In early April, a group called Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT) came to light by launching a $50 million advertising campaign. To begin with, they paid for two advertisements in one of Trumpism’s favorite places, Fox News, and specifically in the shows Fox & Friends and Jesse Watters Tonight during the morning and evening, respectively.
In this infomercial, Chuck, a former Trumpist, is seen saying the following:
I am from the state of Nebraska and I am a former Trump supporter.
I hold him completely responsible for the Capitol insurrection. Trump invited those people. He invited them knowing who were going to show up, and he is 100% responsible for what happened that day….
I will vote Democrat. I can’t believe I’m saying it. But I will not ever support or vote for Donald Trump ever. I’ll vote for Joe Biden.
And on the RVAT website, a second expresses:
Hello, I’m David and I’m from Madison, Wisconsin. I was an alternate delegate to the 2016 National Republican Convention in Cleveland. I did vote for Donald Trump in 2020, never again. I think he disqualified himself by leading the insurrection on January 6th.
He led the mob against the Constitution really in trying to overturn a duly elected president. He lost, and January 6th is a disgrace, a stain on our history.
I’m a conservative Republican and I believe in the rule of law. I believe in the Constitution, and I believe in free and open elections, and being a good loser when you lose. Donald Trump lost.
And a third:
Hi, I am Dennis. I’m from Wichita, Kansas. I’m a prior service member who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but I can’t ever bring myself to do that again. I really did support Donald Trump up until probably January 6th. That’s when I really learned what he was all about, and I saw that he was really trying to keep the power, regardless of the outcome of the elections. He started by telling everybody that the election was gonna be stolen and then he insisted that it was stolen and everybody could see it wasn’t stolen… Donald Trump has said that he wants to terminate our constitution, the bedrock of our democracy. There’s no way we can allow anyone that would say something like that to serve in the presidency.
The Trump campaign was quick to mock it, calling it “fake Republican nonsense.” But it doesn’t seem like it can be taken lightly. The testimonies are not false. Everyone involved is a Republican voter.
The group emerged thanks to Sarah Longwell, former head of the LGBT+ Republican group known as Log Cabin Republicans. She is a consultant known for her label experience and work with specific groups. And she has now placed herself in the middle of an expanding universe of Never Trump movement conservatives.
She aims to overcome previous problems regarding the impacts of anti-Trump ads on Republican voters.
The Never Trump movement
The movement began as an effort by a group of Republicans to prevent Trump from obtaining the presidential nomination in 2016. In the elections that year they supported other candidates such as Hillary Clinton, the libertarian Gary Johnson, the independent conservative Evan McMullin and the candidate of the American Solidarity Party Mike Maturen.
The last Republican primaries served to give greater visibility to the Never Trumpers, verified in the Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley. Those elections were, in fact, races for or against Trump, although they ended with a very tangible victory for the former president.
In New Hampshire, Trump won with 54% of the vote, Haley trailed by nine points, getting 43%. And there were states where the candidate won the vote of 72% of moderate Republicans, beating Trump by approximately 3 to 1 in this social segment. In others, 83% of their voters said they would not consider Trump fit to hold office if convicted of a crime. In New Hampshire, for example, an analysis by the not exactly antiseptic Fox News found that 35% of Republican voters in that state would not vote for Trump in November.
The above is particularly relevant at the national level, especially in battleground states, full of suburban Republican voters who continue to doubt Trump’s return to the White House.
Club for Growth
According to Adimpacts, election spending is expected to exceed $10 billion in 2024, almost five times the amount spent in the 2016 cycle, in which $2.6 billion were spent on political ads. This represents a 15% increase from the previous record ($9 billion during the 2020 election cycle). “Spending is expected to be $2.7 billion on political advertising this cycle,” they conclude.
For their part, anti-Trump Republican organizations have spared no money to try to keep him away from the White House. One of them is the Club for Growth, a political action committee (PAC) founded in 1999 and an advocate of free market policies that support candidates aligned with its fiscally conservative principles. And they focus on tax cuts, limited government intervention and free market policies.
In spring 2023, this PAC began airing ads criticizing Trump’s plan to fund Social Security. But it had a fairly modest success.
The Lincoln Project
Founded in December 2019 by moderate conservatives and former members of the Republican Party opposed to Trump, the Lincoln Project is, without a doubt, one of the most notable points of resistance to Trump.
That year, four of its founders — George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson — announced the formation of the group in The New York Times. Its current board is made up of prominent Never Trumpers, among whom Rick Wilson himself, Reed Galen and Tara Setmayer stand out, all with extensive experience in the world of politics and the media.
The mission they have given themselves is:
to protect the American Republic from Donald Trump and those who identify (publicly or privately) as MAGA supporters. While we are optimistic about the future, we are not complacent. In 2020, it took an ad-hoc coalition to ensure Trump’s defeat. In 2022, we built a coalition across the political spectrum and again bought democracy some breathing room. We agree with Trump on only one thing: 2024 is a battle for America’s future.
Today, we find our nation divided again ― faced with a growing authoritarian movement populated by millions of radicalized voters for whom this fight is existential… Donald Trump and those who ascribe to Trumpism are a clear and present danger to the Constitution and our Republic. This is why we fight.
In April 2020 they supported Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Members of his advisory board then declared the impossible: “We have never endorsed a Democrat for president. But Trump must be defeated.”
In the current cycle, they have placed several infomercials in national media and social networks. One of the last was last March, conceived against a “broken, ruined, loser in chief” Trump, and focused on his problems to pay a $464 million bail in his civil fraud case in New York.
It was his reaction to the announcement that New York Attorney General Letitia James had begun preparing to seize Trump’s privately owned Seven Springs golf course in Manhattan. According to the Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA, ads by other anti-Trump groups, such as the Lincoln Project, ultimately did not end up changing the voting intentions of many Republicans.
The new experience
RVAT claims to have found that personal testimonies are more effective in moving those who voted for Trump. “What we have discovered that is most persuasive to the center-right voter…is that listening to like-minded messengers is what gives them the leverage needed to say, ‘You know what? I may have voted for McCain and Romney and maybe even Trump in the past, but now I can’t support this version of Donald Trump,’” said Gunner Ramer, the group’s current political director.
Conventional wisdom supports the low probability that people who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 will now opt for a Democrat, especially if it is Joe Biden.
However, a prominent group of anti-Trump Republicans believe they are in a better position to convince other Republicans to vote against him.
What they are doing must be followed. They are willing to spend a lot of money to achieve it.
