Kasich’s role will likely be to help woo these wobbly Republican voters. “I think they want to give permission to Republicans: that it’s OK to vote for Biden,” said Stuart Stevens, a veteran GOP operative who was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012, and whose views on Trump’s party are summed up in the title of his scathing new book on the topic — ”It Was All a Lie.” And if Biden has his way, Kasich will have plenty of company. The nominee himself isn’t doing preliminary outreach to bold-name Republicans who might be willing to defect, but some of his top allies are making quiet approaches. Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator-turned-Obama administration defense secretary, has spoken with some former GOP officials about Biden, as have both Bloomberg and former Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, a Democrat and close Biden associate. Meanwhile other Biden friends on Capitol Hill tell Intelligencer they have had informal conversations with current Republican colleagues gauging potential support. (Delaware’s Chris Coons, one of Biden’s top supporters, is known in particular for his bipartisan relationships in the Senate.)…

Still, some Biden allies are holding out hope that recently retired Trump-skeptical-or-opposed GOP officials like ex-senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker might denounce the president’s re-election bid, and that retiring Republican House members like Will Hurd or Francis Rooney might chime in, too. (They’d love to get Romney, too, but they don’t expect much success given that he still has four years left in his senate term.) The Biden partisans know they won’t win over conservative diehards, but the idea is to generate news coverage every time an official like Kasich steps up, demonstrating to questioning voters that there’s another option for them.

Kasich is the most prominent member of this camp, but he’s not alone. Some, like Whitman and Colin Powell, backed Clinton against Trump in 2016. Others, like 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, only switched over after witnessing four years of Trump. Some