Rich Logis voted for former President Donald Trump four times: twice in the primaries and twice in the general elections of 2016 and 2020.
“I was wrong about all of it,” Logis said in an op-ed for Newsweek last year. In an interview ahead of the DNC on Monday, he said he stands by his decision to leave Trump behind.
“I thought that Trump was the right person for the job at the time. I helped Donald Trump divide our nation. He has pitted complete strangers against each other. He has torn us under families, close relationships, communities, households, places of worship, and I was complicit with that. I was wrong for that.”
Logis will be the focus of a video shown at the Democratic National Convention Monday night, in which he voices his support as a member of the group known as “Republicans for Harris.”
“When they asked me if I’d consider serving in this role for Republicans for Harris in the Florida team, I didn’t hesitate,” Logis said. “Doing this work is a way for me to contribute to some of the solutions to the ills that I helped create…We have the choice of moving forward or we can move backward.”
Looking back, Logis says he was neither a staunch Republican nor a staunch Democrat before Trump came on the scene nearly a decade ago. He called himself “very disillusioned” politically, feeling “alienated and estranged” at the time from politics.
It took Logis some time to support Trump, he said, but he eventually pointed to Trump as someone who was able to “obliterate” the political order.
“I found myself in agreement,” said Logis, who wrote campaign scripts for phone banking and helped in other volunteer capacities. “I gravitated to the Trump campaign and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement.”
Logis said he invested his “entire being” into the MAGA community, calling it a huge part of his identity. The campaign and ideals sometimes took precedence over his own family.
“My MAGA family was really my second family,” Logis said.
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It took until the Covid-19 pandemic for Logis to “come to his senses,” he said. He did not take the pandemic seriously at first, but he later recognized the “flip flop in public health measures,” especially from his own governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis. The Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol also was a tipping point from him, and he said he then started to consume more diverse media sources.
“It was life altering for me,” Logis said. “If Trump had won (in 2020), almost certainly I probably would have never left MAGA.”
Logis has since published a few “mea culpas” to publicly acknowledge his mistakes and share that he believes he was wrong.
“I want to make an appeal to the undecided voters, the so-called ‘double-haters,’ those who are maybe Republicans or maybe they’re right-leaning independents,” Logis said. “I want to make a case to them that isn’t just an anti-Trump campaign.”
He called President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris politicians who are currently “uniting left, center and right.”
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“I am unaware of any presidential campaign that has actually invited into the campaign to actively participate those who the campaign knows are probably going to disagree with some of the policy, style and substance,” Logis said. “This is the difference between a divisive campaign and a uniting campaign.”
Logis said Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, have room for “compromise” within their campaign. He called it the “hope” that Americans are “starved for.”
“She is creating the community of democracy,” Logis said.
Logis is pushing a pro-Harris message along with the anti-Trump campaign because he said he does not think there can be one or the other. While the undecided voters do not need to “like or even love” Harris, Logis said he just wants to “nudge them onto our side.”
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