The 2024 election is the Never Trumpers’ last stand

Geoff Duncan leaves an Atlanta courthouse in 2023.
Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters/Redux

As soon as Donald Trump's attempt to overturn Georgia's 2020 election failed, he embarked on a revenge mission against the state's three top Republicans who opposed him: Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Both Kemp and Raffensperger were able to prevail against primary challengers supported by Trump, but not Duncan, who declined to seek re-election.

The story might have ended there for Duncan, another rising Republican star whose political career was ended by Trump, but he decided to keep speaking out, first as a pundit on CNN. Last year, he testified before a grand jury in Atlanta, which subsequently indicted Trump for alleged crimes related to the election. This summer he gave a prime-time speech to the Democratic National Convention. “This journey started as an anti-Trump journey for me,” he says. “But it turned into a pro-Kamala Harris trip.”

On Tuesday, that trip led him to speak to an audience much smaller than the DNC, but one that may be just as important. About two dozen disaffected Republicans like him gathered in the back room of a Mexican restaurant just off the Perimeter Highway that circles Atlanta. As they ate chips and sipped pet-sized margaritas, they were enthralled as Duncan delivered his talk: Harris would govern as a moderate, while he called Trump “a fake conservative” who spent lavishly and failed to win To secure the south border.

“If I'm wrong about Kamala Harris, she'll end up being this strong left-wing liberal who just wants to slide deep to the left… we'll be stuck in legislative gridlock for four years,” says Duncan, describing his worst-case scenario. He then turns to the worst-case scenario for a Trump victory. “Ukraine will fall; Western Europe will be under the influence of Vladimir Putin. “We will have rapid inflation,” he says, before also mentioning the threat to the rule of law and the threat posed by Project 2025.

So-called “Never Trump” Republicans have captured media attention, as heretics often do, since they first emerged in 2016 after they failed to stop Trump’s nomination — and as it became clear that his appeal was not a passing fad, but rather had profound tensions within the Republican Party. Her track record is controversial, but this election is almost certainly her last and most important candidacy.

Perhaps no demographic has become more important to the Harris campaign than Republicans skeptical of Trump. There are many reasons for them to abandon the former president – out of dismay Dobbs Deciding to dislike efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and everything in between — but they're still Republicans for a reason. The goal of the campaign is to turn out enough disaffected conservatives to secure victory. This is about more than just touting surrogates like Duncan or Liz Cheney, who has appeared at several events with Harris. It dates back to the spring, when the then-Biden campaign launched a paid media campaign to appeal to those who voted for Nikki Haley against Trump in the GOP primary. Since then, the campaign has stepped up criticism of former Trump officials who have either defected or warned of the danger of a second term, most recently his former White House chief of staff, John Kelly.

It works with voters like Hilda Bishop and Susan Hicks. The two women were long-time Republicans who had switched because of Trump. Hicks never voted for Trump: “I just didn’t like his behavior. I didn't like the way he talked.” Bishop says she voted for him in 2016 but not in 2020, citing “his handling of the pandemic and the way he treated Gretchen Whitmer” and plays as the reason This refers to a right-wing extremist conspiracy to kidnap the governor of Michigan. “If I had still been undecided and voted for him in 2020, January 6th would have been enough,” she adds. She also can't imagine returning to the GOP. “If Trump loses, who will lead the Republican Party? I mean, if it’s JD Vance, he’s worse.”

The couple had committed to the party years ago, but there were also professional Republicans in the room who hadn't quite made it yet (some of them didn't want to be named because they're still involved in GOP politics). They loathed Trump and voted for Raphael Warnock over Herschel Walker. “Oh God. Yes. Yes. “That was easy,” says one. That same year, they supported Kemp, who supports Trump's re-election.

“I just want the Republican Party back,” said Andrew Ojeda, a former Republican activist who pulled out his phone to scroll through various pictures he took with GOP elected officials such as Republican Rep. Tom Emmer No. 3 in the House of Representatives, which he had I met while working in politics in Minnesota. He voted libertarian during Trump's first two presidential candidacies, but not this year. “This is the first time I have legally voted for a Democrat,” he said.

