Did Republican strategist Karl Rove campaign for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania as of mid-October 2024? No, that's not true: Rove denied that to Lead Stories. Posts on social media speculating about his involvement in the Harris campaign reused images and recordings of Rove predating the time when Harris entered the race. Lead Stories found no evidence confirming that Rove had campaigned for Harris.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 14, 2024. It said:
This bloated Toad is campaigning today in PA for Kamala.
Trump just won Pennsylvania!!
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Oct 15 15:23:47 2024 UTC)
The post included a photo of Rove that implied that it was a recent picture of him taken in Pennsylvania during an October 2024 Harris campaign event.
Rove, who previously worked for the George W. Bush administration, refuted the claim in an October 15, 2024, email to Lead Stories:
I have not been in Pennsylvania since Sept. 23 when I spoke at a health care services conference nor have I ever campaigned or organized for Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania or elsewhere. It was claimed I was in Pennsylvania Monday. I was not: I was in Salt Lake City.
On Monday, October 14, 2024, when the post on X that is the focus of this fact check was published, the Harris campaign held a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. The rally's recording (available, for example, on C-SPAN) doesn't show Rove taking the stage.
A search for Rove's name on C-SPAN (archived here), which is a nonprofit TV channel covering exclusively national politics, including presidential campaigns, didn't produce any results from October 2024.
The image shared in the post on X didn't prove Rove's involvement in the Harris campaign, either. It was an old photo of him that predated the 2024 election campaign by nearly 16 years, according to the photo agency Getty Images (archived here) where it's available for downloads. The photo's caption reads:
Karl Rove, former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to U.S. President George W. Bush, speaks during a panel discussion at the 2008 Mortgage Bankers Association Conference and Expo October 21, 2008 in San Francisco, California.
Another variation of the claim, also posted on X on October 14, 2024 (archived here), reused an old video of the Republican strategist during a broadcast on MSNBC on April 3, 2024.
In that clip, Rove condemned Trump supporters' January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and criticized the Trump campaign:
Look, I'm a Republican. I don't want to have a Democrat president -- I want to have a Republican president. 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.
That clip was broadcast by MSNBC months before Harris entered the presidential campaign as a candidate: At the time and until late July 2024 (archived here), the presumptive Democratic Party nominee was still President Joe Biden.
Had Rove openly campaigned for Kamala Harris in environments where he could have been photographed or filmed, that would have likely been mentioned by him or by media organizations reporting on the 2024 campaign.
A broad Google search across Rove's website (archived here), which republishes his public appearances and media comments, for mentions of the Democratic presidential nominee's name and Pennsylvania in October 2024 produced zero matches.
Another search for October 2024 articles on Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) yielded results that mentioned the Republican strategist's name in other contexts.
Other Lead Stories fact checks concerning the 2024 U.S. presidential election can be found here.
