With fewer than six weeks left until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is significantly outspending Donald Trump’s on television and digital advertising, according to a new report from the Wesleyan Media Project released this week.

Over the past two weeks, Harris’s campaign and supporting groups spent nearly $73 million on almost 73,000 broadcast television ads promoting her White House bid, compared with nearly $45 million on more than 52,000 television ad airings for Trump by his campaign and supporting groups.

The spending gap was even larger for digital ads: Over the same two-week period, pro-Harris groups have spent $40.1 million on Meta and Google platforms, compared with $7.9 million by pro-Trump groups, the report found. Meta is the parent company for Facebook and Instagram, among other platforms.

“Although Harris is sweeping the board in terms of advertising everywhere, her advantage online over the past two weeks is truly stunning,” Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project and a government professor at Wesleyan University, said in a statement.

“[Harris] has more than doubled her spending on Meta and Google properties from $18.7 million in our last analysis to $40.1 million, and is crushing Trump — the candidate who devoted half of his advertising budget in the 2016 race to digital — in spending overall, with enormous margins on Facebook and Instagram in particular,” Fowler added.

Most of the spending, however, has been on local broadcast stations, with ads that are focused on the economy, inflation and taxes, the report found.

As a result of the spending disparity, the report found that broadcast television viewers were more likely to see pro-Harris advertising in almost all media markets across the country, except for in a handful of areas in Pennsylvania (Erie), Michigan (Lansing, Marquette and Traverse City), North Carolina (Greensboro, Greenville and Wilmington), South Carolina (Greenville), Georgia (Augusta) and Florida (Tallahassee).

Pro-Harris ads have also been running over the past two weeks in several markets where there was no pro-Trump advertising at all, including in Indiana (South Bend), Ohio (Youngstown and Toledo), South Carolina (Myrtle Beach), Minnesota (Duluth and Minneapolis) and Arizona (Yuma).

In response to the report, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the Harris campaign was outspending theirs by such margins because the vice president “isn’t capable of generating organic support.”

“The Harris campaign must spend an enormous amount on digital advertising and we don’t because our campaign’s greatest asset is President Donald J. Trump,” Leavitt said in an email. “Millions of people want to organically watch and engage with President Trump — you can’t put a dollar value on that.”

Representatives for the Harris campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.

On radio ads in particular, Harris has spent more than $4 million in the past two weeks, while Trump has spent nothing, according to the report. Meanwhile, Trump spent almost $2 million for satellite television ads, while Harris did not spend anything on those platforms in the same period.

“Political advertising seldom makes a huge difference in a presidential race, but the potential for advertising to persuade increases when one side is on the air and the other is not,” Travis Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, said in the report.

The spending difference also corresponds to the stark contrast in how much both campaigns have reportedly raised since President Joe Biden announced in late July that he was stepping aside and Harris jumped into the race.

Harris’s campaign raised $190 million in August, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, and she spent almost $174 million in August — ending her first full month as a presidential candidate with $235 million in cash on hand. Her campaign spent more than $135 million on media buys and ad production; more than $6 million on air travel; about $4.9 million on payroll and related taxes; and $4.5 million on text messaging.

The Trump campaign’s report showed that he raised $43 million in August and spent $61 million, with $135 million in cash to spend at the beginning of September. His campaign spent more than $47 million on advertisements, alongside $10.2 million on direct mail to potential voters and around $670,000 on air travel.

Maeve Reston and Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

It’s been evident for some time that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) underwent a politically convenient evolution on Donald Trump. A staunch critic of Trump when he first ran for president in 2016, Vance gradually reinvented himself publicly and then fully embraced Trump for his own Senate race in 2022 — when he needed the votes of Trump supporters in a Republican primary. Now he’s Trump’s running mate.

Vance has always cast this evolution as a genuine shift born of reflection on Trump’s actual record. And that’s difficult to disprove.

But private Vance comments newly reported by The Washington Post’s Peter Jamison add a whole new layer to questions about what Vance really believes — because of both the comments’ substance and their timeline.

It wouldn’t be the first time an increasingly powerful politician seemed to favor strategic calculations over principled decisions. But the timeline here is important.

Vance’s comments criticizing Trump in 2016 have been widely and frequently reported. Vance suggested Trump might be “America’s Hitler” and called him “cultural heroin.” He criticized Trump for making immigrants and Muslims afraid.

But there wasn’t as much in that vein after Trump took office — at least publicly. What has come out has generally emerged from records of private comments Vance made.

When Vance first started his run for Senate, CNN reported that he had still been disparaging Trump privately in the summer of 2017, calling him a “moral disaster” and saying his administration had “no domestic policy agenda besides tax cuts.”

And now, Jamison reports this kind of criticism lasted well into Trump’s presidency — into Trump’s final year, in fact.

In direct messages sent in February 2020, Vance told someone he was corresponding with: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”

As Jamison notes, this is a contrast to what Vance would say just a year and a half later as an Ohio Senate candidate, when he said Trump “actually honored his promises.” Vance during the campaign would label Trump a “great president.”

It’s theoretically possible that Trump’s actions at the end of his presidency changed Vance’s mind, or that reflection brought Vance to a new verdict, as Vance has posited. It’s also possible Vance was saying things he thought his correspondent wanted to hear. Vance’s office told The Post that his comments meant to refer to “establishment Republicans who thwarted” Trump’s agenda.

But the comments are also a contrast to what Vance had said publicly even before February 2020. Toward the middle of Trump’s presidency, Vance began emphasizing the difference between Trump’s unwieldy personal style and his actual policies. And in May 2019, he said at an event held by the American Conservative that Trump’s policy toward China had been a “wild success.”

“He’s certainly nailed the China issue in a way that no American president has for the past 20 or 30 years,” said Vance, who nine months later would privately label Trump’s China policy “disjointed.”

The other thing that struck me from The Post’s new reporting is how Vance essentially grants that he’s making political calculations — and not for the first time.

In the same private February 2020 exchange, Vance’s interlocutor suggested the two of them were both working toward similar political goals.

“You’re playing a strategic game,” Vance wrote, “the same as me.”

In the 2017 comments unearthed by CNN, Vance alluded to how his criticisms of his party had marginalized him. In the course of his comment about Trump being a “moral disaster,” Vance scoffed at his own political prospects, while citing his opposition to Republicans’ health-care proposal.

