These Republicans think Donald Trump is a 'threat.' Who will they vote for in 2024 and beyond?
WASHINGTON – Michael Steele compares former President Donald Trump’s 8-year hold on the GOP to a weekend-long party.
2016 was like the Fridaythe gathering started: Some people were gung-ho about attending, while others begrudgingly joined. 2020 was Saturday – the heat of the event when it was easy to get lost in the moment. Now it’s Sunday, and it's time to get up and face reality.
“There is that point where you realize, I’ve got to do the responsible thing,” Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee who has long opposed Trump, said Saturday during an interview at a conference dubbed the Principles First Summit.
The summit brought together over 500 like-minded, traditional conservatives in a hotel ballroom blocks away from the White House. One topic weighed heavy on their minds: How to preserve the future of the Republican Party as Trump seeks another term in office.
Many are holding out hope that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will persevere against longshot odds and beat Trump. But even before her double-digit loss against the ex-president in her home state primary on Saturday, most saw Trump as the inevitable 2024 Republican nominee.
Facing down that prospect, roughly a dozen anti-Trump conservative figures told USA TODAY that, if the November election is a choice between Trump and President Joe Biden, they will vote, and even campaign for, the Democrat.
“Do I agree with all the policies of the Biden administration? No,” said Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary for Trump who testified in congressional hearings on the Capitol riot. “But I'm willing to put policy aside because Trump is such a threat.”
Anti-Trump Republicans brace for November
For this group of conservatives, the general election is less about specific issues and more about defending broader norms in the U.S. and around the world.
Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election was a tipping point for many of them. His rhetoric since then, including comments he’s made attacking NATO and suggesting that he’d be a “dictator” for “one day,” have only intensified their frustration.
People once within Trump’s orbit, including staffers like Matthews and Cassidy Hutchinson, a former assistant to Trump’s chief of staff who also testified after the Capitol riot, have become some of his most vocal critics.
“In a second Trump term, there are not going to be people who are willing to stick up for the truth. There will be people who are willing to execute Donald Trump's plan and Donald Trump's plan only,” Hutchinson warned during a panel discussion at the summit.
She, like many who took the stage over the weekend, advocated for Republican leaders to speak up about the potential perils of another Trump presidency. They need to hammer home, particularly in swing states, that the election is about the fate of the country, she said.
Exit polls from early Republican primaries, including in South Carolina's contest over the weekend, do reveal cracks in Trump's support among moderate and conservative Americans. Many are wary of Trump's four criminal indictments and believe President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
But it's not clear how widely these cracks have spread in 2024. A RealClearPolitics average of polls currently shows Trump beating Biden by roughly 2% nationally, and he defeated Haley in her home state over the weekend by approximately 20 percentage points.
Anti-Trump leaders point to the string of elections Republicans have lost since Trump became the party’s standard bearer as evidence that democracy-focused arguments can work.
Former Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., highlighted Republican losses in swing districts like her own during the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections as evidence that there are voters sympathetic to hits against Trump. The former president's influence over the Republican Party was seen as major reason Comstock lost her largely suburban Northern Virginia district in 2018.
“Those are the kind of districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona – all those places that Trump has weakened and bankrupted across the country that are going to be places where he loses," Comstock predicted of the 2024 election.
The Trump voter
One group that anti-Trump Republican leaders don’t appear to be making a play for is the party’s ultraconservative base.
Heath Mayo, founder of Principles First, argued that Trump's supporters are backing him out of a “deep sense of emotional connection."
“That’s a contest that Donald Trump is probably going to win nine times out of 10 because he's loud. He's brash. His voice is really going to rise to the top,” Mayo said.
Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, an outspoken critic of Trump who dropped out of the GOP presidential contest in January, said in an interview over the weekend he's planning to continue ringing the alarm bell about Trump’s “style and character.”
But he said it's not “just about what candidates do” in the lead up to the general election. Instead, Hutchinson said GOP voters have to “come into their own realization that this is not going to work for our party.”
The former governor is among the group of Republican leaders unwilling to vote for Trump but who have not committed to voting for Biden.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House director of strategic communications under Trump, said the way to bring voters to their side is by "practicing compassion" and educating them rather than shaming them "out of their belief system."
Still, these outlooks don't form a real plan to win against the former president, this anti-Trump group's goal. While Trump's base only makes up between 30% and 40% of Republican primary voters, they have stayed steadfast by his side.
The ex-president has dominated the Republican presidential primary, particularly over candidates who came out swinging against him, like Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Asa Hutchinson dropped out after garnering less than 1% support in the Iowa Caucuses.
Figures like Hutchinson and Christie still don't have a playbook for attracting swaths of Republicans away from the former president, in both 2024 and future elections.
Beyond 2024
Even if Trump becomes the Republican nominee and loses the general election in November, he's still likely to remain a dominant voice in politics, summit attendees warned. His grip on the Republican Party won’t loosen right away.
Trump in recent weeks has sought to flex his muscle among the party’s governing body, the Republican National Committee, by nominating his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as a co-chair, and his longtime senior campaign advisor, Chris LaCivita, as its chief operating officer.
That control, coupled with sustained support among the party’s base, will give Trump some level of staying power.
“It's not going to be a snap back,” to the before-Trump days, Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator, said.
But currently, there’s little agreement among anti-Trump leaders about what that means for their future post-2024.
One person pondering those next steps is Marine Corps veteran Michael Wood, who ran on an anti-Trump message during a 2021 special election for a House seat in the Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, suburbs and lost. The election was considered a referendum on Trump’s influence over the Republican Party, and in the three years since, Wood has “gotten to a really dark place” in his views about the GOP’s future.
He believes the party has transformed into a “nationalist populist outfit,” that could take decades of sustained losses to destroy.
He's not the only Republican who feels that way. Former Vice President Mike Pence also targeted Trump's brand of populism during his failed White House bid and has continued to push back against it through his advocacy work.
However, Wood argued that younger, more moderate conservatives like himself will need to migrate elsewhere within the current political system to find an ideological home.
“Part of that is going to be potentially creating a conservative or moderate faction within the Democratic Party, something that is recognizable and very separate from the left-wing elements,” Wood said. “That might be the way forward.”
Steele, who also served as lieutenant governor of Maryland, views the future differently. People who subscribe to Republican ideals espoused by former presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan may need to create a whole new party, he said.
“Part of our problems goes to the heart of what our founders were concerned about – the concentration of power in the hands of political factions,” Steele said.
Instead of pigeonholing traditional conservatives, he believes a reckoning that allows more ideologies on the ballot will be necessary.
How that would work, exactly, is a challenge that still needs to be figured out. But Steele said one factor remains clear.
“MAGA light is going to exist in some form,” after the 2024 election, Steele said. “Unpacking that is going to be messy.”
Contributing: Francesca Chambers, USA TODAY
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Anti-Trump Republicans search for a path forward in 2024 and beyond
