Former Republican U.S. Sen. Gordon Humphrey and longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley don’t see eye to eye when it comes to policy.
But the one-time antagonists are teaming up to take on a common political enemy – President Donald Trump.
The two political veterans joined forces on Friday – a couple of hours ahead of the president’s arrival in the state – where Trump held his first campaign event following Thursday night’s conclusion of the four-day Republican National Convention.
“We don’t agree on anything but we do believe it is a moral imperative to join together to defeat Donald Trump,” Buckley noted as he and Humphrey spoke to reporters in Manchester about what they emphasized was the president’s “failed agenda and broken promises to New Hampshire.”
Humphrey – who’s an independent nowadays – appeared with Buckley just a few days after he joined a large group of other former Republican members of Congress in endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.
“I served twelve years with Joe Biden, I know him very well. Personally, I like him very much, he’s a very likable person. I respect him, I trust him. He is calm, in contrast to the president. He is confident, he is compassionate, and he is strong,” emphasized Humphrey, who was elected to the Senate in 1978 and re-elected in 1984.
Pointing to the coronavirus – the worst pandemic to hit the U.S. and the world in a century – Humphrey stressed that “Biden has a plan to deal at long-last with COVID. The president’s quack medicine – the cost of that quackery is responsible for 180,000 deaths.”
It’s no surprise that Humphrey joined Buckley in targeting the president. Humphrey’s been a vocal critic of Trump dating back to the 2016 election when the former senator backed then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the Republican primaries.
That summer, at the GOP convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Humphrey was one of the leaders of floor efforts to try to block Trump from securing the nomination. Two days before the November general election, he officially endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
A year later, he wrote a letter calling for President Trump’s removal from office, arguing that Trump was “sick of mind.”
New Hampshire GOP officials whom the Monitor spoke with discounted Humphrey’s new opposition to the president and support for Biden, saying that the former senator is discredited in the minds of Granite State Republicans.