Top Biden campaign official held Zoom call with Haley supporters hours after she endorsed Trump

A top official with Joe Biden’s presidential campaign held a call with Nikki Haley supporters on Wednesday, just hours after the former U.N. ambassador announced that she would be voting for Donald Trump.

The Zoom meeting involved Biden’s deputy political director Juan Peñalosa and members of the Haley Voters Working Group, a nonprofit composed of former Haley supporters. And though it had been scheduled prior to Haley’s announcement, the message conveyed didn’t change.

Peñalosa stressed that the campaign would continue to quietly reach out to current and former Republican elected officials who don’t support Trump. The goal wouldn’t just be to win their votes or campaign donations but to potentially offer endorsements of Biden as well.

“They said they’re going to have prominent Republican surrogates, like [former Georgia Lt. Gov.] Geoff Duncan, but that there are others they haven’t announced,” said Robert Schwartz, the executive director of the Haley Voters Working Group. “They separately plan on having Republican volunteers in battleground states talk to other Republicans.”

The Daily Beast first reported the call.

Haley’s decision to endorse Trump did not come as a major surprise to the Biden campaign, which had never expected that the former South Carolina governor would endorse the current president.

But there had been some hope among Democrats and Never Trump Republicans that Haley would withhold her support for the former president, having kept quiet about her leanings in the months since she suspended her campaign.

The Biden campaign has, largely behind the scenes, tried to woo the millions of voters who backed Haley even after she dropped out of the GOP primary. It has spent more than $1 million on TV and digital ads featuring Trump bad-mouthing Haley, particularly in Pennsylvania. Biden campaign finance chair Rufus Gifford and campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg are leading private efforts to bring in high-dollar Haley donors. And the campaign also plans to organize anti-Trump Republican volunteers and voters in battleground states to talk to fellow GOP voters about backing Biden, which will be part of what the campaign views as a “relational” organizing push.

Peñalosa “stressed that [Biden’s team] knows they need to earn their votes,” Schwartz said. “He said he was raising the concerns and the input with the campaign, and that he was very willing to come back on the call and he thought other Biden people could attend this call.”

Members of the Haley Voters Working Group, which includes former members of Haley’s state leadership team and former leaders of the Women for Haley coalition, raised several policy concerns with Peñalosa, including Biden’s approach to the border.

“The common theme was, they feel homeless and they need a reason to vote for Biden,” Schwartz said. “A lot of them are just not there yet.”

Haley said she planned to vote for Trump during an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington, noting that while Trump has “not been perfect,” Biden “has been a catastrophe.”

In response, the Biden campaign focused on Haley voters, rather than Haley herself.

“Nothing has changed for the millions of Republican voters who continue to cast their ballots against Donald Trump in the primaries and care deeply about the future of our democracy, standing strong with our allies against foreign adversaries, and working across the aisle to get things done for the American people,” said Biden spokesperson Michael Tyler in a statement.

Lauren Egan contributed reporting.