“Can you imagine running as an anti-AHCA populist who thinks Trump is a moral disaster?” Vance wrote. “Where’s my constituency?”

(Vance was courted by some Republicans to run for Senate in 2018, but he passed on that opportunity.)

Even when Vance began running for Senate in 2021, he gestured, not subtly, at the idea that he had to take his medicine and back Trump. He told Time magazine just a day after announcing his campaign that Trump is “the leader of this movement.”

He added: “And if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”

It is not news that politicians make political calculations and adjust what they say to please the voters they need. This is Politics 101.

But politicians’ evolutions on Trump have often been particularly drastic, as Vance’s certainly is. That makes it logical to wonder what they truly understand themselves to be enabling. And for Vance, as he tries to ascend to an office a stop away from the presidency, that just became a more pertinent question.

Mayra Vélez Serrano drove to work Wednesday along Puerto Rico’s Highway 18, one of the island’s busiest freeways. It would’ve been a normal drive — had it not been for a new, giant billboard that left her “absolutely floored,” said the political science professor at University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras.

There, in Spanish on a black background, was a stark message: “Anyone who votes for the New Progressive Party (PNP), does not love Puerto Rico,” a bold attack on the island’s dominant party since 2017. To Vélez Serrano it encapsulated Puerto Ricans’ long-held frustrations over the island’s two-party political system — one that is threatening to crumble during the Nov. 5 gubernatorial elections.

The unsigned ads spotted hanging over some of Puerto Rico’s most-transited routes soon fueled a frenzy of headlines and gossip — which only crescendoed after Bad Bunny, one of the biggest superstars in the world, announced he had bought them to show his love for his homeland. His ads — some of which said that voting for PNP was voting for corruption — were the latest twist in a long-brewing spat that has once again placed the musician front and center of the island’s politics.

“We’re so used to seeing political ads made by the parties or super PACS, but nothing like this,” Vélez Serrano told The Washington Post. “This was the visual epitome of how there’s an important segment of the population that does not trust the traditional parties, is fed up by the ongoing crisis and is looking for a change.”

The PNP did not comment when reached by The Post.

Puerto Rican politics don’t align neatly with the Democrats vs. Republicans dichotomy of Washington. Instead, the island’s two main parties, the PNP and the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), are divided over Puerto Rico’s status — the former pushing for statehood and the latter for the island to remain a self-governing commonwealth of the United States. A smaller third party, the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), advocates for independence.

That system was “stable for half a century, with the two biggest parties getting approximately 95 percent of the vote in each election,” said Amílcar Antonio Barreto, a professor of cultures, societies and global studies at Northeastern University. But the past decades — marked by economic stagnation, corruption scandals, a fiscal crisis and a troubled response to a devastating hurricane — have “created a melee and left the political scene in flux,” Barreto said.

In recent years, the question of the island’s status has taken a back-seat in the minds of voters, who are more concerned with the issues related to the cost of living, the state of the economy and the quality of life, he added. That’s why new, smaller parties — such as Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana, which focuses on social justice and battling corruption and the ultraconservative Proyecto Dignidad — have been able to emerge and gain ground.

For the first time in more than seven decades, polls have the “Alianza,” a coalition made up by the PIP and Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana, garnering about 20 percent of the vote in the upcoming gubernatorial race. Its candidate, Juan Dalmau is trailing behind PNP’s Jenniffer González-Colón, who also serves as the resident commissioner of Puerto Rico, a nonvoting member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The PPD’s gubernatorial candidate is polling third.

“There’s an older cohort of voters in Puerto Rico that are still loyal to the traditional parties — there’s a lot of identity politics at play,” Barreto said. “But this is not how young people feel. There is also a lot of disenfranchised, disaffected voters lashing out, and the way they’re doing so is to vote for the nontraditional parties.”

That cohort of younger, frustrated voters is what Vélez Serrano calls “the crisis generation” — those born in the 1990s and 2000s, who Vélez Serrano says “have never seen economic growth and have only experienced Puerto Rico falling into decay.”

“They’re the ones who’ve seen dwindling opportunities, forcing them to migrate to the mainland,” she said. “And Bad Bunny is part of this crisis generation.”

The 30-year-old Bad Bunny — whom Barreto and Vélez Serrano described as a “much more vocal Taylor Swift” — has for years used his platform as one of the most popular artists in the world to raise awareness about Puerto Rico’s plight. In 2019, he was a constant presence in the protests that led to the ouster of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló (PNP). In 2022, the music video for his song “El Apagón” — named after the rolling power outages that have plagued the island since Hurricane Maria in 2017 — doubled as an 23-minute documentary about Puerto Rico’s power grid failures, colonialism and gentrification.

During an interview with Puerto Rican YouTuber El Tony earlier this month, Bad Bunny spoke out against voter apathy in Puerto Rico and called on people to register.

“I really care about Puerto Rico,” the singer said in Spanish as he swallowed back tears. “It’s good to go out on the streets to protest, to let ourselves be heard as people, but I think that the biggest act of protest is to vote against the people who have led us to this mess on Nov. 5.”

A day after the interview aired, hundreds of college students went to a voter registration event at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras. In a bleak reminder of the ongoing crisis, the entire school lost power. The next day, though, about 300 students returned and registered to vote, local outlet El Nuevo Día reported.

It’s still unclear how much of an effect Bad Bunny’s actions will have in the elections. Last month, Somos Más, an engagement nonprofit, released data revealing that 75 percent of all newly eligible voters under age 21 had not yet registered to vote. The deadline to do so, Sept. 21, has already passed, although there is an effort to extend that window.

The ACLU on Tuesday filed an emergency lawsuit to push the voter registration deadline to Oct. 6 — the latest time frame allowed under Puerto Rican law — given the power outages, the flawed rollout of an online registration system and staffing shortages that have plagued the registration process, the group said.

The problems with voter registration prompted five members of the U.S. House to send a letter Wednesday to the Department of Justice, calling on the agency to send federal poll monitors to oversee the PNP-controlled Commission on Elections’ compliance with voting rights laws.

