Defending Democracy

Meet the Republicans Voting Against Trump with Sarah Longwell

Sarah Longwell, founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, wants you to know that not all Republicans support former President Donald Trump. She discusses with Marc Elias fractures in the GOP, how Trump is a threat to democracy and conservative ideals and what Democratic voters need to understand about modern Republican voters. Learn more about Republican Voters Against Trump: https://rvat.org/

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Duration:: 58m
Broadcast on:: 06 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: aac

Donald Trump may have taken over the Republican Party, but not all Republicans support him. Sarah Longwell, founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, is here to discuss the state of the Republican Party and the 2024 election. Welcome back to Defending Democracy. I'm Mark Elias. Let's get started. Sarah Longwell, thank you for joining us. Hey, great to be here. All right, so I gotta ask the obvious question. Why did you become a Republican against Trump? Oh, I thought you were going to say why did you become a Republican in the first place? We'll get to that next. That seems like where your speed. I became Republican against Trump because of Trump. Look, when Donald Trump came on the scene in 2015, like many people, I thought he was a joke. Didn't think voters could possibly be interested in him, that the conservative movement couldn't possibly be interested in him. And so I was, like we say now, sort of never Trump from the jump. There was sort of never a moment in which I thought, well, this could be fine. Actually, you know what? That's slightly untrue. When Donald Trump was elected, I do remember writing to some of my friends who were very alarmed as I was, but I was saying, look, Republicans are responsible people. We have branches of government. The people in the Republican Party will check him. It's not like he can run unfettered all over the Republican Party. And I think of all the things that I was most wrong about from the beginning, it was the notion or sort of my faith that responsible Republicans would stand up against Trump. And it's something nobody did. Jeff Flake did. John McCain did. There were people. It's just that they were systematically and then systemically sort of run out of the party. And so those people sort of no longer exist. But the Republican voters against Trump, sort of, there was me, a never-trumper who was just like, I will never vote for this guy. I will never become accustomed to the way that his role in the Republican Party. And then there's the project that I run, which is Republican voters against Trump. And that's a program that was designed for persuasion, for voters, right? This was really borne out of the idea that the number one messenger that voters trusted, especially sort of these right-leaning independents and soft GOP voters who didn't like Trump, that the number one way to get them to vote against Trump, and hopefully for the Democratic challenger, was to have real people who had been Republicans their whole lives explaining why they wouldn't vote for Trump. And so we made hundreds and now thousands of testimonials from these types of voters to create a permission structure for other Republican voters to feel like they could vote against Trump. But there's a reason we didn't call it Republican voters for Biden or now Republican voters for Harris. It's because many of these Republicans, they are much more against Trump than they would be for a Democrat. And so you just sort of have to figure out, like, who are you trying to persuade and how? And these are Republicans, they're not going to get super pumped about a Democrat, but they might vote against Trump still. Okay, I want to run through both of these streams with you because I find it fascinating. The first is what I'll call the sort of the insiders, right? The people who you were disappointed in who didn't, you know, who didn't leave, and the people who have been regarly heroes for essentially endorsing against their party. And then we'll talk about the voters because I know you do a ton of work with voters and by God, we need to know what the hell's going on with the voters. But I recently realized that there are kind of three groups of Republicans around the never Trump movement. There are the people who were Republicans and now seem to really like Kamala Harris. You know, I'll put in that category and you can totally disagree with the people I put in which category, but like a Michael Steele or even a Jennifer Rubin, right? These were like Michael Steele was the RNC chair. And now he's like pretty strongly pro Harris. Jen Rubin was brought to the Washington Post to be a Republican columnist. And now frankly, her columns are not really all that different from what a Democratic columnist would look like. The second group are the people who are never Trump and they're willing to sort of tolerate Kamala Harris. You know, maybe they find at the margins there's something that they like, but but not necessarily they may even disagree with everything Kamala Harris stands for policy wise, but they are just committed to democracy in such a strong, core way that even though her views might be antithetical to their views, they just view her as a responsible governing person who would be responsible in governing. And I put in this category, you know, probably the most to me the most heroic of them. And we'll talk about her later is Liz Cheney, who I don't agree with anything on Liz Cheney. I suspect she doesn't agree with anything that I agree with or Kamala Harris agrees with, but but who has been a clear never Trumper probably also in this category. You would put some of the folks in, you know, at the bulwark that you helped, you know, that you founded in that category. And then the third category, which I didn't know was a thing until very recently, which goes to show you do learn something from Twitter, is that there's kind of like a never, never Trump movement that seemed like anti-Trumpers. Yes, which I started as, but started as skeptical of Trump. And some of them still seem to be skeptical of Trump. But oddly, they seem more motivated by those of you who are anti Trump. And this is like the dispatch, I guess, or some of the dispatch and the national review has some people in this. And so have I gotten the taxonomy right? And what is the state of things? Yeah, no, I think you're pretty close with the taxonomy. Although, you know, it's funny, I think that it's hard for people, maybe especially Democrats, to look at the never Trumpers and see like the stratifications among us that we see boldly and clearly among ourselves, right? Because we can see in very nuanced ways how we differ from one another. And it's weird because I think we're the most sensitive to being lumped in with the wrong stratification, right? Like, I don't want to be sort of a Lincoln project type. And then, you know, the dispatch guys don't want to be a bulwark type. And then our own guys don't want to be a dispatch type, you know, and it's, it's a, it is a, it is a funny thing. But like we all, and that's why I think the fights get so international and like even one of the narcissism of small differences, but I'll just, I'll