Former Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock (Va.) said Sunday that she will vote for Vice President Harris for president, marking the latest former GOP lawmaker to break from the party’s support of former President Trump.
“After Jan. 6, after Donald Trump has refused for four years to acknowledge that he lost, and his threats against democracy, I think it’s important to turn the page,” Comstock said during a CNN interview. “That’s why I will be voting for the vice president.”
Comstock’s pledge comes weeks after another former GOP congress member from Virginia, Denver Riggleman, endorsed Harris’s bid.
Riggleman’s name was released among a high-profile list of endorsements from the Harris campaign during its launch of the “Republicans for Harris” initiative earlier this month.
Like Comstock, Riggleman pointed to the events of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Comstock, who served Virginia’s 10th Congressional District from 2015-19, was among the GOP defectors who had ongoing tensions with Trump during his time in the White House.
She was one of about two dozen Republican lawmakers to call on him to drop out of the 2016 presidential race after audio emerged of him making sexually obscene remarks about groping women.
She eventually lost her reelection bid in 2018 and has remained a vocal critic of Trump in recent years.
Comstock said Sunday she did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020.
“I mean, this is the most misogynist ticket we’ve ever had,” she said, pointing to controversies surrounding Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).
“This is not something that my party should accept. Not to mention he’s a felon, not to mention we still have cases where, you know, he took classified documents,” she said, in reference to Trump’s ongoing legal battles.
A judge dismissed the classified documents case last month, setting aside Trump’s 40 criminal charges that accuse him of mishandling classified documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
He was convicted, however, in his hush money case in New York earlier this year and still faces two other cases related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.