Though the ads themselves might not be enough to mobilize voters, Vélez Serrano said they’re still poignant in how they capture Puerto Ricans’ frustrations — especially those of younger people, who “find themselves stuck between staying in the country they love or looking for better opportunities elsewhere.”

Álvaro Carrillo, 24, is among the thousands of Puerto Ricans that have left the island in recent years, settling in New York City after graduating from college. His long-term goal is to return to “the home I desperately love” once he gains the experience and skills “that will help me contribute to Puerto Rico’s future.”

In Bad Bunny’s billboards, Carrillo sees “a wake-up call not only for the PNP, but for the United States in general, about the legitimate frustrations people have — frustrations and concerns that must be taken seriously or our diaspora will keep on growing.”

Party members of the PNP, however, appear to have taken the beef with Bad Bunny “quite personally,” Vélez Serrano said.

Earlier this month at the party’s convention, González-Colón walked out to Daddy Yankee’s song “Dura (Remix).” And in what appears to be a clear dig at Bad Bunny, she pointed at her ears and started to dance when the song’s lyrics of “me como al conejo” — I eat the bunny — resounded inside Puerto Rico’s biggest indoor arena.

More surprising still, Vélez Serrano said, was the PNP’s reaction to Bad Bunny’s billboards. The party filed a complaint with the Office of the Electoral Comptroller pointing that the ads were published without the required tag identifying who paid for them. (The ads would later appear with a line saying they were paid by Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, Bad Bunny’s legal name.)

Shortly after, a member of the party came up with what’s been described online as a “counterattack”: An ad urging people to vote en mass on Nov. 5 “PARA QUE BENITO _AME.” The missing letter “m” would make the message read “so Benito can suck it.”

“I mean, this is a legislator paying for an ad that alludes to what we refer to in a derogatory way as a humiliating act to attack a private citizen,” Vélez Serrano said. “It’s shocking.”

In San Juan, 25-year-old Eduardo Alvarado was not exactly shocked by the response from a party he said “is just not attuned to what we Puerto Ricans want and need.”

“I think this shows that they’re scared and that they’ve realized that we’re incredibly frustrated by what’s been going on — the corruption, the lack of opportunities, the economic crisis,” Alvarado said. “You’d think that they’d be more focused on showing their government plan and trying to solve people’s problems, but instead they’re beefing with a celebrity.”

Even before the ads popped up, Alvarado was already planning on not voting for PNP — but the party’s response, he said, cemented his choice.

“I don’t want to vote for a party that doesn’t seem to care about our everyday problems and that has to reduce itself to putting up a sign telling Bad Bunny to suck it.”

Adriana Usero contributed to this report.

Shortly after Kamala Harris took control of Joe Biden’s campaign, her top advisers began holding senior staff meetings unlike any that had happened before.

New strategists appeared on Zoom calls with the Wilmington brass, and a transformed decision-making process took over. The competing power centers that had defined Biden’s world — a headquarters staff, a White House operation and a coterie of Biden loyalists who operated with one foot outside both structures — had been flattened into a single high council, reporting to a single boss, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who spoke most days with the candidate.

Harris blessed the unified structure, giving O’Malley Dillon the power to hire and direct a new layer of top talent from Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns for president. The vice president also gave marching orders: I don’t care where you are coming from, she told the new team, according to a person familiar with the statements. We don’t have time for drama. We will just do what we need to do.

In short order, the Democratic presidential campaign, almost entirely inherited from Biden, found a new direction. The four-person polling team that had toiled in the mid-tier of the Biden operation — sometimes unaware of ads until they were released — suddenly found themselves invited to the senior Zoom calls. The new leadership wanted to hear more directly about the data and they wanted more testing of ads before they went out. The new ad-makers jettisoned the president’s focus on defending democratic institutions or any discussion of abstract American ideals represented by waving flags.

A wholesale embrace of economic anxiety and rising costs took over. “A New Way Forward” replaced Biden’s slogan “Finish the Job.” Harris pushed out new policies to respond to inflation, driving home the message that she was different. The talk about “Bidenomics” success turned into a discussion of the new “opportunity economy.” “We’re not going back” chants became common at her rallies.

Like Biden, she would sell herself as a child of the middle class, more stable and empathetic than Donald Trump, who she argued had become more dangerous, deteriorated and unhinged since leaving office in 2020. Like Biden, she avoided most opportunities for unscripted exchanges or formal press interviews that could lead to blunders, distract from her message and fuel Trump’s attacks.

But unlike Biden — who was universally known and had been campaigning for years — the new team decided early on that they would need to make their decisions in the context of a singular problem that defined their campaign: the ticking clock.

As of late June, less than a third of voters in a CNN poll viewed her favorably, with 16 percent saying they had no opinion or had never heard of her. By the time the new team came into place in early August, she had just over 90 days to go.

Trump was on the attack, hoping to define her with his own research that showed major doubts about whether she was a serious leader who could handle the job. The former president’s West Palm Beach crew had cut clips of her dancing in a glittery rainbow jacket into their ads and blasted out montages of Harris guffaws to drive home the point. She needed to beat Trump to the punch.

“We have a new top-line imperative. We have a new candidate that people want to know more about. The data shows that the more that they see her, the more they like her,” explained one person involved in the effort. “Trump has a ceiling. The more that we can present the clear choice to people, the better off our campaign is.”

This account of how Harris restructured Biden’s campaign team and transformed the Democratic ticket is based on interviews with eight officials directly familiar with the operation, almost all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations because the campaign sees little upside in what one called “process stories.”

With 38 days until Election Day, there is still no certainty of the outcome, but Democratic presidential campaign veterans have been universally pleased with her progress. With Democrats spending roughly twice as much as Republicans in presidential advertising, Harris has retaken a slight edge in public polling of the northern battleground states, while narrowing her deficit in the southern ones.

An average of high-quality national public polls shows that Harris has cut Trump’s advantage on economic issues in half, or by six points. Her favorability rating in CNN polling has risen from 32 to 45 percent. While both Trump and Biden were effectively tied on the question of who voters trust more to unite the country, Harris now leads Trump by 11 points.

“They are undertaking an extraordinary feat — essentially retrofitting a campaign in midair 90 days before Election Day with a new candidate,” said David Axelrod, the top strategist for both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. “When you consider the enormity of that, and the quality of the convention, the debate and the gap they’ve closed, it’s been really impressive.”