draw you to me what is the biggest distinction. Okay. And actually, it's not totally dissimilar with what I think has happened among sort of never Trump isn't a voters term. Like, there aren't really voters who are like, I'm never Trump. I mean, there are, but it's not the dominant thing. What there are are a group of voters, just like there is a group of people who essentially said, Republicans have been so offensive and have so betrayed everything that I care about that I'm essentially a Democrat now, right? Like they have Democratic audiences, the people who read them, donate to them, support them are Democrats. And they sort of cheer lead for the Democrats now. And you know, they have a very sort of like burn it all down mentality with the Republican Party. I share sort of elements of that, but still don't quite view that as like, who I am in large part, because I feel like I haven't changed at all in terms of how I think about policy. What I have thought a lot about and what I've changed a lot on, because part of it is I was always a moderate squish to begin with, like I'm a gay Republican. I was much more concerned. Like if you're like, Sarah, why are you Republican? I would give you I'd sort of wax poetic about debt and deficit reduction. Much more than I would sort of woke things in schools or, you know, whatever, like I wasn't a big culture warrior. I'm a gay Republican. Like, you know, I just I was always a moderate. But I think that for me, what animates me is I think a lot about tribalism. And I was never like so committed to Republicans being my tribe. I didn't write about it every single day. I worked in Republican politics. I worked on Republican policy issues prior to this. But when Trump came on the scene, I was so appalled by who he was as a human. Like, my tribe isn't just conservatives. They are one of my tribes. But my much bigger tribe is America, right? And I cared so deeply as a conservative, some of the things that animated my conservatism, which was the idea that character counts that individual responsibility matters, that American leadership in the world matters. Like, Donald Trump represents none of those things. Like, and that is where when you say like, why did I become a Republican voter against Trump? Obviously, it was because I thought Trump was a bad person. But also he reflects almost none of the values that were part of the values that I had as a conservative and continue to have. Although I don't necessarily talk about them in terms of conservatism anymore, because the language has all got mocked up. And so people don't even know what you're talking about. The thing that's different between sort of the bulwark side and the dispatch side is that we say, Donald Trump is a unique threat, both to American democracy and to sort of the American experiment in the project, where he's poisoning who we are as people. And he is changing our politics in every way for the worse. And each day he brings with him sort of a new disqualifying thing that he does that attached to any other politician would singularly be disqualifying. And he has piles and piles of those things. And so from my perspective, you don't need to be a Democrat or decide that you agree with everything Democrats believe in order to want very badly for Democrats to defeat Donald Trump and all the candidates like him in order to create a new incentive structure for a reform in the Republican Party. I don't think we're going back with the Republican Party. I don't think we're going back to some Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney conservatism. I believe that that's over because I listened to voters and I know that that's not what they want anymore. And so because I know that they're not going back, I'm thinking, how do you create an incentive structure for the Republican Party to at least be a healthy political party, a non-dangerous political party? And I think the only way that happens is through sustained electoral defeats. And so I want to help Democrats deliver those sustained electoral defeat, okay? Because my highest order is that I believe in America. I feel strongly about the purpose and point and America being like a force for good in the world. And I don't want to see us go down an authoritarian rabbit hole. And so I want to defeat this guy. That is that is and I think that's where a lot of the bulwark guys are. And to do that though, you got to be like the Democrats are better. The Democrats are not as dangerous. You should vote for them. You should do something about this. The dispatch kind of lane is no, no, no, but I want to go back to that conservatism, right? I want to fight for that conservatism. I believe that that still exists. And so I'm going to sort of carve out this thing and to do that. And the problem is for a lot of these guys because they are professional conservatives, right? They've just they've been working that muscle of I hate Democrats. I don't like Democrats. Democrats are wrong about this for so long that they do this thing where like they get into kind of an equivalency. They they're clear out about how bad Trump is, right? The dispatch guys are super clear out about how bad Trump is. The thing that they struggle with is how to then not say, and as a result, the Democrats are acceptable to vote for in this moment. That they like struggle with that. They can't get there for a variety of reasons. And then the NRO guys are the kind of like, now I'm just now I'm just here for Trump. Like, this is where my audience is. We're full on Trumpers now. I'm going to change how I think about everything in the conservative movement. And so even though they were long skeptical and they might do some throat clearing about Trump being bad, they're still happy to like say the vote for him. They might have tried to get DeSantis in. But as soon as it became clear that DeSantis wasn't what they want, their readers want it or the voters wanted, they snapped right back into Trump defense mode. I don't know if that explains it all. It's a lot. But to me, it's pretty clear. It's very it's very helpful. You're right. Those are nuances that were totally lost to me. And I probably followed this more closely than most Democrats do. You mentioned something that is where I really want to spend the bulk of our time, which is that this isn't how voters think of it, right? Like voters, and for people who don't know, Sarah is one of the most insightful voices on voters generally, but in particular these voters who are sort of struggling with what to do. She does focus groups upon focus groups, upon focus groups, which is vitally important to understand not just what a poll says, obviously lots of polling too, but also like how do the voters actually express it in their own words and how they think about it. So I assume in your focus groups, people are not saying I'm in the dispatch lane. No, like how are voters processing this? Yeah, but I can I can sort of map voters on to these things. And I'll just say the reason I started doing the focus groups is because back when after Trump got elected, I was trying to figure out how we could primary him and get rid of him, beat him from the Republican side. Like in the early days of Trump, I was still trying to figure out how you saved the Republican party to some degree. And my first and not