(TheRedWire.com) – Former President Donald Trump’s longtime ally, Andrew Stein, is backing a different GOP candidate in the 2024 presidential race despite Trump being the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary.
Stein, a Democrat who backed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, has now announced that despite the polls, he would back former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley to become the next GOP nominee.
On Friday, in an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal, Stein argued that America needed an alternative and that only Haley has had the necessary momentum in the last few months.
Stein’s and Trump’s friendship dates back five decades, as the two have known each other since 1973. Stein, the son of Jerry Finkelstein, the late publishing giant, served as a New York State Assembly member in the 1970s and was later elected in 1977 as Manhattan’s borough president. He served there for two terms before being elected city council president. In all the positions he has been in, Stein has been a Democrat.
On Friday, Stein argued that his endorsement was not something he took “lightly.” He added that Trump had handled the Southern border, international relations, and the Southern border during his first presidential term. However, he claimed that Trump being reelected would only cause more division at a time when the country needed to be united.
He added that despite the polls showing that Trump was the only Republican who could beat President Joe Biden, the legal challenges against Trump meant that the poll numbers were “irrelevant.”
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