The biggest changes have had to do with the candidates. Biden’s reelection campaign had been built to serve him. As with Trump, physical proximity mattered enormously. The two principal architects of the reelection effort, top strategist Mike Donilon and O’Malley Dillon, had waited until February to leave their White House jobs in the face of pressure from the party. Even after they left they leased an office a few blocks away so they could work close to the boss.

Donilon had largely authored the story of Biden’s 2020 campaign for president — a quest that was billed around transcendent ideas of “restoring the soul of America” and the candidate’s basic decency. As the reelection campaign took shape, his brief was again enormous. Not only did he oversee the polling operation, but he had complete responsibility for the main television advertising program and the macro-messaging theory of the campaign.

When Biden dropped out of the race, Donilon departed as well, leaving a massive hole in the operation that had been coordinated in senior adviser calls from Wilmington and the White House. O’Malley Dillon, who had been working for Democratic presidential campaigns since Al Gore in 2000, turned to a crew of top strategists from the two Obama campaigns.

Stephanie Cutter, her former business partner who had been doing media training with Harris while overseeing convention planning, came in as a strategist. So did David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, who took the title “Senior Advisor for Path to 270 and Strategy.” O’Malley Dillon also elevated Mitch Stewart, the field wizard of Obama’s operations, and two new ad-makers, Adam Magnus and Ann Liston.

The new operation was unconventional in that Donilon’s duties were being dispersed. No single strategist with command and control over the operation was replacing him. But the bet was that more voices in key meetings, including the addition of the polling team, would lead to better decisions, not disarray. Multiple people described the senior team — stocked with Biden veterans and newbies — who are now in constant contact with each other through a private messaging app, with periodic strategy meetings to assess the state of the race. The early leaks about tensions between Obama operatives and the Biden team have all but dried up.

Lorraine Voles and Sheila Nix, Harris’s White House and campaign chiefs of staff, respectively, continued to work directly with Harris and the senior team. In contrast to her 2020 campaign, Harris’s family largely supported her at a distance from the campaign operation, with brother-in-law Tony West appearing at some debate prep sessions.

“In a very brief amount of time, the roles have become clear and the mentality has flowed from the top. Jen runs a meeting like nobody else that I have ever encountered,” Harris adviser Brian Fallon, a former Clinton aide who joins the new senior strategist Zoom calls, said in a recent Politico podcast appearance. “She is somebody that does not suffer fools and that is a credit to her.”

The early Harris ads speak to the shift. Biden had leaned heavily on a personal contrast with his opponent, casting Trump as a legal defendant, would-be dictator and midnight social media poster in his ads. His references to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and the threat to democracy have largely dropped out of Harris’s ads. In place of that, she speaks more about lowering costs and attacks Trump as “out of control” with an extreme policy agenda, particularly around economic issues.

“His plans will raise costs and taxes on the vast majority of Americans,” one spot says, referring to his plans for higher tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing.

Harris’s coordinated campaign raised $540 million in its first month, giving the new team significant firepower to try to move the electorate in the coming weeks. But a primary data finding of the Biden campaign’s 2023 research still holds: The election, Wilmington believes, will be decided in a few states by narrow margins, probably hinging on a sliver of voters who were repelled by a Biden-Trump contest and remain disengaged from the daily political news.

And the clock is ticking.

CHARLOTTE — North Carolina Republicans were in a panic last week as CNN prepared to drop a devastating story about their nominee for governor, Mark Robinson. Some sought help from the man who had supercharged Robinson’s candidacy: Donald Trump.

A member of Robinson’s own team asked the Trump campaign for help persuading their boss to drop out, according to a Trump ally with knowledge of the exchange. A consultant close to state Senate President Phil Berger (R) called as well, according to the ally and another Republican with knowledge of the conversation, asking whether Trump would personally urge Robinson to exit the race. Robinson had indicated that he might listen to Trump, two other people familiar with the matter said.

The response from Trumpworld: And then what? Overseas and military ballots were due to be sent out the following day, Sept. 20. It was too late to remove Robinson’s name from the ballot. And who did they have lined up to replace him who would campaign on this message: Cast your vote for Mark Robinson, and that vote will count for me?

“It was dead silence,” said the Trump ally, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. “Nobody was going to be willing to do that.”

CNN upended the governor’s race nine days ago with new reporting tying Robinson to an old account on an obscure online porn forum. The user called himself a “black NAZI,” praised Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf,” expressed support for bringing back slavery and described supposed extramarital sexual exploits in graphic detail. Robinson vehemently denied that the posts were his, but the allegations were a crushing blow to his campaign against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.

Robinson has pressed on through the scandal so far, which now threatens GOP prospects up and down the ballot in a critical battleground state. Critics say he is a problem of the party’s own making — a charismatic outsider whom Republicans in North Carolina and beyond elevated despite a long record of inflammatory comments made in full public view. He was beloved by the base and is Black — an enticing prospect for a party not known for its diversity, some Republicans said.

Top Republicans had long championed him or enabled him. Trump promised to endorse Robinson early in the primary. National party leaders declined to intervene against him. GOP voters delivered a landslide primary win. Finally, Trump shrugged off a chance to condemn Robinson even after the porn account scandal, telling reporters Thursday, “I don’t know the situation.”

Robinson continues to tie himself to the Republican presidential nominee, saying in a statement that “President Trump and myself are barnstorming North Carolina taking the problems of our state seriously.” He dismissed other Republicans’ criticism, adding, “There’s too much at stake in this election for the voters to worry about mindless chatter from defeated politicians from yesteryear.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt made no mention of Robinson in a statement for this report. “Voters in North Carolina are going to reelect President Trump,” she said, citing his campaign’s economic and national security themes.

Trump’s aides never took the pleas to help force Robinson out to the former president. They didn’t have to. “He was like, ‘I’m not getting in the middle of that,’” the Trump ally said.

This was not a failure to vet their candidate, critics said. It was a conscious decision to look away.

“The leaders of the state Republican Party did turn a blind eye to his very apparent weaknesses because he brought a new diverse and dynamic voice to the party,” said Republican Pat McCrory, a former North Carolina governor.