The Harris campaign needs more disaffected Republicans like Ojeda in places like an Atlanta suburb that has become a key political battleground in Georgia in the Trump era. She seeks them out by going door-to-door with volunteers like Fred, an upper-middle-class Republican who cares about two issues on the ballot: stopping a tax increase referendum in suburban Cobb County over mass transit expand, and the prevention Trump will not be re-elected. (He asked that his last name not be used.)

On an unseasonably warm October afternoon, he runs up and down winding streets knocking on doors in a leafy Roswell neighborhood. Few people are home and most of those who are have already voted. When Fred explains to a woman that he is a Republican for Harris, she appears taken aback and says, “I just had a little brain fart.”

“Well, I think their policies are more fiscally conservative than Trump's,” he explains, “and I think it's very important to maintain the alliances that we have built over 75 years with other democracies around the world.” And I see Trump as a threat to all of this. So those are my reasons. Regardless of the fact that there's a good chance my capital gains rate could go up.” The woman seems unfazed by the pitch. “It’s a quandary,” she said, adding that she has already voted.

The question is how many more potential Republicans Harris can poach. Polling data on how many actually support them varies. A New York Just-A poll in Siena in early October showed the vice president winning the support of 9 percent of self-identified Republicans, a few points higher than Trump's support among Democrats. However, a newer one Just– A Siena poll showed that this figure has fallen to 4 percent. Ultimately, it's somewhat unclear who still identifies as Republican but isn't voting for Trump. Particularly since Trump entered the political fray in 2015, voters have become polarized in terms of their education: those with college degrees increasingly support Democrats, while those without college degrees increasingly support Republicans. The change blew up both parties. Orange County, California, the heart of Reagan Country, now leans Democratic, while the GOP once won solidly Democratic blue-collar enclaves like Ohio's industrial Mahoning Valley.

As these white, working-class voters slipped from Democratic hands, the party increased its efforts to bring MAGA-rejected college-educated Republicans into the Republican fold. Both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden made concerted efforts to appeal to such voters in their campaigns, and in 2022, Democrats' focus on the threat from Trump supporters after January 6 helped motivate those voters to turn to MAGA. Reject candidates like Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano.

While these voters have played an important role in American politics over the past decade, this may be the last presidential election in which they will represent an important demographic. After all, there probably aren’t that many 18-year-old “Never Trump” Republicans registering to vote. Voters who look back fondly on the party of Ronald Reagan and John McCain are not only getting older but also increasingly anachronistic, at a time when the key political divide is what voters think of Donald Trump.

Still, 2024 presented a new, tempting target for the Biden and Harris campaigns: Republicans who continued to vote for Nikki Haley against Trump long after she dropped out of the Republican primary. According to David Montgomery, a data journalist at YouGov, they have disproportionately high levels of college education and describe themselves as moderate or liberal. Even in Georgia, where Haley received less than 15 percent of the vote statewide, she received nearly 40 percent of the vote in two of the largest counties in Metro Atlanta.

Of course, not every anti-Trump Republican in the state is convinced of the Harris campaign's broad reach. Emory Morsberger, a local real estate developer, former GOP state representative and ardent Ukraine supporter, voted for Biden in 2020. He too is still undecided. “Neither of them pays attention to the deficit,” he says. “I'm frustrated with Trump and Vance's disregard for our commitment to Ukraine, and that bothers me in that regard, along with some of the various anti-immigrant things they've talked about.” He also laments the Biden-Harris financial policies government, which resulted in “a lot of money simply being spent with very little efficiency.”

The key for Harris' campaign is to do enough to close the deal with voters like Morsberger, particularly in the seven key swing states that will decide the election. After all, these voters may be “Never Trump,” but at least for now, they remain Republicans.