The 2024 election is the Never Trumpers’ last showdown

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

As soon as Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 Georgia election failed, he went on a mission of revenge against the top three Republicans in the state who opposed him: Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Both Kemp and Raffensperger managed to outlast primary challengers backed by Trump, but not Duncan, who declined to run for re-election.

Duncan’s story could have ended there, 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 an Atlanta grand jury that would go on to indict Trump for alleged crimes related to the election. This summer he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in prime time. “This journey started for me as an anti-Trump journey,” he says. “But it’s grown into a pro-Kamala Harris journey.”

On Tuesday, that trip brought him to address a much smaller audience than the DNC, but one that may be just as important. A crowd of about two dozen disgruntled Republicans like him gathered inside the back room of a Mexican restaurant just off the Perimeter highway that rings Atlanta. Munching on chips and sipping margaritas the size of a farm animal, they were enraptured as Duncan delivered his pitch: Harris wants to govern as a moderate while blasting Trump as “a fake conservative” who spent the and failed to secure the southern border.

“If I’m wrong about Kamala Harris, she ends up being this strong left-liberal who just wants to fall deep left … we end up in a legislative gridlock for four years,” Duncan says of his worst-case scenario. Then he turns to consider the worst-case scenario for Trump’s victory. “Ukraine will fall; Western Europe will be under Vladimir Putin’s boot. We want runaway inflation,” he says, before also mentioning the threats to the rule of law and the threat from Project 2025.

So-called Never Trump Republicans have captured the media’s attention, the way heretics often do, ever since they first emerged in 2016 after failing to stop Trump’s nomination — and when it became clear that his appeal was not a passing fad , but represented a deep tension within the Republican Party. Their track record since is debatable, but this election is almost certainly their last and most important stand.

Perhaps no demographic has become more crucial to the Harris campaign than Republicans skeptical of Trump. There are plenty of reasons why they are failing the former president – from dismay at Dobbs resolution of impeachment over the 2020 presidential impeachment effort and everything in between — but they’re still Republicans for a reason. The campaign’s goal is to peel away enough disgruntled conservatives to secure victory. The effort is more than just calling out surrogates like Duncan or Liz Cheney, who have appeared at numerous events with Harris. It goes back to the spring when the then-Biden campaign started a paid media effort to appeal to those who voted for Nikki Haley against Trump in the GOP primaries. 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 longtime Republicans who had switched because of Trump. Hicks had never voted for Trump: “I just didn’t like his behavior. I didn’t like the way he talked.” Bishop says she had voted for him in 2016 but not in 2020, citing “his handling of the pandemic and the way he treated Gretchen Whitmer” as a reason, alluding to a far-right plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor . “If I had still been on the fence, if I had voted for him in 2020, January 6 would have been enough,” she adds. She also can’t imagine going back to the GOP. “If Trump loses, who’s going to lead the Republican Party? I mean, if it’s JD Vance, he’s worse.”

The couple had lit the party years ago, but in the room were also professional Republicans who hadn’t quite gone all the way (some of whom didn’t want to be identified because they’re still involved in GOP politics). They loathed Trump and had voted for Raphael Warnock over Herschel Walker. “Oh God. Yes. Yes. That was easy,” says one. That same year, they backed Kemp, who is supporting Trump’s re-election.

“I just want the Republican Party back,” said Andrew Ojeda, a former Republican operative who pulled out his phone to scroll through various photos he had of GOP elected officials, such as Tom Emmer, the No. 3 House Republican , which he had. met while working in Minnesota politics. He voted Libertarian the first two times Trump ran for president, but not this year. “This is the first time I legally voted for a Democrat,” he says.

The Harris campaign needs more disaffected Republicans like Ojeda in places like suburban Atlanta, which has become the defining political battleground in Georgia in the Trump era. It 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 referendum to raise taxes in suburban Cobb County to expand mass transit, and to stop. Trump from being re-elected. (He asked not to use his last name.)

On an eerily hot October afternoon in a leafy Roswell neighborhood, he runs up and down winding streets knocking on doors. Few people are at home and most of those who are have already voted. When Fred explains to a woman that he’s a Republican for Harris, she seems surprised and says, “I just had a bit of a brain fart.”

“Well, I consider her policies more fiscally conservative than Trump’s,” he explains, “and I consider it very important to maintain the alliances we’ve built over 75 years with other democracies around the world. And I see Trump as a threat to all of that. So that’s my reasons. So despite the odds, my gains could go up.” The woman does not seem impressed by the pitch. “It’s a Catch-22,” she says, adding that she has already voted.

The question is how many potential Republicans are still there for Harris to creep. Polling data is mixed on how many actually support her. One New York Times –Siena poll in early October, the vice president found himself winning the support of 9 percent of self-identified Republicans, a few points more than Trump’s support among Democrats. However, a newer one Times-Siena poll found that falling to 4 per cent. In the end, it’s a bit unclear who still identifies as Republican but doesn’t vote for Trump. Especially since Trump entered the political fray in 2015, voters have become polarized by education: Those with college degrees increasingly support Democrats, while those without increasingly support Republicans. The change has blown up both parties. Orange County, Calif., the heart of Reagan Country, now leans Democratic, while the GOP has won once solidly Democratic working-class enclaves like Ohio’s industrial Mahoning Valley.

As these white working-class voters slipped from Democratic hands, the party accelerated its efforts to bring college-educated Republicans turned off by MAGA into the fold. Both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden made concerted efforts to appeal to such voters in their campaigns, and in 2022, the Democratic focus on the post-January 6th threat posed by Trump acolytes helped motivate those voters to reject MAGA candidates such as Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano.

Despite how important these voters have been in the past decade in American politics, this may be the last presidential election in which they will be 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 aging but increasingly anachronistic at a time when the most important political divide concerns what voters think of Donald Trump.

Nevertheless, 2024 presented a new, tantalizing 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 race. They are disproportionately college-educated and self-identify as moderate or liberal, according to David Montgomery, a data journalist at YouGov. Even in Georgia, where Haley won less than 15 percent of the vote in the entire countryshe received nearly 40 percent of the vote in two of the largest counties in Metro Atlanta.

Of course, not all anti-Trump Republicans in the state are convinced by the Harris campaign’s ample outreach. Emory Morsberger, a local real estate developer, a former GOP state representative and a passionate supporter of Ukraine, voted for Biden in 2020. He also remains undecided. “None of them are aware of the deficit,” he says. “I’m frustrated that Trump and Vance are reneging on our commitment to Ukraine that we’ve made, and that bothers me on that front, coupled with some of the various anti-immigrant things they’ve been talking about.” He also bemoans the Biden-Harris administration’s fiscal policies that led to “just a lot of money being spent with very little effectiveness.”

The key for Harris’ campaign is to do enough to close the deal with voters like Morsberger, especially 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.