‘The hottest guy in politics’

Robinson’s fast-track journey to the GOP nomination solidified 15 months ago with an off-the-cuff comment from Trump.

The former president was in Greensboro, N.C., to deliver the keynote speech at the state Republican convention. Trump met with state party luminaries backstage, but Robinson stood out. “They hit it off,” recalled the Trump ally.

“I’m going to endorse Mark,” Trump said from the lectern that evening, shocking his own team as much as the rest of the room. “But I’m not going to tell you about it tonight, okay? We’ll save it for another time. But you can count on it, Mark. Congratulations. Great job.”

The comments terrified those who knew that Robinson carried baggage, including a long list of inflammatory statements about abortion rights, transgender people, women and Jews. Trump’s popularity within the GOP base would make his endorsement virtually impossible to overcome, leaving other Republicans powerless to air the risks he posed.

By that point, Robinson was a rising Republican star with proven abilities as a public speaker. It started with a speech in 2018 that went viral and put him on the radar of party activists. The city of Greensboro was thinking about canceling a gun show after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and Robinson, a longtime factory worker, was outraged. “I’m a law-abiding citizen who’s never shot anybody!” he said at a city council meeting.

For years, Robinson had vented about politics on Facebook, railing against Democrats and posting homemade memes. He suddenly had a bigger platform. The National Rifle Association put him in a commercial and gave him a speaking slot at its Dallas convention.

He launched a shoestring campaign for lieutenant governor after cold-calling political consultants and enlisting a young man just out of college to serve as his top adviser. The blue-collar worker who said he grew up amid poverty, alcoholism and abuse — and at multiple points declared bankruptcy — trounced other GOP candidates with political experience and more money before winning the general election.

He became a fixture at conservative conferences, giving fiery speeches around the country. And he caught the eye of Trump.

“He’s the hottest guy in politics,” Trump declared at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 2022 “Road to Majority” conference in Nashville.

At the same time, much of Robinson’s baggage was in plain sight on his Facebook page. He called school shooting survivors “media prosti-tots”; mocked actresses for wearing “whore dresses to protest sexual harassment”; used antisemitic tropes and railed against a movie hero he said was created by a Jewish person to “pull the shekels” out of Black people’s pockets; and predicted that acceptance of homosexuality would lead to pedophilia.

“There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality — any of that filth,” he told a church congregation in 2021.

“And yes I called it filth,” he added forcefully.

Still, top Republicans in North Carolina embraced Robinson — the state’s first Black lieutenant governor — as the future of their party. Robinson announced his bid for governor in the spring of 2023 with Berger, the powerful Republican leader of the state Senate, joining him onstage.

Republicans around Robinson recalled periodic chatter that more damaging information might surface. “There were always rumors circulating,” said one person close to the Robinson campaign, some of them demonstrably false and some of them harder to assess. “We were like, Jesus, I hope that’s not true.”

But the porn site posts were never part of that chatter, the person said.

‘There was universal concern’

Some Republicans tried to warn the party that nominating Robinson for what could be the most competitive governor’s race of 2024 would backfire. Bill Graham, a lawyer and millionaire venture capitalist who challenged Robinson in the primary, said he made that case to the Republican Governors Association and jumped into the race in October 2023 under the impression that there would be major third party spending to sideline Robinson. The RGA sought input for a potential team, according to Graham’s chief strategist, Paul Shumaker.

Courtney Alexander, a spokeswoman for the RGA, said in a statement the group met with all the GOP candidates and “had no involvement in the North Carolina primary.” The RGA had concerns about Robinson but thought he would win the primary no matter what, according to a person familiar with group’s thinking, who called the notion that any of Robinson’s opponents could have prevailed “revisionist history.”

GOP operatives laid plans in fall of 2023 for a large ad campaign against Robinson. “There was universal concern from Washington all the way down to Charlotte that this guy was going to be an electoral disaster,” said a person involved in the plans.

But some eventually concluded that Robinson would be impossible to beat, the person said. The third-party spending effort was shelved.

Republicans dug through Robinson’s past and found all kinds of offensive comments they tried to use against him in the primary. Graham ran attack ads accusing Robinson of “demeaning women” and “defending sexual predators.” Other GOP challengers — including state treasurer Dale Folwell and former Congressman Mark Walker — were harshly critical, too.

None could come close to Robinson’s star power or following within the GOP base.

Republicans did vulnerability studies on Robinson, but multiple people familiar with GOP vetting of Robinson said it did not surface the porn forum posts. Robinson beat his closest primary opponent by 45 points.

Folwell said an interview that Robinson was “selected by former president Trump” and other party officials who elevated him. Those officials and their consultants “did know, should have known or,” he added, “didn’t want to know” about Robinson’s flaws.

“The party I joined nearly 50 years ago was based on conservatism, common sense, courtesy, humanity, humility and ethics,” he said, lamenting “counterfeit conservatives like Mark Robinson who think they can build our party by telling people who to hate.”

Even Robinson’s critics acknowledge that he was politically talented. “He was probably one of the most effective, dogmatic, dangerous populist speakers that I’ve ever seen in my political career,” said McCrory, the former GOP governor.

For a time, it seemed to Republicans that a strong night for Trump in North Carolina could pull Robinson over the finish line. Robinson tailored his message for the general election, leaning into economic issues. Republicans tested some of Robinson’s more inflammatory public comments after he won the primary and found that he still mostly held the Trump base together.

But Harris’s replacement of Biden at the top of the ticket made North Carolina more competitive, and moderate voters kept recoiling from Robinson. By the time CNN reached out to the campaign on Sept. 17 about the porn site account, many Republicans had already become resigned to the likelihood that Robinson would lose.

As state party leaders braced for CNN’s story to drop, however, a small handful of them initially held onto the hope that they could somehow control the damage.

One top Republican election lawyer in the state, Phil Strach, had led the legal effort to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name from the ballot a few weeks earlier, forcing counties to reprint their ballots just as they were preparing to send them out.

It was worth a try to see if it could happen again, the Republicans said in conversations that day. But it required Robinson to voluntarily exit the race.

Around the same time, Robinson released a video denying the latest allegations even before the details had published. He vowed to stay in the race.

There was no controlling the damage, the Republicans concluded. And that ended the conversation.

