August 28, 2020 10:13 AM UTC

A Few Local Republicans With Nothing To Fear Turn On Trump

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Aurora Sentinel’s Grant Stringer reports:

A former Aurora city lawmaker joined a coterie of ex-Republicans Thursday urging conservatives to ditch President Donald Trump and instead vote for Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in November.

Former Aurora city Councilmember Barbara Cleland and former Arapahoe County Commissioner John Brackney — both longtime Republicans before Trump captured the party in 2016 —called for change with other metro-area former Republicans in a news conference organized by the Colorado Democratic Party…

Cleland, Brackney and others described how they’d left the Republican party because of Trump’s leadership style and policies on immigration, the novel coronavirus pandemic and climate change. They said it’s critically important that voters remove Trump from the Oval Office in the Nov. 3 General Election.

Although the Colorado Republicans who came out yesterday to swear off Donald Trump were municipal and county-level elected officials without much upward mobility left in their careers, don’t underestimate the amount of personal courage it required for any of these people to go on record in the current climate of enforced totalitarian loyalty over Trump’s Republican Party. You can bet, unfortunately, that any social media exposure these folks have will be swamped with irate “RINO hunters” demanding they all immediately leave the party, leave the country, or…you know, worse. And what’s said publicly is often nothing compared to what some people are willing to say in email–we’d probably just not check it for a few weeks.

The one word of comfort we can offer such brave and longsuffering individuals is that if the polls are accurate, on November 4th whatever the Republican Party becomes next is going to need them.