The man who built the modern Republican machine says he is voting for a Democrat. Karl Rove, the strategist behind George W. Bush’s presidency, announced he will back Democrat Jon Rosenthal for Texas railroad commissioner over Republican Bo French, after French posted an image of brown skinned students at a University of Texas football game and complained about Americans being replaced by foreigners. Rove says he has voted for exactly one other Democrat, in 1994. CNN’s Aaron Blake, cataloging the cycle’s crossover endorsements, calls it perhaps the most shocking one, and the operative word is one, because there is a list. This piece is the list, what is actually on it, what is behind each name, and the week of money data that rhymes with all of it.
Start with the Senate tier. In Kansas, two former Republican governors, Mike Hayden and Bill Graves, are backing Adam Hamilton, the Democratic pastor running against Senator Roger Marshall, and both put their reason on the record, Marshall’s willingness to go along with Trump policies they argue are bad for Kansas and the country. In Georgia, former Senator Jeff Flake endorsed Jon Ossoff over Representative Mike Collins, while saying he remains a conservative Republican with plenty of policy disagreements. In New Hampshire, Don Bolduc, the party’s own 2022 Senate nominee, endorsed Democrat Chris Pappas over John E. Sununu. And in Texas, a coalition called Republicans for Talarico counts 21 current and former officials, including former Representative Adam Kinzinger and a former chief justice of the state supreme court.
Then the party machinery tier, which is the stranger one. Two former chairmen of the Republican National Committee have endorsed Democratic House candidates this cycle, Marc Racicot behind union leader Sam Forstag in Montana’s 1st District, and Mel Martinez, who announced Thursday he is backing former NASA chief of staff Bale Dalton in Florida’s 7th. In Illinois, Jim Durkin, who led House Republicans in Springfield longer than anyone, endorsed Governor J.B. Pritzker’s reelection. And in South Dakota, the state’s own Republican secretary of state, Monae Johnson, who ran in 2022 on election integrity, is endorsing the Democrat seeking her job after her party dropped her at its convention. Pundits writing op eds is one thing. The people who ran the machine endorsing against it is another category.
The motives deserve honest sorting, because they are not all principle. Some are, the Kansas governors and Flake name policies and conduct. Some are personal, Bolduc’s endorsement lands against the brother of the governor who called him not a serious candidate in 2022, Durkin has an old feud with his party’s nominee, and Johnson lost her convention fight. And some are revulsion at a specific candidate rather than the party, Rove’s case in Texas, and Colorado, where former Representative Ken Buck backed Democrat Phil Weiser for governor against a nominee who recently described slamming his wife against a door, which she says was self defense practice, not abuse. The list is a coalition of reasons, not a movement.
Now the caveat, placed high because it is real. Endorsements rarely move votes. Kamala Harris carried the backing of Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney and Flake himself in 2024 and lost. A name on a press release is not a precinct, and the lane runs the other way too, retiring Democrat Jared Golden endorsed Republican Mike Lawler in New York, Joe Manchin backed Susan Collins and Brian Fitzpatrick, and Kyrsten Sinema is supporting a Republican House candidate in Arizona. The finding is not that crossovers exist. It is the asymmetry. Blake’s conclusion after cataloging both directions is that the Republican crossovers for Democrats are more numerous and come from more interesting places, and the list above, governors, RNC chairmen, a sitting secretary of state, is what more interesting places means.
The same 48 hours produced the financial version of the same signal, and it is worth one paragraph of receipts. The quarterly filings posted Thursday night. The Republican Senate super PAC raised a record 273 million dollars, 158 million of it from Elon Musk alone, and its own filing shows it pulling money out of North Carolina to spend defensively in Republican held Kansas, the same Kansas where the two governors just crossed. On the opposite model, James Talarico reported 64 million dollars, the largest quarter any Senate candidate has ever recorded, from 1.3 million people giving 100 dollars or less, against Ken Paxton’s 10 million. Candidate money ran lopsided toward Democrats in Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire. Elite endorsers, small donors and super PAC triage are three different thermometers, and this week they read the same temperature.
Kansas deserves its own close up, because every tell in this piece runs through it at once. The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since the 1930s. This month it has two of its former Republican governors endorsing the Democrat, the national party’s Senate fund spending defensively there by its own disclosure, and the race rated competitive by the national desks. When the deepest red soil on the map requires defending, the weather has changed everywhere.
What does any of it predict, honestly, less than the coverage implies and more than nothing. These are elite signals, and elites have been wrong about voters before, spectacularly. What endorsements of this kind reliably build is a permission structure, lifelong Republicans telling other lifelong Republicans, out loud and under their own names, that this particular ballot allows a split ticket. Whether anyone walks through that permission gets counted in 18 days. And the actions test this newsletter ran on Wednesday cuts both ways here too. If the endorsements stop, if the Senate fund’s money flows back out of Kansas, the read changes, and we will say so.
So the week closes with a ledger of defections, all of them public, all of them signed. Money left the House map and said so in filings. Airtime got handed from one chamber’s fight to the other’s. And the names came last, governors, chairmen, the architect of the machine itself, each signing a permission slip for someone else’s party. Rove spent three decades voting for one Democrat. This fall made it two. The only signatures left to collect belong to the voters.