The Never Trump Club: Who Are They, and How Many of Them Are There Really?

All, I have a couple of threads I am going to pull on. These will be more serious posts than I usually send out, because I think they are important topics. The first will be four parts on the Never Trump ecosystem who thinks they are the truth-tellers and the inheritors of America, entitled to dictate to Democrats how to move forward.

Following that will be a sober assessment of what comes next, and the stark reality. I will try to post these over the next two weeks. I would appreciate your thoughts either in the comments, or you can always replay to this email and let me know what you think.

I follow a lot of political commentary, and over the past few years I've found myself increasingly drawn into the ecosystem of what gets called the "Never Trump" conservative movement. I do write about this fairly regularly, here, here, and here. You probably know who I'm talking about: the Lincoln Project crowd, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger[1], Bill Kristol, the folks at The Bulwark. Former Republicans who saw Trump coming in 2016, said "no thank you," and have been saying it ever since. This appeals to me because I am largely a center-left aligned Democrat. I do share some positions with the progressives (on human issues in particularly), and I am fiscally more conservative. But my fiscal conservatism is that I want those social goodies, and I am willing to raise taxes to pay for them.

I am not blind, I know that temperamentally the Never Trump ex-Republicans are not the same as me, and never will be. What raises my ire is their insistence that they have the "vision" to claw back American democracy, but it's really cementing their brand of small-c "conservatism" with the Democratic Party positions. And that dog won't hunt. They love to say that they didn't leave the Republican Party, that the Republican Party left them. My rejoinder is that what they thought the Republican Party was was always ephemeral, built on a foundation of tissue-paper.

I am going to spend a few posts digging into this world, because I think it's genuinely interesting, and also because I think there are some things these people get badly wrong that are worth examining. Not enough to take my eyes off them. They are important and allies, yet, are they helping? Before I can get there, we have to answer the essential question: how many of these people actually exist?

The answer is smaller than you'd think, and the implications of that are significant.

First, some numbers

The Census Bureau tells us that about 154 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents make up somewhere around 27-30% of the electorate, which means you're looking at a universe of roughly 75-80 million people who consider themselves part of that coalition. And 82-85% of that foundation is all in on MAGA. Let that sink in.

Of those, how many actually view Trump unfavorably? The most recent PRRI data from February 2026 puts Trump's favorable rating among Republicans at 81%, which means about 19% do not hold favorable views of him. A YouGov/UMass Lowell poll from March 2026 found 16% of Republicans holding an unfavorable view. So we're consistently in the 15-20% range.

Apply that to 75-80 million Republicans and you get roughly 12-16 million people within the GOP who could be described as Trump-skeptical. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that this category includes everyone from "I kind of wish he tweeted less" to "I will never vote for this man under any circumstances." The actual committed Never Trumpers, the ones who have actively opposed him across multiple election cycles, voted third party or Democrat specifically because of him, and identify with the Never Trump label? That's a much smaller number.

A rough proxy: a recent poll found that about 9% of Republicans strongly favor impeaching Trump, which is probably the closest we can get to measuring the hardcore slice. That gets you to somewhere around 6-7 million people nationally.

As a share of all 2024 voters, the committed Never Trump cohort is probably 3-5% of the electorate, or 5-8 million people. Real, but not remotely large enough to swing a national election on its own.

Who these people actually are

The named, recognizable Never Trumpers are almost entirely drawn from a very specific world: professional Republicans, operatives, consultants, writers, and commentators who built careers in the pre-Trump GOP. The Wikipedia entry on the movement is quite useful here — it notes that the movement is "generally made up of long-standing, professional Republicans or conservatives, donors, consultants, operatives, writers and commentators, as well as Republican officeholders." This is not a mass movement. It's a fucking guild.

And it actually shrunk after 2021. There were some sympathetic voices in the elected Republicans, who for them the attack on the Capital was the last straw. They were people who would artfully dodge direct questions about the "what the actual fuck" actions by Trump for those sweet Republican staples (tax cuts). And they broke publicly in the aftermath, people like Senators McConnell and Graham, claiming they were out. But starting with Speaker Kevin McCarthy's pilgrimage to Mar a Lago at the end of January 2021, the flood of these "principalled" Republicans back to the embrace of Trump and MAGA. Sickening.

The ones who didn't — Cheney, Kinzinger, Romney, the Bulwark crew — paid real political prices for it. Cheney lost her Wyoming seat in a primary by 37 points. Kinzinger didn't bother running again (whimp, keep that in mind when you read his "hard-hitting" missives on Substack). Romney retired. The signal to anyone still inside the party was clear: this costs you everything and gains you nothing inside Republican politics. That lesson was learned.

The elephant in the room

Here's what's interesting about this coalition: it is overwhelmingly an elite phenomenon. The mass of Republican voters who dislike Trump but stay Republican are not Never Trumpers. They're just people who have decided, for various reasons, that the policy wins are worth the character chaos, or that the alternative is worse, or that they don't have strong enough feelings to change their voting behavior. They don't read The Bulwark. They probably couldn't name a single Lincoln Project ad. And, if they stumbled across it, they would tut-tut it as partisan sludge, and move on.

The Never Trump coalition that gets media attention is a relatively small number of high-profile commentators and former officials who are very good at generating coverage, which creates an illusion of scale. Pew Research data from 2026 does show genuine erosion in Republican confidence in Trump, with his approval among Republicans slipping to 73% in January 2026. But erosion in approval doesn't translate automatically into the Never Trump column. Most of those soft disapprovers, as analysts have noted, don't see the Democratic Party as a viable home either.

So, what does this mean?

The sorting is largely complete. Read that again. "The sorting is largely complete". The Republicans who were persuadable have been persuaded, one way or the other, over the course of three elections and a term and a half of the Tangerine hued Tyrant in the White House. The people who were going to leave left. The people who were going to stay made their peace with it. The people who were going to become fully MAGA became fully MAGA-fied.

This matters enormously for evaluating what the Never Trump coalition can actually accomplish politically, which is something I want to dig into in the next post. Because I think they're operating with a strategic model that doesn't match this reality, and it's making them less effective than they could be. They love to talk about Earth I and Earth II, but it rings hollow that they have the orbital mechanics to get us to the better world. That's a conversation for next time.

The TL;DR: Never Trumpers are real, they're not wrong about Trump, there are several million of them, and as a percentage of the electorate they are a rounding error. Everything else follows from that.

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1 - To be clear, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were supportive of Trump in his first administration, their flip was precipitated by the uprising at the Capital on January 6, 2021. Until that moment, they were fine, just fine, with Trumpism. That is a grain of salt that must not be ignored.