Gardner and LeVine reported from Washington.

Vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has a go-to explanation for his evolution from outspoken critic to impassioned defender of Donald Trump: He says he was converted by Trump’s achievements in the White House.

Vance has said watching the former president enact his populist agenda for left-behind Americans transformed him from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016 to a Trump supporter in 2020.

But Vance privately expressed a very different verdict on Trump as the former president’s first term was nearing its end, previously unreported messages obtained by The Washington Post show.

In the direct messages — sent during Trump’s final year in office to an acquaintance over the social media platform then known as Twitter — Vance harshly criticized his future running mate’s record of governance and said Trump had not fulfilled his economic agenda.

“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” Vance wrote in February 2020.

He also offered a prediction: Joe Biden, he believed, was going to win the 2020 election.

“I think Trump will probably lose,” he wrote in a message in June 2020, a few months before ballots were cast in an election that Vance would later claim, falsely and repeatedly, was stolen by the Democrats.

The critical messages, shared with The Post by their recipient on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation, cast doubt on Vance’s oft-recited account of how and when he embraced Trumpism. They were written years after Vance’s previously reported remarks attacking Trump, such as his statements in 2016 that Trump was “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin” and possibly “America’s Hitler.”

In a statement, Vance spokesman William Martin said Vance’s 2020 assessment of Trump’s failure to deliver on his economic policies was not meant as a criticism of the former president, but of “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”

Martin added, “Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party.”

Vance’s campaign did not respond to questions about his prediction that Trump would lose the 2020 election.

While Martin said Vance recalled the 2020 exchanges, he criticized The Post for not identifying the person who disclosed the messages and for not sharing with the campaign the entirety of the conversation, portions of which were withheld to protect the person’s anonymity. Martin said The Post was engaged in “nothing more than unethical journalism.”

Vance has never pinpointed a moment when he became a fully committed Trump supporter, instead describing a gradual conversion away from his earlier views that was complete by the end of Trump’s first term. He says he was moved “to change my tune about President Trump from 2016 to 2020” and that he voted for Trump in 2020. He has sought to isolate his critiques of Trump to a chapter of his life that is now in the distant past.

“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance said shortly after he began campaigning for Senate in 2021. “And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”

But the messages show that Vance still took a dim view of Trump’s achievements long after 2016 — and after almost four years of observing how the man he now calls “the best president of my lifetime” behaved in office. In fact, during the same June 2020 exchange when he said Trump was likely to lose the upcoming election, Vance seemed to suggest he had been offered a position in the Trump administration.

He claimed he had rejected it.

“I’ve already turned down my appointment from the emperor,” Vance wrote — adding a winking emoji — after his interlocutor referred to the possibility of a government appointment by “Emperor Trump.” Pressed by his acquaintance about what job he had been offered, Vance replied, “I’m not going to say over twitter messenger.”

Neither Trump nor Vance has ever disclosed that he was offered a role working for Trump before he was selected as the GOP vice-presidential nominee in July. The Vance campaign did not address questions about whether Vance had been offered a job.

The exchanges are further evidence of Vance’s penchant for engaging in prolific and sometimes incautious dialogues with digital pen pals, including a 20-month texting conversation with the far-right blogger and conspiracy theorist Charles Johnson.

Vance rose to fame in 2016 with his critically acclaimed memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about growing up in a Midwestern family riven by drug addiction. A Yale Law School graduate who at the time worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, he established his reputation as a fluent commentator on the despair of the White working class — and as one of a minority of conservatives opposed to Trump, whom he described as “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

Vance has said he voted for independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin in 2016 but changed his mind about Trump over the next four years because, as he put it in 2021, “he actually honored his promises” in the White House.

The messages obtained by The Post reveal Vance in a garrulous and seemingly unguarded mood. He wrote them after initiating contact with their recipient, whose published writing interested him.

In their exchanges, Vance criticized the left in a way that aligns with his more recent public statements, worrying about “the woke stuff” and saying he believed progressive Democrats will inevitably be “coopted by financial elites.” He also talked about his belief that government policy should make it easier for women to stay out of the workforce to care for their children, if they desire to do so.

But he also expressed views that appear jarringly at odds with the positions he would soon adopt as a politician. In one message, he mused about how the right focused on the harm caused by pandemic lockdowns while underplaying the dangers of the coronavirus.

“I’m sympathetic to the idea that there’s a lot of long-term economic damage being done. But it’s always draped in this bizarre desire to pretend the virus itself isn’t a problem,” he wrote in May 2020.

The next year, as a Senate candidate, Vance denounced what he described as a “cabal” of public health experts, led by White House adviser Anthony S. Fauci, that he said was seeking to suppress American liberties with unreasonable pandemic restrictions. As a senator he has pushed to ban federal mask mandates.

Martin, the Vance campaign spokesman, said, “Just like billions of other people all over the world, Sen. Vance’s views on COVID in May of 2020 were not the same as his views on the pandemic in 2021.”

In another of the 2020 messages, he expressed openness to a holy grail of the progressive left: a government-run universal health-care system, or Medicare-for-all. In a February 2020 message Vance wrote that “M4A,” as he called it, “is maybe a net positive, maybe not (details matter).”

Medicare-for-all, a plan in which the government would provide health insurance to every citizen — effectively replacing the private health insurance industry — was briefly endorsed by Kamala Harris during her failed 2019 presidential bid, when she tacked to the left in the primary. As the Democratic nominee she has distanced herself from that position but is still subject to attacks from the right — including the Trump campaign — for once supporting the idea.

In recent weeks Vance has argued for a strikingly different approach to health coverage, saying the federal government should roll back the regulations of the Affordable Care Act and allow insurers to group the sickest people into separate “risk pools.” Critics of that plan say it would result in people with preexisting conditions being forced to pay exorbitant insurance premiums, or not being able to find insurance at all.

Vance’s spokesman said the vice-presidential nominee now believes Medicare for All to be bad policy.

“Sen. Vance, like President Trump, doesn’t want people dying in the streets, but believes the details matter,” Martin said. “And the Democrats top-down Medicare for All plan would make healthcare worse for Americans.”

Vance’s judgment that Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism” came in the context of a discussion of wealthy business executives — such as former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg or former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — running for office.