particularly good idea was that we were going to primary him with somebody like Larry Hogan or like an Adam Kinzinger or somebody like that. But everybody I talked to about it was all like, well, show me that I could win or show me that I get close or something right. So I started talking to voters and doing some polling, but a lot of listening to voters and I was immediately like, oh, you can't primary him. Voters wanted Trump. Republican voters wanted Trump and they want him more now than they did even back then. But but I realized at the time, there was a real like scales falling for my eyes moment when I was like, I have spent too much time talking about education policy. In fact, think tanks and like think, oh, you know, do we private, you know, charters and then, okay, this is not where the voters were. This is not what voters were talking about. And once I started listening to voters, I got very addicted. Voters are cheat code for political analysis. Like you want to you want to do good political analysis, listen to what voters are saying. And far too often, people in Washington are substituting their own judgment for what they think voters think, but they don't know because they don't listen to that many regular voters. They certainly don't do it in bulk. They're every so you see so many articles about like, I was at dinner with my brother-in-law. I think they use them as a focus group of one person. And it's like, okay, well, that's not enough information. And so I really did become addicted to this. Now I do, yeah, three or four focus groups a week with voters across the political spectrum. But I've really dedicated myself to trying to understand what's happening with the Republican Party. And so there's this big group of voters that back in 2016, when Trump won the primary, they were like, I'm out. Like they were immediately out. Like they vote. They were, I'm going to vote for Hillary Clinton. And that was sort of like your first wave of people that began what I would call what we've been an ongoing almost decade long political realignment. And that political realignment consists of some of those voters who immediately saw Donald Trump for what he is, and they moved to the Democratic Party at the same time a number of Democrats, right, especially I would say the sort of white working class voters, maybe union voters, they started to politically realign into the Republican Party because of Trump. And so you had people leaving because of Trump and people coming because of Trump. And in the first, so there's a first wave that goes out, and those are pretty vociferous. And I would say that both in 2016 and then in 2018 is where you get the rise of the resistance, right, to 2016 and 2018. And this is where you get almost like your Lincoln project voter. The people who are like, they're not just out, they're so mad about what they've seen out of Trump, right, which is totally justifiable, that they're in like sort of like burn it all down. I'm now an MSNBC resistance mom. I'm like, I may, I may like, what is it the zeal of a convert, right? They've got the zeal of converts. And they go immediately from, I've been a Republican my whole life to Pete Buttigieg, like not even Pete Buttigieg. And he's like two, it's like AOC is my goddess now, you know, and like that happens kind of early. And then there's a sort of a second wave that I would call as like a red dog Democrat, which are people who voted for Romney, they voted for McCain, they voted for George W. Bush, they're kind of standard issue, college educated suburban voters who voted on economic issues, but like kind of wanted the Republican Party to be a little more moderate on gay marriage and a few other things. This is like the next wave that gets driven out of the party. Meanwhile, the Republicans are collecting all the anti-factors, all of the like kind of cranks, like the cranks are all uniting and moving into the Republican Party with Trump. He now has RFK and Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah, that's right. All of whom, I don't know if you look at, there's this great unite poster out right now and it's Trump, RFK, Tulsi, Elon, and then J.D. Vance. And as far as I'm concerned, that is basically four Democrats and then a guy who really hates cat ladies who really hates them. There's like one Republican on that sheet, but it's interesting, this political realignment, the way that Trump has sort of pulled in a lot of former, again, sort of soft Democrats who were maybe so, they're socially not particularly conservative, but they like a big panoply, like just a menagerie of weird stuff. But the number one thing they do is they hate Democrats, particularly on sort of woke, what they would call woke cultural issues. And that's created just like a whole new thing in our politics, which I will just say as a personal, like a personal note, as opposed to just analysis, one of my biggest frustrations for people who stay in the Republican Party right now and argue for it, they say, "I got to vote for Trump because of his policies." And I'm sitting there going, what policies now? I've watched all these Republicans get on Kamala for these stupid price controls and no, we're not going to tax tips. I'm like, she's just copying Trump's bad economic policies. He's had non-conservative, except for tax cuts for rich people. It's the only economic policy that codes conservative. The rest of them are just protectionists, tariffs, all kinds of things that free market conservatives are supposed to be against. The war in Ukraine, right? We're supposed to be against Russian aggression. We're supposed to protect our Democratic allies, but Republicans, the Republican Party now super split on that, like 50/50 split. Half the party is deeply isolationist to the point of being pro-Putin in a lot of ways, because of the influence of Tucker Carlson and Vance and a bunch of other people. So I find it strange. They're kind of like huffing Reagan's fumes here, some of these guys, to make their arguments, because the fact is the MAGA GOP is no longer particularly conservative. And so just to go back to the voters, this continues to be true. We're sort of every cycle, a new generation of Republican voters who have been Republicans for a long time, sort of looks at the state of things and goes, "This no longer fits who I am." Like, political realignment takes a long time because voting is both tribal. It's generational. Well, my parents were Republicans, whatever. So it takes time for people to kind of move in the directions they're going. But you have seen this diaspora of Republican voters who just owe each cycle. Like in 2022, '22 was the moment that a bunch of people realized it wasn't just Trump. There was a period of time where voters were like, "Well, Trump's the problem. Republican Party's still fine." That's why you saw Trump get fewer in 2020. Trump underperformed down ballot Republicans. More voters voted for Republicans than voted for Donald Trump. But then in 2022, they're looking at Herschel Walker and Blake Masters and Harry Lake, and all of them are going, "What is this now? These are not normal people." And they're like, "I guess I'll vote for Mark Kelly. I guess I'll vote for Raphael Warnock." And once again, a bunch of these sort of marginal Republicans, soft Republicans went ahead