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

As soon as Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia failed, he went on a revenge mission against the state’s top three Republicans 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 re-election.

The story of Duncan 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 a grand jury in Atlanta, which would then indict Trump for alleged crimes related to the election. This summer, he addressed the Democratic National Convention in prime time. “This journey started as an anti-Trump journey for me,” he says. “But it has turned into a pro-Kamala Harris trip.”

On Tuesday, that trip led 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 in the back room of a Mexican restaurant just off the Perimeter freeway that surrounds Atlanta. They munched on chips and sipped pet-sized margaritas and were elated when Duncan made his pitch: Harris will govern as a moderate, while addressing Trump as “a fake conservative” who has spent profligately and failed to deliver to secure the southern states. border.

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

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

Perhaps no demographic group has become more important to the Harris campaign than Republicans skeptical of Trump. There are plenty of reasons for them to abandon the former president – ​​out of dismay at the Dobbs decision to decline due to the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and everything in between – but they’re still Republicans for a reason. The goal of the campaign is to peel away enough disgruntled conservatives to secure victory. The effort involves 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 began a paid media effort to target those who voted for Nikki Haley against Trump in the Republican Party primaries. Since then, the campaign has amplified criticism from former Trump officials who have defected or warned of the dangers 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 defected 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 voted for him in 2016 but not in 2020, citing “his handling of the pandemic and the way he treated Gretchen Whitmer” as the reason, referring to a far-right plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor. “If I had still been undecided, if I had voted for him in 2020, January 6 would have been enough,” she added. She also can’t imagine returning to the GOP. “If Trump loses, who will lead the Republican Party? I mean, if it’s JD Vance, he’s even worse.”

The pair had turned against the party years ago, but the room also included professional Republicans who hadn’t quite made it to the end (some of them did not want to be identified because they are still involved in Republican politics). They hated Trump and voted for Raphael Warnock over Herschel Walker. “Oh God. Yes. Yes. That was easy,” says one. The same year they endorsed Kemp, who supports Trump’s re-election.

“I just want the Republican Party back,” said Andrew Ojeda, a former Republican official who took out his phone to scroll through the various photos he had with Republican Party elected officials, such as House Republican Tom Emmer. Delegates he 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’ve 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. She seeks them out by going door to door with volunteers like Fred, an upper-middle-class Republican who cares about two ballot issues: stopping a referendum to raise taxes in suburban Cobb County to expanding public transportation, and blocking a referendum to raise taxes in suburban Cobb County to expand public transportation, and Trump is not re-elected. (He asked that his last name not be used.)

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

“Well, I consider her policies more fiscally conservative than Trump’s,” he explains, “and I think it’s very important to build on the alliances that we’ve built over the last 75 years with other democracies around the world, to maintain. And I see Trump as a threat to all of that. So those are my reasons. So despite the fact that there is a good chance that my capital gains could increase.” The woman seems unimpressed by the field. “It’s a Catch-22,” she says, adding that she has already voted.

The question is how many potential Republicans are left that Harris can steal. Survey data on how many people actually support her varies. One New York Times–A poll in Siena in early October showed the vice president with the support of 9 percent of self-identified Republicans, a few points more than Trump’s support among Democrats. However, a more recent one Times–Siena Poll found this dropped to 4 percent. Ultimately, it’s a bit vague who still identifies as a Republican but doesn’t vote for Trump. Particularly since Trump entered the political fray in 2015, voters have become polarized based on their education, with those with a college degree increasingly supporting Democrats, while those without a degree increasingly supporting Republicans. The change has blown up both parties. Orange County, California, the heart of Reagan Country, is now Democratic, while the Republican Party once won solidly Democratic working-class enclaves like Ohio’s industrial Mahoning Valley.

As these white working-class voters slipped from Democrats’ grasp, the party accelerated its push to bring college-educated Republicans, who had been rejected 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 threat posed by Trump acolytes after January 6 helped motivate these voters to support MAGA candidates like Kari Lake and rejecting Doug. Mastriano.

Despite how important these voters have been in American politics over the past decade, this may be the last presidential election in which they will be a key demographic group. 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 getting older, but also becoming increasingly anachronistic at a time when the most important political divide has to do with what voters think of Donald Trump.

Still, 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 withdrew from the Republican primaries. They are disproportionately highly educated and 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 largest counties in Metro Atlanta.

Of course, not every anti-Trump Republican in the state is convinced by the broad reach of the Harris campaign. Emory Morsberger, a local real estate developer, former Republican Party representative and passionate supporter of Ukraine, voted for Biden in 2020. He’s still not sure about it either. “Neither of them are paying attention to the shortage,” he says. “I’m frustrated that Trump and Vance are ignoring our commitment to Ukraine that we made, and that bothers me on that side, combined with some of the various anti-immigrant issues that they’ve been talking about.” He also laments the Biden-Harris administration’s fiscal policies that have led to “just a lot of money being spent with very little efficiency.”

The key for Harris’ campaign is to do enough to seal 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 they remain Republicans at least for now.