Vance said he doubted that Trump’s richest donors would abandon him in 2020 because he had continued to serve their interests as president, despite his populist rhetoric.

“Not sure any of these people feel like they need to switch sides,” he wrote.

Vance gave no hint in the messages of the enthusiasm with which he would soon publicly embrace Trumpism. But he did indicate that he was thinking carefully about his future.

In February 2020, he wrote to his acquaintance that he believed they were both working with the same long-term approach to achieve their political goals.

“You’re playing a strategic game,” Vance wrote, “the same as me.”

“Their ‘Bidenomics’ led to the highest inflation in 40 years. Highest gas prices ever. Skyrocketing interest rates. Unaffordable housing. Incomes down. Unemployment rising. And a recession now headed our way. Yet Kamala Harris is clueless.”

— Trump campaign ad, “Clueless,” released Sept. 23

On Sept. 18, the Federal Reserve Bank reduced interest rates by a half-percentage point, signaling that inflation had eased significantly. “This decision reflects our growing confidence that, with an appropriate recalibration of our policy stance, strength in the labor market can be maintained in a context of moderate growth and inflation moving sustainably down to 2 percent,” Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell told reporters.

Asked whether the U.S. economy faced the prospect of a recession, Powell said, “I don’t see anything in the economy right now that suggests that the likelihood of a recession, sorry, of a downturn is elevated. Okay? I don’t see that. You see growth at a solid rate, you see inflation coming down, and you see a labor market that’s still at very solid levels.”

The stock market soared to record highs after his remarks.

Five days later, with polls showing former president Donald Trump’s advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris on the economy narrowing, the Trump campaign released this ad. It’s a good example of how a campaign, faced with politically unwelcome economic news, relies on out-of-date numbers to make its case.

Let’s go through each of these points in order. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

“Their ‘Bidenomics’ led to the highest inflation in 40 years.”

Inflation, as measured by the year-over-year percentage change in the consumer price index, spiked to a 9 percent annual rate in June 2022. That was the highest level in 43 years. But that was also two years ago. Inflation, as of August, has fallen to 2.53 percent. That’s similar to the inflation rate (2.49 percent) in January 2020, when Trump was president and before the pandemic.

Moreover, pinning the blame just on President Joe Biden and Harris is misplaced. Inflation initially rose because of pandemic-related shocks: increased consumer demand as the coronavirus pandemic eased, and an inability to meet this demand because of supply chain issues, as companies had reduced production when consumers hunkered down during the pandemic. Inflation climbed everywhere — with many peer countries doing worse than the United States — because of pandemic-related shocks that rippled across the globe.

An influential 2023 paper written by Olivier J. Blanchard, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and Ben S. Bernanke, former chair of the Federal Reserve, pinned the blame for inflation on the pandemic. But they also concluded that inflation stayed high because of low interest rates and the impact of stimulus programs passed under both Trump and Biden that put dollars in people’s pockets and spurred some of that demand. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, passed in early 2021, might have especially fueled spending — as some economists, including Blanchard, warned at the time it would.

The final event that pushed inflation to 9 percent was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which sent energy prices skyrocketing.

“Highest gas prices ever.”

The Russia-Ukraine war pushed gasoline prices higher — two years ago. What was once $5 a gallon gasoline is now closer to $3, depending on state and local taxes.

On an inflation-adjusted basis, gasoline prices were not the highest ever in 2022. Gasoline was more expensive in the early 2010s, 2008, 1981 and many years before World War II.

“Skyrocketing interest rates.”

The Federal Reserve, which is independent of the White House, boosted interest rates to combat inflation. The Fed Fund target rate was raised to as high as 5.5 percent, the highest since 1999-2000, when the Fed raised the rate to 6.5 percent over concerns that a frenzy in internet and technology stocks might spark inflation.

But, as noted, the Fed believes the program has been a success and is now reducing interest rates. It’s worth noting that Biden has never publicly complained about the Fed’s actions — and Harris has pledged to respect the Fed’s independence. Trump has made no such promise, and when he was president he criticized the Fed for “ridiculous policies.” He wanted rates kept low — which can be inflationary.

“Unaffordable housing.”

This line cites a New York Post article from June 2023 that references a spike in home mortgage rates because of the Fed’s actions. When the article was written, 30-year mortgage rates were 6.7 percent. They have now fallen to 6.08 percent, which is still the highest since 2008.

Housing affordability is an important issue, which is one reason Harris had proposed building 3 million new homes and offering up to $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-generation home buyers. Trump has promoted the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants as a way to reduce competition for housing.

“Incomes down.”

The ad cites a Wall Street Journal article from 2023 on the Census Bureau reporting that household incomes had fallen for three straight years. (This included one year of Trump’s term, 2020, and the first two years of Biden’s term, 2021-2022.)

But on Sept. 10, two weeks before the ad was released, the Census Bureau reported that real median household income rose four percent in 2023, to $80,610, the first increase since 2019. The ad ignores this positive news and instead displays text: “Americans’ incomes down three straight years.” That leaves the misleading impression that the decline happened in all three years of Biden’s presidency.

“Unemployment rising.”

This line is especially rich. The unemployment rate in August was 4.2 percent — near historic lows. But it is up slightly from 3.4 percent in January 2023, which was the lowest unemployment rate in 70 years.

“And a recession now headed our way.”

The Trump campaign sees a recession on the horizon. As noted above, the Fed chairman thinks there is little risk of that, though of course it’s always possible. Most economists say the combination of fiscal and monetary policy has cooled inflation without causing a recession — the best possible outcome.

What’s the source cited for this line? Another old article, from last November, in the Economist magazine. The headline was: “America may soon be in recession, according to a famous rule. But is it right?”

The article provided a technical explanation of the Sahm rule, named after former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm. The rule says a recession is likely if the unemployment rate, based on a three-month average, is a half percentage point above its lowest point over the past 12 months. But the article notes that the post-pandemic economy made the rule less relevant.

Sahm agrees. “A recession is not imminent, even though the Sahm rule is close to triggering,” she wrote in July.

