The GOP has left Never Trumpers. Will Never Trumpers leave the GOP?

The last vestige of Nikki Haley’s role as a Republican alternative to Donald Trump has now vanished along with her self-esteem. On Tuesday, she released her delegates and encouraged them to support Trump, whom she recently called “diminished” and “unhinged.” But where does that leave Republicans in state after state who gave their votes to Haley or other candidates as a protest against their party’s embrace of Trump?

Some Never Trump Republicans appear serious about refusing to vote for a man they see as a threat to the viability of the GOP and the stability of the nation. That includes former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan who said in May that Trump had “disqualified himself through his conduct and character,” and urged Republicans to vote for a Biden as the first step in rebuilding a post-Trump Republican Party. 

Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who voted for Trump in 2020, followed suit in June, calling Trump “a direct threat to every fundamental American value” and insisting that he was voting for Biden to “protect the very thing that makes America the best country in the world: our democracy.”

But the biggest thing Kinzinger and Duncan have in common is that first word in their titles: “former.” Again and again, Republican politicians have found that opposing Trump is a ticket to a swift departure from a party now defined by loyalty to one man. Republicans who once sneered at Trump have become some of his most sycophantic supporters.

The voters who went with Haley in the Republican presidential primary could easily make the difference in November. But where will they go now?

To find a similar bottleneck for any political party—when the fundamentals of what it means to be a member of that group changed so radically—requires going back decades to when the last of the liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” were driven from GOP ranks. There’s no doubt some of those Republicans simply switched to the Democratic Party as the GOP became more socially conservative during the civil rights era. But for every Republican Sen. Wayne Morse shifting one way, there was a Democratic Sen. Strom Thurmond headed the other as the Republican Party employed the “Southern strategy,” leveraging racist attacks as a means to peel away white rural voters. 

The last time a senator crossed the party divide was in 2009, when Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter moved to the Democratic Party after decades of conservative criticism for his moderate voting record.

The Democratic Party has long represented a more diverse—in every definition of that term—coalition of interests and a broader range of positions. “Conservative Democrat” is still a fairly common thing. “Liberal Republican” is not. 

That diversity of opinion and composition is why it’s easy for the media to find a “Democrats in disarray” story. Democrats don’t put thumbscrews on every candidate and make them all swear to a strict set of beliefs. There is no groveling contest over which lawmaker is the most loyal to President Joe Biden—which is obvious from the statements many Democratic politicians have made since the presidential debate.

On the other hand, the Republican Party might best be described by primary races where the main issue candidates are emphasizing is which of them loves Trump the most. A great majority of elected Republicans, as well as those seeking office, have followed the path of Sens. Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham, accepting any level of humiliation in exchange for what they see as an increased chance of victory through association with Trump.

And they may be right. The current calculus suggests that Republican candidates need to be pro-Trump to win a primary. That doesn’t mean Trump’s endorsement is by any means infallible. It’s not. But supporting Trump is part of the toll that must be paid to be a viable Republican candidate in 2024.

Even if a Republican politician wanted to become a Democrat, the philosophical divide between the parties is much higher than it’s been in the past. That’s largely because Republicans have shifted hard to the right. As the Pew Research Center put it in a 2022 study, “Democrats on average have become somewhat more liberal, while Republicans on average have become much more conservative.” A Republican wanting to switch now would find themselves having to make a much greater leap just to reach the rightmost edge of the Democratic Party.

However, the calculus for Republican voters isn’t the same as that of Republicans seeking office. Voters can jump the party boundary with the pull of a lever, so long as they’re convinced that the person at the top of the Democratic ticket represents a better immediate choice. That happened in 2020, and the large protest votes for Haley in multiple states suggest it could happen again. In fact, with Haley’s primary campaign having captured large numbers of voters even in very red states, there’s a big opening to go after Republicans who find Democratic positions a lot less scary than Trump.

As Politico noted in May, there are more than enough Haley voters to make a huge difference in the outcome, especially in one particular demographic.

The warning signs for Trump are striking because of the geography of where those voters live: suburbs, the place Trump warned in 2020 were under threat in a Biden presidency, are still getting bluer. The latest example came this week in barn-red Indiana’s primary, where Haley’s zombie campaign won 22 percent overall. The numbers were even higher in the suburban donut counties like Hamilton, the wealthy Indianapolis suburb of gated communities with manicured lawns, where Haley won 34 percent of the vote.

When a party tightens its political grip, some voters will escape. The Republican Party’s abandonment of all principles except support for Trump isn’t just a massive shift—it’s an invitation for realignment.

If that realignment ends up seeing more suburban voters fleeing the party, Democrats should be ready to take in these red refugees.