and voted for Democrats. And a lot of it's stratified along education lines. Non-college white voters have been politically realigning much more into the Republican Party, where Democrats now dominate with college-educated suburban voters, many of whom had long-time been Republican voters, which is why Democrats are winning so many special elections. Because those old suburban college-educated voters, they show up and vote in special elections. And that's why you can get a 10-point win in Wisconsin right now on a Supreme Court fight, because you got Ben Wickler out there making sure the base is there. And then you've got all these new people who are part of the party who are very reliable voters. So one of the great terms that it seems to have been of the Biden era, the Biden campaign era, rather than the Harris era, was the term double-hater. The double-haters. So were double-haters never trumpers, or were they from some other part, like were they never trumpers who just didn't like Joe Biden, or were they Biden people who didn't like Trump, was it a mix? And are they gone? We don't hear about double-haters anymore. Yeah. So here's the thing about double-haters, which I talked about a lot, and I listened to a ton in the focus groups. They are not never trumpers. They're not never trumpers. And in fact, never trumpers, like I said, they're not so much voters. Like the voters are really defined. It's a very DC kind of term of art for people who were Republicans who are driven by their animus of Trump, which I'm happy to say it describes me perfectly. But the thing, the reason that they feel like they've gone away is because double-haters, they hated Trump, actually. They are voters who hated Trump. And they voted for Biden reluctantly. So they often were like center-ish voters. A lot of them voted for Trump in '16 and then Biden in '20. But then we're very unhappy with the job that Biden did. Number one, and number two, most importantly, the double-haters never hated Joe Biden. The double-haters thought Biden was too old to do the job. And the reason that I was somebody who really agitated for Joe Biden stepping down after the debate, frankly, before the debate, too, was because I'd been listening to voters for years talk about how little they wanted to vote for Joe Biden because they thought he was too old and how they were afraid every time he talked. They were afraid he was going to fall over. They were sure he wasn't going to live through his term. And so the term double-haters, which is one that I'm not even sure if I coined it or just used it all the time. But I talked about it constantly. But it was always a little bit of a weird descriptor because the hatred was really for Trump. And it was more like, they just didn't want to vote for Biden. And many of them were saying, I'm just going to sit it out. I think it's irresponsible to vote for somebody who is that old, who can't finish a term, who's not. And the thing was, for those, many of those people, their problem went away. The second Kamala Harris took over. They were like, you don't hear about them anymore because they were like, okay, I got what I needed. I'm here for Harris. Great. There remains, I think. And I think you'll hear more from these people because they tend to be the undecided voters who are still people who do not like Trump, but also art Democrats. And so every time they struggle with the having to vote affirmatively for Democrats. And that's just like a hill that they have to climb. And I think that Kamala Harris presents a challenge from a, these are sometimes like voters who are a little more plugged in. They're not as low info, which low info is a meaner term than it should be because low info just means people who are not like living and breathing politics or even paying a ton of attention, which is actually healthy. Go live your lives people. It's fine. Why do you listen to all these podcasts? You're just raising your blood pressure. But you know, I think for a lot of them are just like, I don't know. Do I like, do I want to vote for a Democrat? I'm not sure, but Trump sucks. And eventually they get there and they'll break for Harris, in my opinion. You know, it's interesting. You say pay less attention to politics. The fact that I know that there was a fight not long ago between Tom Nichols and a guy who writes under the Twitter handle baseball crank shows that I probably spend too much time too much. You shouldn't know who baseball crank is. It's bad for you. It's bad for me. So he is, I think he's an NRO, NRO writer, I can tell. But so, you know, 15 years ago, I felt like people were talking about soccer moms, security moms, okay, as like the swing voter. That seems to be less the case. Then, you know, we were talking about the double haters. Now it seems to be, and again, this is just based on the popular zeitgeist. You may say none of this has ever been true. Now there seems to be a lot of attention on gender divide, rather than suburb, city, or whatever that was, or even educational attainment, which was, you know, very much the zeitgeist of the 2016 and 2020 elections. Do you buy that? Do you buy that this is like now more gender driven than it has been? I mean, I still think it's pretty polarized along education. I think that that still matters. And in fact, some of the gender divide is informed by the fact that there are more women going to college. That's sort of baked in there a little bit. I will say, this is going to be, you're going to hear more and more about this being sort of a boys versus girls election. I think as we get deeper into this, I think that the fact that abortion is such a prominent issue, the fact that Kamala Harris, I think to the extent that she has basically gotten the Democrats back in the game in this election by building the base back, right, getting black women back engaged at like enormously high levels, like the people who are registering to vote, I mean, black women, the numbers are just going through the roof. She's bringing young people back. But, you know, I think where she's going to make interesting headway, the thing people are going to see is that she's going to start doing better with white working class women, many of whom who have voted for Trump. But this is both because of abortion, and I think the more that she focuses. So this is a, one of the reasons that Biden had started to sort of underperform a little bit with women is that their primary shoppers often super price sensitive. And I think we were just starting to see like a real frustration from that set of voters with Biden. And one of the tricks that Kamala Harris seems to be pulling off so far is not owning the anger that voters have felt that Joe Biden over the economy. She seems to be getting a fresh look from people. And that's going to allow her, I think, to do what she's doing, which is to make a pitch for middle class voters to talk about their economic issues in a way where I think that she will find that she does well and better and increasingly well among women in general, college educated women, but increasingly non college white women that are a big voting block that the Republicans have been kind of able to hold on to. And I think that that's the space where Kamala Harris has the best chance to sort of get the edge in this race. OK, so I have