Geoff Duncan knew “The Beast” from the inside. Ahead of the 2020 election he rode in the president’s aptly named limousine whenever Donald Trump came to Atlanta. But when Mr Trump claimed that Georgia’s election was rigged, Mr Duncan, then the state’s lieutenant-governor, rebutted him. Death threats soon arrived from Trump loyalists. Mr Duncan chose not to run for re-election after watching the former president “hijack the conservative agenda” in the Georgia legislature and “sidetrack multiple sessions” by infecting lawmakers with his baseless vote-fraud obsessions.
In August Mr Duncan joined a chorus of Republican politicians campaigning against Mr Trump when he endorsed Kamala Harris on stage at the Democratic National Convention. “It was like the first day getting traded from the Yankees to the Red Sox,” he says of sitting in the green room waiting for his debut. Since then Liz Cheney, once the third-most powerful Republican in the House, and her father, former vice-president Dick Cheney, have said that they, too, will vote for Ms Harris.
Yet the never-Trump movement of anti-Trump conservatives is not quite what it was. Four years ago it contributed to Joe Biden’s victory as thousands of Americans who voted for Mr Trump in 2016 abandoned him. They were encouraged to do so by an array of generals, press officers and administration officials who had worked under Mr Trump during his presidency. Democratic mega-donors financed groups like the Lincoln Project, a conservative PAC, to run ads warning fellow right-wingers of Mr Trump’s con-man proclivities and fondness for authoritarianism.
This time around the movement’s influence appears more muted. The never-Trump camp has faced heavy pressure as Mr Trump unleashed a campaign of vengeance against Republicans who voted to impeach him. A Trump-backed candidate crushed Ms Cheney by 37 points in a Republican primary in 2022. When Mitt Romney announced last year that he would not run again, the movement lost its legs in the Senate. The question in 2024 is whether its leaders’ voices will matter in battleground states.
They are certainly going to try. This cycle Republican Voters Against Trump is planning to spend $40m to air testimonials in swing states from former-MAGA voters, which would be a four-fold increase from 2020. As November approaches the Lincoln Project is targeting two voter blocs it hopes will flip in the final hour. One are “Red Dawn conservatives” (named after a cold-war film in which the Russians invade America), baby-boomers who came of age politically during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and are uncomfortable with Mr Trump’s cosiness with Russia. The other are “Dobbs dads”, conservative millennials struggling to justify abortion bans to their daughters. The activists reckon that hearing from more people like Mr Duncan will create a “permission structure” for voters to quietly leave the top of the ticket blank or cast a ballot for Ms Harris.
However, the never-Trump movement is divided over whether it should explicitly endorse Ms Harris. Stephen Hayes, co-founder of the Dispatch, a centre-right online news outlet, is adamant that journalists in his orbit should be warning Americans of the threat of Mr Trump without resorting to “partisan boosterism” by backing the Democratic nominee. That argument was echoed by Pat Toomey, a former senator from Pennsylvania and self-described “never-again-Trumper”, who says that he will vote for neither candidate, mostly out of disdain for Ms Harris’s economic policies. “The outcome is very likely binary, but that doesn’t mean my choice is necessarily binary,” he explains.
“Cowardice” over Kamala
Sarah Longwell, who runs Republican Voters Against Trump and publishes the Bulwark, another news outlet, calls that approach “the kind of cowardice I have seen play out over and over again in the Republican Party”. If never-Trumpers really believe that Mr Trump is a singular threat to democracy, she thinks they should work not just to deprive him of votes but to give Ms Harris more.
Many of the movement’s intellectuals are pessimistic about changing minds. Never-Trump has become “a movement of leaders without followers”, says Charlie Sykes, a former conservative talk-show host and author of “How the Right Lost Its Mind”. Weekly Economist/YouGov polls show that since 2016 the percentage of Republicans who plan to vote for Mr Trump rose from roughly 80% to 90%. When it comes to swing voters, more importantly, the share of Republican-leaning independents who plan to back him has nudged slightly upwards since April, but overall has barely budged since 2020.
There are several possible reasons. The Republican internationalists and traditionalists who are most aligned with never-Trumpers probably already crossed partisan lines. Eight years into Trumpism those who remain in the Grand Old Party may be less influenced by its elite old-timers. Most simply, says Kyle Kondik of the Centre for Politics at the University of Virginia, persuadable voters tend to be the ones paying the least attention.
Sitting by the pool in his backyard in Forsyth County, Georgia’s wealthiest, Mr Duncan contemplates his future after election day. He hopes his Georgia colleagues will admit to backing the wrong guy if Mr Trump loses again. On the other hand, “If this whole Republican thing just implodes on itself maybe there’s a place for me over there,” he says, referring to the Democratic Party. In October he will go on the road with Ms Harris.
But campaigning does not come without risks. Two weeks ago the town sheriff called and told Mr Duncan not to go home one evening. A rogue sniper was spotted waiting for him on his rooftop.
