Supporters of Donald Trump, carrying flags and signs, march through a crosswalk in Virginia on Nov. 8, expressing their excitement after his 2024 presidential election win.
Ali Khaligh/AFP via Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump is known for rewarding loyalty and attacking his political enemies.
Despite that risk, many current and former high-profile Republicans publicly opposed him and threw their weight behind Vice President Harris in the 2024 election.
Now, anti-Trump conservatives are regrouping, says Craig Snyder, former director of Haley Voters for Harris.
“These are people who had significant career and personal investments in Republican politics and who threw it all away, burned the bridge — knowingly burned the bridge — because they couldn’t abide Donald Trump and they wanted to support Vice President Harris,” Snyder said.
They’re also thinking about what went wrong. Snyder says he thinks efforts to win over center-right voters for Harris were successful in some areas; exit polls suggest college-educated voters, especially women, moved toward Democrats this year.
But Snyder says that movement wasn’t enough given other trends in the electorate.
“We were providing a kind of a transfusion…into the Democratic campaign,” he said. “But the problem was there was a hemorrhage…that was bleeding out the other end with large groups of formerly traditionally Democratic voters, people who frankly the Democratic Party maybe had taken for granted.”
Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and chairman of Republicans for Harris in Virginia, uses a different analogy.
“In some areas, I think that the Republicans for Harris was a bit of a fart in the wind honestly,” Riggleman said.
Riggleman was a technical adviser to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“I’m an expert in this, and even I, I think, underestimated the power of the far-right media ecosystem and how it could affect and persuade people,” Riggleman said.
Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, says for him, the election confirmed that the Republican Party is fully the party of Trump.
“There were others who held out hope that he’ll lose, and boom-boom-boom, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney everybody can get back in and we can remake it,” Walsh said. “I think now everyone understands that it’s gone.”
Walsh says people like him are left with few choices: form a new party — a notoriously difficult task — or become a Democrat.
Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist and host of the “Never-Trump” podcast “The Bulwark,” says many are being “thrust into…a semi-permanent alliance” with the Democratic Party.
“I think some never-Trumpers are gonna be more comfortable with that than others,” Miller predicted.
Brittany Prime, co-founder of Women4US, a group that focused on trying to win over Republican-leaning women, says she also sees no future for anti-Trump Republicans within the GOP.
“I have always thought that two strong parties is what makes a strong country, and part of that is having diverse voices within a party,” she said. “And I think Donald Trump has made it clear that it is loyalty or nothing else.”
While Trump won’t be president again for several more weeks, his nominees for key cabinet positions are offering a window into how he will govern in a second term.
Riggleman says Trump’s unorthodox choices for several posts have heightened his concerns about threats to the democratic system.
“There is some fear based on what he’s saying, because he’s doing exactly what he said he was gonna do with his appointments,” Riggleman said. “These are the worst batch of political appointees, I believe we can say, maybe ever.”
Olivia Troye, a former Trump administration homeland security official who served as a surrogate for the Harris campaign, shares that worry.
“I’m watching very closely what Republican senators do on the Hill when it comes to some of these confirmation hearings…and whether they’re going to confirm some of these people that are not fit for leadership in the departments that they’re gonna lead,” Troye said.
Some anti-Trump Republicans worry not only about what comes next for their party and their country, but for themselves, given Trump’s threats to go after his rivals. Some have talked about leaving the country. Others say they’re speaking to lawyers, and trying to prepare for whatever might be next.
“All of us…are afraid that he will act out on some of his threats, no doubt,” Walsh said.