to say, I have been surprised. It was not surprising to me that Dobbs energized the left and was a strong issue for Democrats in the midterm elections. That didn't surprise me. I don't think it surprised many people. It has surprised me that here we are just a little more than two months before the presidential election. And the Republican Party seems no more equipped to deal with this issue. In fact, in some ways it is more of a hash now because Donald Trump frankly keeps saying things that seem at odds with other things he says and at odds with other parts of his coalition. Talk to me about whether you think the abortion issue is as clearly a one-sided win for Democrats versus Republicans and be what the Republicans, you know, I grew up at a time where the abortion issue was an organizing issue for Republicans. Like, what is going on there? Well, so a couple of things. One, look, there's a Faustian bargain that the pro-life movement made with Donald Trump. And to the point where they have so many sunk costs that even now is Donald Trump sort of tries to backpedal away from the abortion, his own abortion record by appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe by saying he was going to appoint people who were going to, like claiming that he, like claiming them and claiming that he was happy that Roe got overturned. He's not talking like that right now because it's become poison as an electoral issue. One of Donald Trump's strengths that I don't think people are always quite grok is that people read him as a social moderate and especially on abortion. Voters think that he's paid for a bunch of abortions. Like, you know, when you listen to voters and focus groups and they're like, that guy's not pro, that guy's not pro-life. Like, there's no, no way. And he's the one who sleeps with porn stars and I'm sure he's, they will just say it in groups. I'm sure he's paid for an abortion. So when they, that his being moderate on, like, gay rights and on abortion, it's an enormous help to him. And so he just made a bargain with evangelicals where they kind of gave him a pass on some of this stuff and they continue to give him a pass in a way that they don't for their, and then, but voters. So voters, they think the Republican Party is really bad on abortion. They thought that the candidates in 2022 were very bad on abortion. And abortion is actually, it is that all voters understand the abortion issue. It's not a complicated one, like so many other things. Everybody gets it. And so it can be the pathway into understanding how extreme a candidate is. And so for Blake Masters and Carrie Lake and a bunch of them, it was how voters, they would say, they would always kind of speak about 22. They'd be like, well, you know, Blake Masters is like, he's crazy on abortion and he's like, says the election was stolen and he thinks the Unibomber is good. You know, and they were like, guys, just a weirdo. Like, and that's how they would just decide this person was too extreme to vote for. Trump's superpower is that voters think he is more moderate than a lot of like, they don't think he's like Mark Robinson. Like I'll talk in North Carolina, Mark Robinson is the insane candidate, gubernatorial candidate, who's like, said really anti-Semitic things, said crazy things about women is super pro-life. But there's plenty of voters who are like, I'm not all vote for the Democrat over Mark Robinson, but Trump's still fine, right? And that is real where people view Trump as more moderate on these issues and therefore think he's okay. That being said, for abortion to be a potent issue, as it was in 2022, you have to keep it high salience. When you talk to a group of voters and you say, what are you thinking about? Like, what matters to you in this election? They say the economy, they say the border, they say inflation, maybe they say crime. Very seldom do people say abortion, especially swing voters. But the second you bring it up, you introduce it. The tone totally changes that group, especially with women and people will tell stories about people that they know. They'll tell their own stories, they'll get intensely personal. If it's a group of all women, they will all tell their stories, they will support each other. And this is just one of these issues where pro people, and I laughed the first time I heard this, but so many people in the group say, well, I'm pro life, but I believe in a woman's right to choose. And you're like, well, it's not a thing. And then you realize that what they mean is they personally are pro life, but they were happy with women getting to make their own medical decisions. They did not want this right taken away. They didn't like it, which is why these referenda, whenever they are in a state, they overwhelmingly pass with a lot of Republican support, because the fact is the majority of the Republican party are not die hard, sort of no exceptions, pro lifers. That's actually a much smaller part of the population. So I think that it can be a potent issue, but for it to be a potent issue, Democrats have to prosecute the case effectively against Trump. They got to hang the judges who took Roe v, who repealed Roe v Wade, they got to hang it all over Trump. They can't let him get away with just kind of his vibe stuff. Because if he does, voters will just on their own sort of continue to interpret him exclusively as somebody who is not as extreme as say, I'm like Johnson, Mike Pence, or anybody else. So I was really struck at the convention that you had a former representative, Adam Kinzing, or former Georgia lieutenant governor, Jeff Duncan, the mayor of Mesa, Arizona, former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grissom, all speak at the convention. And I want to set aside what that says about Democrats, because that I know when I think our audience is mostly Democrats, so they can interpret that. But how surreal is it for them? Some of them, you know, Adam Kinzing are seem very comfortable. He's a member of Congress. He's given a lot of big speeches. I suspect he was the most comfortable just with the podium. I thought that the mayor of Mesa seemed, Mesa not to really know what to expect, whether he was going to get applauded or booed. Like, you are someone who has made this jump. And here you are on a podcast with, you know, one of the most viewed as on the right is one of the most partisan lawyers there is, like, how surreal is this for those of you who are Republicans to be in settings in which you have Democrats saying all these nice things about you? Yeah, I mean, look, I try not to, first of all, Democrats say plenty of mean things because every time we go off, you know, when I was like, Biden has to step step down. Everybody's like, you're an undercover long game mega freak. And I was like, okay, well, I'm not. But so like, whatever, you, I think you can't, I think people who get swept up in being either lionized by a politic by the, because they've, they are trying to beat them. I think that's a mistake. I think you end up with audience capture and what you don't want to do is lose your ability to just say what you think is true. That's, and so I try to do that both in terms of how I feel about Donald Trump in this moment, but also sometimes my personal analysis listening to voters doesn't even square with what I want to