“Bidenomics hits families with a $5,600 pay cut”

This text appears as the voice-over says Harris is clueless. This is another out-of-date figure that we have dissected before — in 2023. It depends on an analysis of weekly wage gains, adjusted for inflation. The problem with this metric is that weekly wages spiked in certain months during the pandemic — both because of stimulus payments and also because millions of low-wage workers lost their jobs, changing the mix of workers. Thus, using January 2021 as a starting point gives a misleading picture.

If the starting point is February 2020, before the pandemic tanked the economy, inflation-adjusted weekly wages and hourly wages both show modest income gains for Americans. Another metric — real disposable personal income per capita — shows a five percent increase in income though July.

The Pinocchio Test

This ad is stuck in the time warp. The Trump campaign may wish it was still running in 2022 and 2023, when the economic numbers were grimmer for Democrats. But that’s no excuse for pretending the situation has not improved significantly in the past year. Otherwise, the Federal Reserve would not be cutting interest rates.

Three Pinocchios

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As Election Day nears and a parade of anti-Trump Republicans announce their support for Vice President Kamala Harris, one prominent GOP Trump critic has withheld his endorsement: Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of the rare anti-Trump Republicans who still holds elected office.

Romney, the lone Republican senator who voted to convict Trump during his first impeachment trial in 2020 and an outlier in today’s Republican Party, has consistently criticized the Republican nominee and lamented what he views as the decline of the GOP under the former president.

But for all of his denunciations of Trump, Romney — who is set to retire when his term ends in January — has so far resisted outreach from the Harris team and subtle pressure from Republican officials associated with the Democrat’s campaign who want him to officially back her. With weeks left before Election Day, time is running out for any endorsement to influence voters.

Romney has questioned the value and impact of his endorsement and expressed a desire to preserve his ability to rebuild the Republican Party in a post-Trump world, said three people familiar with those conversations and his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

He has also cited concerns for the safety of his family as one reason for his reluctance to endorse her, a person familiar with his thinking said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

Romney has publicly detailed some of his thinking on the matter. In an interview with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle this year, when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee, Romney said he wouldn’t be voting for Trump but declined to disclose whom he ultimately plans to support. In the past two elections, Romney has written in his wife’s name.

“My particular vote doesn’t have a big impact: I’m from Utah,” Romney said. “In my case, having been the former nominee of the Republican Party, I want to make sure that I’m in a position after this election to have some influence on the direction of our party in the future. So I’m not going to go out and do something that would make that more difficult to occur.”

In a recent interview with the Atlantic, Romney hinted at his anxiety over attacks he and his family might face if Trump is elected again.

“How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids?” Romney said, after hypothesizing whether a future Trump Justice Department would target him or his sons. ‘I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law — it’s like, we’re a big group.”

In the halls of Congress, reporters have pestered Romney for weeks about whether he’ll join some of his fellow GOP outcasts in backing Harris. He’s shared some compliments for his former Senate colleague, praising her debate performance this month and calling her an “intelligent, capable person who has a point of view on issues.”

But when pushed further on a potential Harris endorsement, Romney has ended those conversations, saying he has “nothing to add.”

“People know where I stand on Donald Trump, and that’s enough,” Romney added in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

The Harris campaign has rolled out dozens of endorsements from high-profile Republicans since Biden dropped out of the race, and hundreds of other GOP officials have backed her, launching “Republicans for Harris” as part of her effort to court independent and moderate Republicans who may not support Trump. The campaign has also designated former Trump officials like Anthony Scaramucci and Stephanie Grisham, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, as surrogates. More than 200 Republicans who worked for Romney, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and President George W. Bush published an open letter in support of Harris last month, warning that another Trump presidency “will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”

“This race is going to be so close — if the term ‘your vote counts’ means anything, it means everything for this election,” Grisham said in an interview. “So not to endorse or not actually vote for her? You’re throwing away your vote and the opportunity to get rid of extremism.”

Former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and two GOP establishment figures who were previously reviled by the Democratic Party — former vice president Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales, the former U.S. Attorney General under Bush — have endorsed Harris in the last month.

“The character of the person we elect in November is particularly important today because the current members of the House of Representatives and the Senate have proved spectacularly incapable or unwilling to check abuses of executive power,” Gonzales wrote in an op-ed in Politico endorsing Harris.

Some Republicans, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), have questioned the significance of these endorsements.

“I think what it tells us is that there’s a lot of ferment in American politics,” Cotton said on CNN last week. “But in the end, endorsements are not going to make the difference in this race. What’s going to make the difference is their records. This is a very unusual presidential election.”

Romney has similarly questioned the potential impact of an endorsement. But he also worries that backing a Democratic candidate would hurt his ability to be a credible conservative voice going forward and has expressed an unwillingness to publicly betray his policy convictions by endorsing someone he fundamentally disagrees with on an ideological level, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

In the Atlantic interview, Romney cited his discomfort with Biden’s policies as one of the barriers to endorsing the sitting president, who dropped out of the race in July.

“Biden’s policies drive me crazy,” Romney said. “And one of the reasons I think there are people like me who shrink at the idea of endorsing Biden is, does that mean I endorse his border policies? Or do I endorse giving trillions of dollars to college students to pay their debt?”

A handful of other former top Republicans have distanced themselves from the MAGA movement but similarly abstained from backing Harris. Former House speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in an interview this spring that he would not be voting for Trump — “character is too important to me — and that the presidency is a job that requires the kind of character that he just doesn’t have” — but he’s “going to write in a Republican.” And Bush’s office recently announced in a statement that he would not be endorsing in this election cycle, as he “retired from presidential politics years ago.”

In an interview following her announcement, Cheney argued that writing in someone other than Harris was insufficient.

“Given how close this race is, in my view, again, it’s not enough,” she told ABC News, adding that it was important to “actually cast a vote for Vice President Harris.”

A GOP operative, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid, dismissed the idea that Republican endorsements for a Democrat aren’t impactful, arguing that some voters on the right still relied on the “permission structure” to provide an emotional or psychological justification for those who might otherwise have reservations about voting for Harris. The operative said that especially in an election that will probably be extremely close, Romney could make a difference in a key swing state like Michigan, where he was born and his father served as governor.

“Romney already doesn’t have much influence inside today’s Republican Party,” the operative added. “But just because he isn’t shaping the party’s direction now doesn’t mean he won’t be able to down the line … The effort to reposition the party will be a long, long ordeal.”