Hi, I’m Craig, I’m from Colorado. I am a Republican and have voted for Republicans for 42 years. Vote Trump because you didn’t trust Hillary Clinton, it was a mistake. “
My name is Monica Bailey, I am a pro-life evangelical Christian [de Texas]. I have never voted for a democrat. I voted for Trump because I couldn’t believe that someone who behaved as silly as he did on television was serious. “
“Hi, I’m Jay and I’m from Pennsylvania. I’m a retired Air Force sergeant and a longtime Republican. I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and I’m not going to do it now. I read my statement because there are many reasons and I want to count them … ”.
Dozens of testimonies of this nature, recorded in home videos and with that air of an emotional support group, hang from a website named Republican voters against Trump. It is the project launched by a group of conservative analysts and strategists, staunch detractors of the president, who are investing millions of dollars against his reelection. A cousin sister initiative, The Lincoln Project, created last December by well-known Republican figures, has launched its own advertising machinery by land, sea and air with a goal for November 3: to be elected Democrat Joe Biden.
Donald Trump won the 2016 elections alone. The campaign ended repudiated by the party’s popes. That real estate magnate and showman, addicted to the astracanada, had given the blow of his life in the Republican primaries, but the great figures abandoned him at the rallies. Outside the Capitol and the party, some conservative ideologues and intellectuals also joined the idea of ”never Trump” and came to ask for the vote for Hillary Clinton. The impossible candidate, however, came to the White House and, little by little, practically all layers of the Grand Old Party they were folding to the new leader.
Others, like consultant Sarah Longwell, remained in the gap. She found the perfect ally, the commentator and editor. Bill Kristol, one of the intellectual references of the American neoconservatism, founder and director for 24 years of the political magazine The Weekly Standard (closed in 2018) who had worked for the Reagan and two Bush governments. Son of Irving Kristol – who is considered the father of the neoconservative movement – he was one of the first lashes against Trump. Together with Longwell, he created in 2018 the organization Defend Together Democracy. Other Republican veterans, like adviser Mike Murphy or Tim Miller, who worked for Jeb Bush in 2016, joined them.
In four years, they have grown into an organized group with a remarkable budget: They have raised $ 13 million, committed to spending $ 10, and hope to reach $ 15 million.
“Things have changed compared to 2016,” explains Sarah Longwell, “first, that now we question Trump for his outlaws during his presidency and, second, but more importantly, that in the last five months many of his voters are suffering the personal consequences of his management [por la pandemia]. This is no longer about matters that were abstract to them, and to which they did not pay much attention, such as the Russian plot or the Ukraine scandal, this is directly impacting their lives and Trump is not providing the kind of leadership that is needed ” .
The phenomenon is reminiscent of the 1972 “Democrats for Nixon” campaign, when the candidate George McGovern suffered a sidereal defeat against the Republican.
To defeat Trump, Longwell’s group have placed ads on Fox News, the great conservative media arm of the United States, but, above all, it focuses on digital strategy. That is, Longwell explains, the one that best enables them to identify and target “Trump’s narrow niche of voters. suave” Those, the voters not addicted to the Trump cult, are those who are in danger for the president in hinge states, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. They are not necessarily moderate, clarifies the adviser, there are centrists and others who are very conservative in the economic sphere, who reject Trump’s protectionist turn, for example.
“We have been studying how to convince Republican voters not to vote for him for a few years, we have done many focus group and we have seen that it works very well to listen to the real testimonies of people like them, “explains Longwell.
There is no fire as deadly as friendly fire. The Lincoln Project was born in December 2018 also with that idea at the hands of Republican strategists Rick Wilson and John Weaver, the former Party president in New Hampshire, Jennifer Horn; and attorney George T. Conway, who is the husband of Kellyanne Conway, none other than one of the president’s bedside advisers (yes this is one of the strangest phenomena of this strange time in Washington).
“Trump still retains the majority of the Republican electorate, we recognize that, but he has lost support and, with our electoral system, we only need to win a few votes in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or North Carolina to overturn the result in favor of Biden,” he explains. Rick Wilson. To do this, they flood the networks with videos that riddle Trump. Would they have launched the same campaign with leftist Bernie Sanders as a Democratic candidate? Negative, both Longwell and Wilson say. “It would not have been a viable candidate,” says the second.
Biden almost nine points ahead of Republican (48.7% vs. 40.1%), according to the average of national surveys of Real Clear Politics. The Lincoln Project operates as Super-Pac, political support groups that can raise unlimited signature money without revealing the identity of donors. Between April and June alone, they raised $ 16.8 million, with data from the Center for Responsive Politics, although Wilson says that in total they have reached 19 million and still have 14 in the bank to launch heavy ammunition in the fall. 45% of what is raised comes from small donors, less than $ 200, although large Democratic taxpayers have also injected funds.
For now, some of his videos have already angered Trump, who has branded this group of “losers.” One was targeting Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager until last Wednesday night.. The Wall Street Journal He published that video, in which Parscale was accused of having become rich at Trump’s expense, was the straw that broke the glass for the president to relegate him to the background. Former White House Communications Director Finance Anthony Scaramucci has also launched an anti-Trump group, the Right Side PAC.
Some campaigns are also directed at Republican senators and congressmen who have been especially significant in their support for the president. [como Martha McSally, en Arizona, o Cory Gardner, en Colorado], since “the objective is not only to get rid of Trump, but of the party’s trumpism,” says Wilson.
That is the underlying dilemma in the future of Abraham Lincoln’s party. Who best represents you today, Donald Trump or these Republicans? “Nationalism and populism are incompatible with conservatism,” emphasizes Wilson. Sarah Longwell admits that Republicans had already taken a more populist direction before 2016, but that Trump won the primaries by atomizing his opponents and accentuated that turn. The future will be marked, as always, by the ballot box. If Trump loses, says Rick Wilson, “there will be a collapse within the party, there will be reckoning, it will get ugly, it will be noisy.”
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