happen. And like, I still have to be honest about my analysis and those, but I didn't want Donald Trump to win the Republican primary, but it became abundantly clear to me he was going to listen to that. And I had to say that to people Trump's going to win because here's what's going on with the Republican party. They want this guy. It's a mega cult now guys. Anyway, I think for Adam and for some of the other folks, yeah, they're not quite sure what to expect. But the thing to understand about the people who are the best at this, who are doing it for sort of the, I think, the purest reasons are people like Adam, who basically say, you know, I wish I hadn't stayed in as long as I did, which I hadn't held on as long as I did. And I'm going to do whatever it takes to help build the permission structure for other people to see how dangerous this is. I know that my voice carries extra weight with some of these center right voters. And I want to say what I believe to be true. And I'm not, you know, and part of it is, I think it's so weird. When you just, the thing you just said, why shouldn't we be able to sit down and have a conversation? Like, we've decided that like, we're just both Americans, right, who care about things. We can fight you and I, we've met each other in person. We've had it. We've had some back and forths about things we don't completely agree on. So what? Like, I think it's strange the way that we've decided that the way our politics operates is that we sit in these silos and don't talk to people who disagree with us. I'll talk to just about anybody who wants to talk in good faith. And I'm happy to disagree. And we should be able to do that. I think that part of what's gone wrong. I don't know, man. So many things have gone gone wrong. But like, I want to be able to sit down and have that conversation with Rich Lowery and with Steve, you know, like, I just, I think that we should be able to sort of really examine this moment in our politics because it's not a normal one, right? And the other thing, the reason those Republicans are speaking at the convention is because they feel like they have to, right? Like, I think, and when they get criticized, people criticize them being like, Oh, look at your plum gig, you know, like, whatever, you think you want to think that these Republicans want to go stand up in front of a rabid crowd of base Democrats? Like, they don't know what they're going to be met with. That Messa, I don't know, Mesa, Arizona, he could have been booed. And so, look, I don't think it should be surreal. And I think that, but I also think people in our position shouldn't get it twisted that like, uh, we all agree with everything. Like, we're not partisan Democrats. Uh, and so, you know, we should just, we should be in a position to say what's true, do the work, and hopefully, uh, try to find ways to rebuild our way out of this sort of hyper partisan polarized moment and, and past Trump, back to a place where we can like be productive about how this country is going to move forward. You know, it's funny. I had, you mentioned now, twice, um, the, uh, you know, the, the complicated situation that you find yourself in when you are giving an honest analysis and the left decides they don't like the honest analysis. I think you used the example of Biden. And you also mentioned earlier that the zeal of the converted my experience, frankly, uh, was a little different than yours. Um, and maybe it's because of my position as someone who is clearly identified as a Democrat and within the Democratic party. Um, I actually found more of the vitriol actually coming from the zeal of the converted. Like the, it was, you know, I think that most Democrats understood the, the, the benefits of president Biden running, the downsides of president Biden running. I think there was a lot of nuanced, you know, opinion about it and conflicted views on it. Um, and a lot of the people who I saw attacking, for example, Tim, um, uh, you know, who, uh, uh, you know, I think wrote something about it. Um, uh, I saw as much coming from the kind of the, the never Trump, the, that first group of the never Trumpers, then I did the lifelong Democrats. You know what? I think you're right about that actually. Um, or I don't know about more because I think it's hard to tell on Twitter because everything is just like coming at you or whatever. And there was a fair number of sort of, I think democratic influencers that were coming hard, uh, at, at people who were saying Biden should step aside. Uh, but they're also, you're right. No, some of the first wave of people who were like, Biden can absolutely not step down were some of the first wave never Trumpers. No, you're, you're right about that. Uh, that's true. I'd sort of forgotten about that dynamic, but it's very real. Yeah. Um, I want to ask you about one person in particular, uh, who I referenced earlier. Um, I find, uh, Liz Cheney's decisions to be among the most, um, unusual of any politician I have ever observed. And I've been doing politics for 30 years. Um, I don't agree. Like I said, I don't think Liz Cheney and I probably agree on a single issue. She is, as far as I can tell, a very, very committed conservative. But here is someone who was the number two or the number three member of the house. Uh, uh, I think she was number three. Yeah. I mean, literally she could have been the next speaker. I mean, if she had, if she had played, if she had played politics rather than principles in light of what happened, uh, to McCarthy, she very well could be speaker right now. And yet she was willing to buck not her leadership because she was in leadership. She was literally willing to buck her constituents, which are the house members, uh, of the caucus, as well as her own, uh, electoral constituents and, um, was able to, you know, was willing to do that and ultimately lost her position in house leadership and lost her, her race. And, um, I'm curious if you think I am right to see a gap between her and some of the others who are now retired or, or, or suffer less consequences or whether you think I am drawing a, a distinction that is actually not a meaning for a helpful one. You know, uh, I think that if you want to just draw a distinction, I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. The distinction that I would make is just how, um, important Liz's voice has been, uh, not just because of what it seems like she gave up. Uh, but I think also, I don't know, I think there's something about the fact that she comes from a, the, the patrimony of the chinese, uh, like, and also just, I mean, the way that she comports herself, uh, is, is something a little bit special, uh, a little bit aside. Uh, the fact that, yeah, she just had a big name and a big apparatus and a bright political future on the right. And she is so self-evidently correct. And she's so good at expressing it, um, that I think she has distinguished herself, uh, just as a person able to articulate why this matters so much. Um, and I think that, I think the mistake that the, and you and I've sort of had this conversation is when you, I, I don't think there's any reason to sort of denigrate the sacrifices or to see as less than the sacrifices that many other people who have had to walk away, uh, or who have lost their positions for speaking up. Um, I