In a Facebook photo heard ’round the world, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend declared that George H.W. Bush will eschew the Republican Party and vote for Hillary Clinton in November, after chatting with him at his Maine estate.
“The President told me he’s voting for Hillary!!” Townsend’s caption on Facebook said.
A family spokesman did not deny that the former president would vote for a Democrat.
“The vote President Bush will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that: a private vote cast in some 50 days,” Bush spokesman Jim McGrath said in a statement. “He is not commenting on the presidential race in the interim.”
That would put Donald Trump in rare territory. Bush would be the first former president in over 60 years to vote for another party’s nominee.
Even Democrat George McGovern and Republican Barry Goldwater, presidential nominees at the fringes of their respective parties who were ultimately trounced in the general election, received endorsements from their predecessors Lyndon Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower.
Sometimes support from a former president is tepid, like Johnson’s curt endorsement of the ultra-liberal McGovern in 1972, but there is no recent record of a former president professing to vote for the opposite party.