Republican Voters Against Trump

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Sarah Longwell, you know right now it’s meant to be all hands-on deck and all Republicans trying to — I guess in any normal cycle it would be — all party members trying to get their president elected, getting all excited about the convention and the rest. And it looks to be very much the opposite. Even the conventions, you know, big names are sort of dropping out, you know, very, very rapidly. How did you come to this point where you’ve actually got a whole organization of Republicans against a Republican president?

SARAH LONGWELL, CO-FOUNDER, REPUBLICAN VOTERS AGAINST TRUMP: Well, you know, I’ve been out on the president since the moment he came down the escalator. And ever since he was elected, I’ve been thinking about how do you defeat this most unfit president? And I wondered, as a lot of Republicans did, what made Republicans vote for him? And so, for the last three years, I’ve been doing focus groups with what I would call sort of reluctant Trump voters, soft Trump supporters as I think about what we do with the party going forward, and has it been totally hijacked by this sort of nationalist, populist president. And as things went on, and as you just saw him, you know, capture the party more and more, you also saw another thing happen, which was the party got smaller, right?

In 2018, we saw a number of especially suburban women walk away from the party and vote for Democrats that led them to flip 40 House seats. And as I looked toward 2020 in the research, I really thought, well, what is most persuasive? What would cause people to walk away from Donald Trump? And the answer was real stories from people like them. There is a real permission structure aspect or a social warming prospect to the way people think about Trump and even about politics. You know, it’s very tribal. And so, when Republican voters who right now are as demoralized as they could possibly be because we are sitting, you know, not at a place where there is a rock solid economy but instead double-digit unemployment, a health crisis that is not being managed, a racial crisis that the president is pouring gasoline on. And so, we went and found all of these people who may have voted for Trump in 2016 but were saying, I’m not going to vote for him again in 2020. And we encouraged them to tell those stories and then we’re going to show them to other people, because there is — and really, this category of soft Trump supporters, because we’re finding there are so many people in this moment who, even though they were with the president for a long time, are starting to rethink things.