think I can agree that Liz is singular in what she's done, but look, there are gradations in here about levels of bravery. Some people just like walked away and like, put their heads down and we never, they went to run a college. Uh, and we've never heard from them again. Uh, but I, I think that for the people who speak up, every person who speaks up is important. Adam, for example, like, I wish Democrats hadn't read hadn't redrawn the lines to draw him out of his seat. Uh, because I think Adam would have remained an effective member of Congress. I mean, there's, the fact is every person who has spoken up against Trump, one of the reasons that the party is so different today that it was back when I was started being never Trump in 2016, whole party is different because they've run out. They've either forced out or voted out every decent member. Carlos Curbello, like all the will heard. These people were all rising stars in the Republican party. Elise Stefanik before she had this weird brain transplant, uh, that she's had where she was injected with mega dial all through her brain. She used to be a super moderate main street Republican. Um, and those people, they're all gone. They're all gone. And with Mitt Romney leaving, like, unless Larry Hogan gets elected, which I think is very unlikely, like, it's pretty much game over for the people that you looked at to have sort of a moderate pro democracy, uh, Republican party. It's just gone. Yeah. Um, you and I have talked about this, um, before, I, I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals who spoke at the convention. Um, and that's not to say only the people who spoke at the convention because there are people who probably would have spoken at the convention, but, but, you know, weren't asked, but, you know, for an Adam Kinzinger to take the stage before a bunch of Democrats, um, and get, uh, get, um, uh, uh, pluses is, is, you know, is, is in some ways both a opportunity, but it's also a sacrifice. You know, he, he has done something now that, you know, in, within the Republican party, is probably seen as a further step beyond, uh, you know, what he, what he did when he was talking to his own party, uh, the same with the former lieutenant governor, um, and, uh, the mayor who we keep, uh, mentioning, and, and also I want to sing a letter. And making it clear neither of us know how to pronounce the name of that statement. I think it's Mesa, Arizona, but, and Stephanie, and Stephanie Gerson and the other, uh, staffers in the White House who, who came forward, you know, they, you know, these staffers don't have the guarantees that members of Congress have or that, you know, former elected even have, you know, and, and so there have been a lot of people who have, who have, who have shown real courage here. And I, and I agree with you. I, I think, you know, I do have sort of a, a sense of maybe that is informed from being in Washington, D.C. based on what people have given up. Um, and maybe that's not the right matrix. Yeah. Well, also, I'll just say anybody who stands up against Trump vocally, you are getting death threats constantly. Like you got people in your phone and in your email and in your Twitter, like, and they're just after you all the time and it is vicious and it gets a little scary. And so like, there's a reason, you know, a lot of times back when, um, you'd, you'd hear sort of people wouldn't necessarily go on the record. But one of the things you'd hear about why people didn't want to, so this was in Mitt Romney's book. Like, why didn't people want to speak up or vote for, um, conviction or impeachment of Trump and people would say things like, why have you on kids? Right. And like, what they're saying is that like, it's actually a dangerous proposition. Like, why did Lindsey Graham turn around after his, because he got screamed at in public at an airport because people come up to him. Uh, you know, it gets scary to be out there against Trump. And so I just, I think when people do it, the vast, vast majority have taken the incentives to get on the Trump train and they've just lived with it. And so I have respect for absolutely everybody who doesn't do that. Okay. So you at the beginning of our, of our chat, you were describing the differences between the different waves or the different factions maybe within the, the, um, the Never Trump Republican Party. And, and in part, they seem to be about what the future of the Republican Party is. And so let me ask you this as a Democrat who, you know, believes in the two party system and believes that you need that for democracy to succeed and for it to survive, we cannot have a system in which only one party can win elections. We actually need a two party system in which both parties can win elections and, you know, you have a, a peaceful transfer of power and normal, uh, and, and normal governance, uh, within, you know, liberal Democratic norms. And by the way, liberal, I don't mean for those people listening. I don't mean left to center. I mean, like freedom of speech, freedom of expression, you know, rule of law, those kinds of, those kinds of norms. So as someone who is a Democrat and looks out at this party, I just, I, I'm sometimes in despair because like, what is the case for the non burn them down, right? Like, what is the case for the, like, reform it or go back to it or whatever you were describing as the alternatives? Like, what, what, what does the case look like for a normal Republican party? Yeah. So I have a couple of things to say this. The first is, I think you should burn it all down if you can, um, in terms of like what this dangerous MAGA movement, uh, has done to the Republican party. However, I think it's important for people to be clear about something because it will save you time in your life, which is the Republican party is never going back to what it was when Mitt Romney or John McCain or George W. Bush was the standard bearer. It's just not the party anymore. The voters don't want it. And the fact is the 10 years in which Trump has been on the scene, everybody who has joined the Republican party, there's a reason that in young voters, uh, who like Trump, they came to the Republican party for Trump. They don't even understand what Nikki Haley is doing there. Um, right? Because she is not, she's anathema to what they're interested in in the Republican party. And so do not think that when you say, hey, we're going to have two healthier or two responsible political parties, that it means going back to the party that you think of under Reagan from the eighties and nineties. That's not happening. I think the question is, is that is there a way to end the sort of performative proto authoritarian maga movement, uh, and turn and have it manifest into something that, uh, maybe you don't like or I don't like from a policy standpoint, but like doesn't try to overturn elections, right? Uh, or doesn't try, like, isn't, uh, isn't sort of dangerous in a, in a variety of ways, isn't steeped in lies, maybe actually has a policy agenda. There is a vision among some Republicans that is a multiracial working class coalition that they view as the future of the Republican party, that is anti wall street, uh, that is much more focused on working class voters, um, that does fight that is, uh, more isolationist, right? America