused on targeting and identifying and turning out voters. I think the other groups are focused on the mass media, the TV and digital ads, the communications strategy,” he said. “I do feel like there was a missing element there in terms of the overall strategy.”
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And he stressed that while the other groups are composed of well-known Never-Trumpers, his PAC is being formed to help Biden rather than to blast Trump.
Borges noted that “these other groups tend to be overwhelmingly anti-Trump. What we’re looking at is the opportunity to be that voice” to convince disaffected Republicans to vote for Biden.
“To complete the sale, there has to be a lot of things pointed out to voters about the former vice president and his record on free trade, his decorum and integrity in office, his life as a person of faith, his record on uniting the country and respecting our allies and our military alliances that stand in stark contrast not to how this White House behaves and are more in line with more in line with what Republicans used to say they cared about,” he said.
Borges publicly clashed with then-GOP presidential nominee Trump during the 2016 election. And after Trump won the White House, he helped oust Borges as Ohio state party chairman.
Asked if setting up the PAC to help defeat Trump was personal to him, Borges said no.
“But what is personal for me is the future of our party,” he said.
Borges said that he still will be supporting Republicans down-ballot – and he spotlighted that “I wouldn’t be doing this if the alternative was Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.”
Speaking of Biden, he said as Republicans “we’re fortunately running against somebody who isn’t a radical leftist, who didn’t embrace defunding the police, who didn’t embrace Medicare-for-all.”
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