Jeff Van Drew Switches Parties, Pledging ‘Undying Support’ for Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/us/politics/jeff-van-drew-trump.html

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WASHINGTON — The day after he defected from Democrats to vote against impeaching President Trump, Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey on Thursday appeared in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump to make it official: He was becoming a Republican.

Sitting beside the president and Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, Mr. Van Drew, who told his staff over the weekend that he planned to leave the Democratic Party, pledged his “undying support” to Mr. Trump.

“I believe that this is just a better fit for me,” Mr. Van Drew said. “This is who I am.”

The announcement — put on the president’s calendar just one day earlier — neatly concluded nearly a week of chaos for Mr. Van Drew after word leaked out over the weekend that he was preparing to switch parties, and courting Mr. Trump’s support for his move. And it showcased a mutually beneficial political union between two native New Yorkers who each find themselves isolated in different ways.

Mr. Trump began the day on Thursday grappling with his new status as an impeached president. Mr. Van Drew, a centrist freshman who was one of the few Democrats to break with the party on Wednesday and oppose impeaching Mr. Trump, began the day as a pariah among members of his old party.

But at the White House, as he proclaimed himself a Republican, Mr. Van Drew, who swapped his usual checkered blue jacket for a somber dark suit with a red tie, reveled in the public embrace of a president who carried his district by nearly five percentage points. He also delivered a wide-ranging jeremiad from his seat in the Oval Office, often employing Republican talking points: railing against socialism and the Green New Deal, and lamenting what he called the demise of American exceptionalism and respect for the American flag among Democratic lawmakers.

“I didn’t leave my party. My party left me,” he said, quoting President Ronald Reagan. “And I’m saying the same thing.”

For Mr. Trump, the subtext of the New Jersey lawmaker’s support fit neatly into his preferred impeachment narrative: that Democrats had alienated even their own by taking the extreme step of seeking to remove him.

“Democrats impeachment is so compelling,” Andrew Clark, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, wrote on Twitter, that “one Democrat actually switched parties. Great post-game!”

Mr. Van Drew’s conversion to the Republican Party began as a discussion between allies of Mr. Trump and the congressman’s associates over the past few months, according to people familiar with the conversations. Mr. Trump had asked several associates about it after seeing Mr. Van Drew vote against the ground rules for the impeachment inquiry.

Just how much Mr. Trump’s backing will help Mr. Van Drew, a former dentist and state legislator, remains to be seen. Several Republican candidates already planning on running for the district’s Republican nomination have warily eyed Mr. Van Drew’s defection while making clear they intend to stay in the race.

But Mr. Van Drew was facing two unappealing options: most likely lose as a Democrat, or roll the dice and see if he could win as a Republican.

Only last month, Mr. Van Drew seemed to regard the Democratic Party as a perfectly good fit; he vowed that he would remain a Democrat even as he continued to oppose impeachment. But that was before he saw the results of a poll of Democratic primary voters that made plain that he was exceedingly vulnerable in his district, with more than 70 percent saying they would be less likely to support him if he voted against impeaching Mr. Trump.

Mr. Van Drew met privately with Mr. Trump in the residence of the White House last Friday, with Mr. Trump’s top adviser, Kellyanne Conway, in attendance, according to two people briefed on the meeting who requested anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Mr. Van Drew sought assurances from the president, and Mr. Trump said he would support him publicly, those briefed said.

Others who were closely involved were Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who is a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, and who still holds extensive sway with Republicans in the state. Bill Stepien, the White House political director, has deep ties in New Jersey and was intimately involved in the effort. He spent the past 10 days in the southern part of the state to work his contacts to help the move come about, according to two Trump advisers.

Congressional Democrats condemned Mr. Van Drew’s move. Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the chairwoman of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, demanded in a scathing statement that Mr. Van Drew apologize to his constituents for “betraying their trust” in a “misguided attempt to save his own political future.” (Omitted from the statement was that Mr. Van Drew had also betrayed the trust of the campaign arm, which had intervened in his primary to support him when he won the seat last year.)

Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, was blunter.

“Do you know what we would have done with a guy like that in my neighborhood in Paterson?” Mr. Pascrell told reporters, adding, “I don’t advocate violence.”

Before he was elected to Congress, Mr. Van Drew cut a conservative figure in the New Jersey legislature, earning a 100 percent approval rating from the National Rifle Association and voting in 2012 against the state’s proposed Marriage Equality Act.

Reveling in Mr. Van Drew’s anticipated defection on Thursday morning on Capitol Hill, Mr. McCarthy boasted that he could not remember “the last time someone left the majority party to join the minority party.”

Referring to comments made earlier in the day by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California that she had a “spring in her step” on Thursday because of the “moral courage” of her caucus, Mr. McCarthy offered his own interpretation.

“That may be true,” he said. “Because her conference is going to be a little smaller, and a little lighter.”