The Republicans who'd prefer Joe Biden are out in full force — and it looks like they might swing the election

'One of the things that we found is most persuasive is seeing a bunch of other people that seemed just like them with the same anxieties, saying: ‘And that's why I'm going to vote for a Democrat for the first time in my life’'

Over the past few weeks, eagle-eyed cable television news viewers in Washington, DC may have found themselves wondering whether the nation’s capital — a city that has delivered its electoral votes to Republicans exactly zero times in the 14 elections since residents were given a vote for president — was suddenly, inexplicably, in play this November.

The clue? A steady drumbeat of advertisements from the president’s reelection campaign, touting the beginning of “the great American comeback,” and describing Donald Trump as “a bull in a china shop” (a metaphor generally reserved for something that does far more harm than good, for the record).

The endless stream of 30-second spots has continued unabated over the past two weeks, even as countless Americans of all races, creeds, and socioeconomic stations have packed the streets of Washington and its surrounding suburbs to decry a policing system that uses force with impunity, and to declare unequivocally what should be so obvious as to be unsaid: Black Lives Matter.

According to The Daily Beast, the Trump campaign is running ads in a solidly Democratic area not to persuade persuadable voters, but to buck up the spirits of pessimistic politicians — with Trump foremost among them — after a little rock of an ad slung by a dissident Republican group called The Lincoln Project landed squarely between the eyes of their modern-day Goliath, the President of the United States.

Last month, The Lincoln Project’s “Mourning in America” ad — a lovingly ripped-off and inverted take on the iconic Reagan-era “Morning in America” spot, became a viral sensation that garnered the sort of earned media attention most campaigns dream of. But it also incensed the President to such a degree that he used his Twitter feed to fire back at several of the group’s founders, including ex-John Kasich consultant John Weaver, Everything Trump Touches Dies author Rick Wilson, and attorney George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne Conway.

But unlike the myriad GOP figures who live in fear of Trump’s itchy Twitter finger, they’re not afraid of some mean tweets.

“Every day that the president, because his lizard brain reacts this way, is attacking me or Steve Schmidt or the Lincoln Project, is a day or time that he's not attacking Joe Biden,” said Weaver, who explained that ads like “Mourning in America” are part of the group’s “opening statement” in what will be a months-long trial of President Trump.

And the “jury pool” targeted by the group is a wide cross-section of Republican-leaning voters, ranging from the college-educated white men and women who once made up the GOP’s backbone, to the non-college-educated white men who now constitute the most reliable members of the Trump base.

Their methods, he explained, are tried and true, honed over years of delivering drubbing after drubbing to Democrats at the ballot box.

“They [different demographics] go to different sources [for media], so you have to be nuanced in those aspects, but this is the type of approach that Republicans have responded to when Republicans are attacking Democrats,” he said.

But The Lincoln Project isn’t the only ship-of-the-line in what has become a highly effective force of privateers targeting the Trumpist fleet with varying techniques.

Republican Voters Against Trump is a project of Defending Democracy Together, a 501(c)(4) advocacy group founded by a group of ex-GOP operatives, politicians, and media figures who once constituted the upper crust of the Republican establishment, including Christine Todd Whitman, the ex-New Jersey governor and George W Bush-era EPA boss; Linda Chavez, once the highest ranking woman in the Reagan White House; former New Hampshire GOP Chair Jennifer Horn; and Sarah Longwell, a longtime GOP consultant and former national board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans.

While The Lincoln Project seeks to mobilize persuadable GOP-leaning voters (and take up space in Trump’s head) with the sort of unsparing, hard-hitting ads once feared by Democrats, RVAT is doing the hard work of persuasion with a peer-to-peer campaign featuring ex-Trump voters and ex-Republicans who speak directly to their former allies.

Longwell, the group’s spokesperson, said the approach her group is taking is one they’ve honed over two years of research, during which they’ve conducted countless focus groups to see what works and what doesn’t.