doesn't get involved in foreign conflicts. That's isolation in the sense that we don't want immigrants coming here. Uh, that is like that, that's why it's like fair that that's sort of America first, right? It's like, we're going to make stuff here. We're not going to have a lot of immigrants coming here. Uh, and because, you know, immigration causes downward pressure on wages, we're going to try to attract more black people. Uh, and we're in, and more Hispanics and we're going to have this multiracial working class coalition, uh, and assuming that that party, now there's a bunch of stuff in their tariffs and price controls and all kinds of things that I don't like about it, let's say. But as long as it abysed by elections and doesn't sort of threaten violence and to suspend the constitution against its political enemies, like there's a world where that's like, oh, okay, this is the other party. Um, and like maybe we, maybe we get there. The problem is, is that, the appetite for the performative part of it, I just see out of Republican voters, especially, I knew, I knew that DeSantis was cooked when I started to hear so many Republican voters say he sounds like a regular politician and like there's basically nothing worse that a voter can say than like the person sounds like a regular politician because what they want is they're like, I want a combination of like JD Vance, but then Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and just like mush them all together so I can have, you know, because I really want them to fight and I want them to be angry and I never want them to compromise. And actually, and I'll, I'll do this last point too, that to me has become sort of a central thing that I now understand about voters, which is, and it's something that we have to rebuild with voters, which is, voters have decided that they don't like the act of compromise, right? They don't like the idea of working with the other party, reaching across the aisle. Those used to be virtues of a politician and they aren't anymore. And as a result, if you want a policy outcome, but you don't want the mechanism for that outcome to exist, which is compromise between the two parties, then what you have are voters reaching for a strong man to say, I alone can fix it, right? And so we have to rebuild in the American public a sense that what they, the project that we're engaged in is one in which you have two parties that do compromise with each other and do work together to solve problems, not just decide that whatever the other party wants to do is bad or intractable, because that's how nothing gets done and we get caught in this vortex that we're in. So, you know, I am somewhat not stunned, but taken aback by your answer, because I assumed that the alternative to where we are now is essentially the autopsy report, you know, which I play for people who don't know after 2012, there was an, the RNC famously did an autopsy that said we need to be more inclusive on issues like immigration and reaching out to women and other. And it sounds like that is not where you see the future. The, the back, what I would hope would be a backlash to Trump within the Republican party. You're saying there actually isn't a backlash coming. No, I think, I think the backlash exists. I just think that it is in, it looks like Abigail Spanberg, and it looks like Alyssa Slotkin, and it looks like Westmore, and it looks like Rafael Warnock, and it looks like, you know, Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro and all of the other Democrats that were able to win in purplish and reddish places as a result of Trump and Trumpy candidates that Democrats figured how to beat. They figured out how to beat them. And now they've got an incredible bench of more pragmatic. I'm not even going to say centrist. I'm not going to say just center left, but pragmatic politicians with big futures that I think can build a bigger tent and deliver those sustained electoral defeats that I was talking about that forces the Republican party to have to figure out how to compete better. And that's one of the reasons why I think it is essential that Donald Trump gets beaten now because you never will create the incentive structure for the Republican party to change how it is currently constituted if it wins elections. All right. So my last question to you is the almost certainly the overwhelming majority of people who are watching this and listening to this are Democrats. They are worried about the outcome of the election. They are terrified that Donald Trump could win, and they want to know what can they do, right? So what is it that if you could tell Democrats, whether it is Democratic elites or Democratic voters, Democratic politicians, Democratic activists, what can they do to frankly make your job easier to make the job of Republicans against Trump job easier to make the videos that you put out with former Republicans? Like, what are the things that Democrats are doing that is making your job harder? What are the things we could do to make your job easier? Yeah, I mean, look, some of this comes down to, like, who are you trying to reach? So I am trying to help Kamala Harris win over a lot of these white suburban voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska, to Arizona. And look, the number one advice that I have for Democrats, overall, it's just like be normal, guys. Be cool. Be cool. Don't make any crazy moves right now. I think Kamala Harris, and so a lot of it is just like, give her the room. She's doing it exactly right right now. She's going on offense on immigration and saying, Donald Trump blew up this compromise that we had. It is, you know, it is her saying, nope, fracking, okay, we're not doing Medicare for all. Give her the room to pivot to the center, because not only, in my opinion, is that better policy, but it is going to help her win. And look, she gave the left something by picking walls and not Shapiro. I think she should have picked Shapiro. I think she should have locked up Pennsylvania, but she didn't want to reopen this wound among Democrats over Gaza and Israel. And one of the reasons I think she's been so successful is because it's such a short sprint. The activist groups aren't able to get their hands on her. The intense Democratic activist groups, once they get their hands on these politicians, they put them in places that are totally untenable to win over these center voters. And I think that if people give her the space to run, she needs to run to win Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that's what you can do to make sure she wins this election and to make my job easier. Sarah Longwell, you are an absolute genius when it comes to politics. And you are one of the nicest people in politics on either side of the aisle. And I am sorry to ruin your reputation that way. But for someone who has been involved in Republican politics and been working hard to fight against Donald Trump, you are a happy warrior and you are an absolute joy to talk to. So thank you for being here. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us to stay up to date on the latest voting rights and democracy news. Subscribe to Democracy Doc. It's free daily and weekly newsletters. We'll see you next time. Defending democracy is a production of Democracy Doc at LLC. [Music]