As soon as Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia failed, he went on a revenge mission against the top-three Republicans in the state who opposed him: Governor Brian Kemp, Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Both Kemp and Raffensperger managed to survive primary challengers backed by Trump, but not Duncan, who declined to run for reelection.
Duncan’s story might 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 pertaining to the election. This summer, he addressed 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 journey 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 disaffected Republicans like himself gathered inside the backroom in a Mexican restaurant just off the Perimeter highway that encircles Atlanta. Munching on chips and sipping from margaritas that are the size of a household pet, they were rapt as Duncan delivered his pitch: Harris will govern as a moderate while jabbing at Trump as “a fake conservative” who spent profligately and failed to secure the southern border.
“If I’m wrong about Kamala Harris, she ends up being this strong left liberal that wants to just fall deep to the left … we’ll end up in a legislative logjam for four years,” Duncan says of his worst-case scenario. Then he turns to consider the worst-case scenario for Trump winning. “Ukraine will fall; Western Europe will be under Vladimir Putin’s boot. We’ll have runaway inflation,” he says, before also mentioning the threats to rule of law and the menace of Project 2025.
So-called Never Trump Republicans have captured media attention, in the way that heretics often do, ever since they first emerged in 2016 after failing to stop Trump’s nomination — and as it became clear that his appeal was not a passing fad but represented a deep strain within the Republican Party. Their track record since is debatable, but this election is almost surely their last and most important stand.
Perhaps no demographic has become more vital to the Harris campaign than Republicans who are skeptical of Trump. There are plenty of reasons for them to forsake the former president — from dismay over the Dobbs decision to repulsion over the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and everything in between — but they are still Republicans for a reason. The campaign’s goal is to peel away enough disaffected conservatives to secure victory. The effort is more than just touting surrogates like Duncan or Liz Cheney, who has appeared at several 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 primary. Since then, the campaign has amplified the criticisms 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’s working with voters like Hilda Bishop and Susan Hicks. The two women were longtime Republicans who had switched over because of Trump. Hicks had never voted for Trump: “I just didn’t like his demeanor. I didn’t like the way he talked.” Bishop says she had voted for him in 2016 but not in 2020 and cites as a reason “his handling of the pandemic and the way he treated Gretchen Whitmer,” 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 can’t imagine going back to the GOP either. “If Trump loses, who is going to lead the Republican party? I mean, if it’s J.D. Vance, he’s worse.”
The pair had turned on the party years ago, but also in the room were professional Republicans who had not quite gone all the way (some of them didn’t want to be identified because they are still involved in GOP politics). They loathed Trump and had voted for Raphael Warnock over Herschel Walker. “Oh God. Yeah. Yeah. That was an easy one,” says one. The same year, they backed Kemp, who supports Trump’s reelection.
“I just want the Republican Party back,” says Andrew Ojeda, a former Republican operative who took out his phone to scroll through various pictures he had with GOP elected officials, such as Tom Emmer, the No. 3 House Republican, whom 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 legitimately voted for a Democrat,” he says.
The Harris campaign needs more disaffected Republicans like Ojeda in places like suburban Atlanta, which has become the decisive political battleground in Georgia in the Trump era. It is seeking 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 increase taxes in suburban Cobb County to expand mass transit, and stopping Trump from being reelected. (He asked not to have his last name used.)
On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in a leafy neighborhood in Roswell, he lopes up and down winding streets to knock on doors. Few people are home, and most of those who are have already voted. When Fred explains to one woman that he’s a Republican for Harris, she seems taken aback, stating: “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 there to be a lot of importance to preserving the alliances we built out over 75 years with other democracies around the world. And I see Trump as a threat to all that. So those are my reasons. So notwithstanding the fact that odds are that my capital-gains rate could go up.” The woman seems unimpressed with the pitch. “It’s a Catch-22,” she says, adding that she’s already voted.
The question is how many potential Republicans are still there for Harris to poach. Poll data is varied about just how many actually do support her. One New York Times–Siena poll in early October found the vice-president winning the support of 9 percent of self-identified Republicans, a few points more than Trump’s support among Democrats. However, a more recent Times–Siena Poll found that dwindling down to 4 percent. Ultimately, it’s a bit fuzzy who still identifies as a Republican but doesn’t vote for Trump. Particularly since Trump entered the political fray in 2015, voters have been polarized according to education: Those with college degrees increasingly support Democrats, while those without increasingly support Republicans. The change has blown up both parties. Orange County, California, 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 drive to bring into the fold college-educated Republicans turned off by MAGA. 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 threat posed by Trump acolytes after January 6 helped to motivate these 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 a key 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 are increasingly anachronistic at a time when the most important political divide concerns what voters think of Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, 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 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 statewide, she received nearly 40 percent of the vote in two of the biggest counties in Metro Atlanta.
Of course, not every anti-Trump Republican in the state is convinced by the Harris campaign’s copious outreach. Emory Morsberger, who is a local real-estate developer, a former GOP state representative, and a passionate supporter of Ukraine, voted for Biden in 2020. He’s also still undecided. “Neither one is paying attention to the deficit,” he says. “I’m frustrated that Trump and Vance are disregarding our commitment to Ukraine that we’ve made, and that bothers me on that side, combined with some of the different anti-immigrant things they’ve been talking about.” He also bemoans the Biden-Harris administration’s fiscal policy that led to “just a lot of money being spent with very little efficiency.”
The key for Harris’s 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.