“People don’t trust the media and they don’t have any belief in Washington, so who do they trust? They trust people like them,” she said. “The real stories from other Republican voters who speak to their anxieties and their concerns, when we show them in focus groups… the people in the groups will often say things like, ‘That guy is my spirit animal’”.

“They hear what those people are saying, and they see themselves in them. And that creates the kind of permission structure that is necessary for people who have always considered themselves Republicans to cast what is for them a very difficult vote,” Longwell continued. “One of the things that we found is most persuasive is seeing a bunch of other people that seemed just like them with the same anxieties, saying: ‘And that's why I'm going to vote for a Democrat for the first time in my life’”.

Trump campaign officials did not respond to a request for comment on whether their own internal polling has found that anti-Trump GOP groups like RVAT or The Lincoln Project have had any effect on the president’s standing with Republican voters.

But James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist and a longtime observer of American presidential politics, said the groups’ impact on the 2020 race has so far been “significant,” and said Democrats could learn a thing or two from them when crafting their attacks on Trump.

“Democratic political culture is different from Republican political culture in that they don’t have all these endless meetings and go ‘let’s hear from 20 people’ [before putting out an attack ad],’” he said. “But these guys, they just go — they know how to pull a trick, and they’re motivated because if Trump wins, they have nowhere to go. If we lose an election and I’m a Democratic consultant, I’m still in good standing with the Democratic Party, but they don’t have a plan B because they’re playing to win.”

Asked why he thought his group’s ads were resonating with voters, Weaver had a different explanation: “There’s science and there’s art to politics, and the Democrats have become more science-based and less emotive-based. We’re very emotive, and in these days where there is so much information and disinformation… you have to use the power of emotion to cut through, and that's entirely what we focus on.”

While the Biden campaign is legally prohibited from coordinating with outside groups, Carville said the ads being produced by The Lincoln Project are so effective that the Biden campaign should let them continue hammering at the president and avoid wasting resources on a duplicative effort.

Biden’s team should be more like a general contractor instead of running a centralized command-and-control model, he explained.

“Obviously, you can't coordinate with the never-Trumpers, but you’re aware that they’re running these negative spots… so that's something that you don't necessarily have to replicate every time. There's so much that is going on with the anti-Trump groups that a good part of the Biden campaign negative ads has just been outsourced,” he said.

According to Carville, one way they’ve been so effective is by helping to drive down the number of voters who identify with the Republican Party.

“People will look [at polling] and they'll say 90 percent of Republicans back Trump and 90 percent of the Democrats back Biden. But the number of Democratic self-identifiers at this moment, according to the best public poll put out, is 45 [percent of Americans]. The number of Republican self-identifiers at this moment, according to the best public poll put out is 33 [percent]. Well, 90 of 45 is a lot f**king more people than 90 of 33,” he said. “If you move people from lean Republican to lean Democrat or even to independent, or you move at an independent to lean Democrat, you've affected a lot.”

But to make such shifts into a lasting defeat for both Trump and his governing philosophy, Carville said Republicans’ defeat in 2020 must be so resounding that not only should the “tree” of Trumpism be chopped down, but the stump and roots pulled out and the earth salted so it cannot grow within the GOP again.

And because Weaver and his compatriots are of a similar mindset, they may be on Democrats’ side for the long haul. For them, the fight will last long after Trump is defeated.

“Getting rid of Trump is not gonna get rid of Trumpism, because we see Nikki Haley, and Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley, and Mike Pence, and all these other Trump wannabes doing all they can to get in line for the nomination in 2024, and in 2022 you have governors who’ve hitched their wagons to Trump like Ron DeSantis, and Greg Abbot, and that knucklehead in Mississippi [Tate Reeves],” he said, adding that there will still be a need to defeat “mini-Trumps” after Trump has left the White House.

“It's like a scene from Night of the Living Dead — even if you get rid of the main zombie, you're still going to have all these other zombies that we're going to be on the hook for, so we're not going anywhere.”