Viral video is old and doesn't show Karl Rove stumping for Harris | Fact check
The claim: Karl Rove campaigned for Harris in October 2024 in Pennsylvania
An Oct. 15 Threads post (direct link, archive link) includes a clip of GOP strategist and former George W. Bush staffer Karl Rove speaking about former President Donald Trump and the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I’m a Republican, I don’t want to have a Democrat president, I want to have a Republican president,” Rove says at one point in the video. “But we’re facing as a country a decision, and everybody gets to make it, as to what kind of leadership we’re going to have, and to me it is a mistake on the part of the Trump campaign to allow the president’s impulses to identify himself with the people who assaulted the Capitol rather than people who stand for law and order.”
The post’s caption claims the clip shows Rove “rallying support for Kamala Harris yesterday in Pennsylvania.”
It was reposted more than 1,700 times in three days.
Other versions of the claim circulated on X, formerly Twitter.
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Our rating: False
The video shows Rove speaking at a February event in California, not in October in Pennsylvania. Rove said he is not campaigning for Harris.
Rove has criticized both Trump and Harris
The clip is taken from a 45-minute MSNBC broadcast of a panel discussion at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, an annual event in southern California, in February. At that point, President Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2024 election.
The conversation, which also included former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger and former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, revolved around the GOP’s strategy heading into the election. Harris’ name was not mentioned during the conversation, according to a transcript of the video.
In an Oct. 15 X post, Rove reiterated that his comments predated the social media claims by nearly eight months.
“I have not been rallying for Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania or anywhere else, nor organizing any state for her,” Rove wrote.
Rove went on to say he had not been in Pennsylvania since September, and thus could not have rallied for Harris in the state on the date referenced in the post.
Fact check: Teleprompter was for Univision moderator, not Harris
Rove has long been critical of Trump, describing his performance in a September debate against Harris as a “train wreck” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and calling Trump “graceless and divisive" even before he won the presidency in 2016.
At the same time, Rove has said Harris is “not a great candidate” and that she is “suffering" from what he described as a lack of enthusiasm among Black and Latino voters.
Paste BN has debunked an array of claims surrounding the Harris campaign, including false assertions that an authentic video shows former Vice President Mike Pence endorsing Harris, that supposed former Trump supporters in a Harris ad are actually Democratic actors and that Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said “we can’t afford four more years” of Harris.
Paste BN reached out to users who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive responses.
AFP and Lead Stories also debunked the claim.
Our fact-check sources:
- Karl Rove, Oct. 15, X post
- Rancho Mirage Writers Festival (YouTube), Feb. 26, The Elephants in the Room: The GOP and the 2024 Election – Panel
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