There Are No More Republicans in the Woods

For almost ten years now, the anti-Trump coalition has been standing at the edge of the forest, shaking a bag of tax credits and solemn warnings about constitutional norms, waiting for the last persuadable Republican to come out.

Every cycle, we're assured they're still in there. Hiding just beyond the next cul-de-sac, clutching a Wall Street Journal editorial, wondering what happened to Paul Ryan, waiting for a Democratic candidate who supports free trade, strong alliances, and precisely 18 percent less visible enthusiasm for trans rights.

And every cycle, the pitch is the same: nominate somebody sufficiently restrained, disown one more troublesome faction, collect one more endorsement from a retired Republican national security official, and these people will finally emerge from the tree line. If you've been here a while, you've watched me take apart the apparatus that sells this pitch, twice.

This is the piece where I say the quiet part out loud: the search party can come home. There's nobody left to find.

I. The project worked. That's the point.

Let me be clear about what this is not. This is not a "Never Trump failed" piece. Never Trump did real work. The writers, strategists, and former officials who broke ranks gave traditional Republicans permission to vote against Trump without feeling like they'd renounced everything they ever believed. They testified to what happened inside their own party. They raised money, made ads, and reached voters Democrats structurally cannot reach. It moved real people. It helped beat Trump in 2020, and it's mattered in every election since. Credit where it's due, and it's due.

But persuasion is not mining. The vein does not replenish itself because the consultants keep showing up with better equipment.

A finite political population can be mostly captured. And this one has been.

Think about what the remaining holdouts have already lived through. The voters who could be moved by Trump's corruption have had a decade of corruption to weigh. The ones who could be moved by January 6th have processed January 6th. The ones spooked by authoritarianism have not exactly suffered from a shortage of exhibits.

So what revelation is still coming that's going to shake the rest of them loose? Another indictment? Another loyalty purge? Another open declaration that the government exists to serve Trump, his family, and the people who flatter him?

They've seen it all. They are not waiting for a more carefully phrased argument.

II. The orchard is picked clean

Here's the uncomfortable part the Never Trump crowd doesn't want to say, because saying it out loud ends the funding model: the Republicans still standing with Trump are not confused about what he is.

Some admire him precisely because of what he is. Some believe every accusation is fabricated. Some know a lot of it is true and have decided Democrats are so dangerous that nothing Trump does can outweigh the threat of liberal power. Some like the cruelty. Some like the corruption because they experience it as their corruption.

The idea that one more reassuring Democratic candidate unlocks a hidden reservoir of responsible Republicans stopped being an electoral theory a while ago. It's a Washington imaginary friend now.

Does that mean no Republican voter ever moves again? No. Elections are big, marginal voters exist, events matter. But there's a canyon of difference between welcoming defectors when they show up and making the hunt for defectors the central growth strategy of the entire anti-MAGA coalition.

At some point the undecided Republican stops being a voter category and becomes a theological concept. We're past that point. Long past.

III. The Last of the Romneyicans

You've met this voter. He's always remarkably specific. College educated. Comfortably professional. Socially moderate, fiscally conservative. Lives in a suburb with a tasteful kitchen renovation. Dislikes Trump's vulgarity. Reads a serious newspaper. Probably voted for Romney. Wishes politics could go back to 2012, when Republicans talked about entitlement reform before handing rich people another tax cut [1].

This voter exists. Some of them are Democrats now. Some are independents. Some split tickets. But the political class talks about him like there are millions more waiting just past the tree line, and every cycle the consultants and the Never Trump pundits set out like Hawkeye into the suburban wilderness, convinced the last of the Romneyicans[2] is out there somewhere.

Notice how he gets discussed versus everybody else. His hesitation is sophistication. His conservatism must be respected. His discomfort must be soothed. His vote must be earned through careful signaling.

Meanwhile: the non-voter is lazy. The young voter is unreliable. The working-class voter is culturally alienated. The progressive is unreasonable. The rural voter is hopeless.The remaining moderate Republican, though? Always one Lincoln Project ad away from salvation.

Funny how the voter who looks most like the people running the focus groups is the only one who never gets written off.

IV. What the chase costs

This isn't a harmless eccentricity. Organizing the coalition around one more Republican defector has a price, and we all pay it. You get candidates designed to offend nobody rather than inspire anyone.

Economic populism becomes dangerous. Conflict with concentrated wealth becomes uncouth. Labor politics becomes a liability. The preferences of people who still refuse to identify as Democrats become a veto over the people who actually constitute the party.

A coalition should welcome converts. It should not build its entire church around the preferences of people still standing in the vestibule.

And then there's 2024, which is the receipt that won't go away. Kamala Harris ran the maximal version of this strategy. Broad anti-Trump coalition, endorsements from former Republican officials, national security figures, conservative intellectuals, the whole old-GOP establishment. For fuck's sake, she campaigned with a Cheney. Maybe it helped. Maybe it prevented a worse loss.

But you know what? Trump won, and he won every battleground state. All seven.

You cannot lose all seven battleground states and then declare the losing coalition permanently exempt from experimentation.

That result doesn't prove Harris lost because she was too moderate. Elections don't hand out answers that cleanly. But it sure as hell puts the burden of proof on anyone arguing the fix is to run the same strategy again with even more authority handed to its center-right flank.

V. Who actually hasn't been gotten

So instead of asking where the final anti-Trump Republican is hiding, ask a better question: which voters are weakly attached to politics or absent from it altogether?

Young people who think the system is unresponsive. Working-class voters who don't believe either party represents their material interests. Rural voters who haven't seen a credible local Democrat in years. Union households that stopped voting reliably Democratic. People attracted to populism who aren't committed to conservative ideology. People who know, in their bones, that corporations, landlords, insurers, and employers have too much power over their lives.

These voters are more difficult to reach. They cannot be activated by a Cheney endorsement. They are not waiting for a commercial where a retired general explains why NATO matters.

They need candidates with local credibility, sustained organization, contested school board and state legislative races, a party that shows up in their community before it asks for a presidential vote every four years. Most of all, they need evidence Democrats will fight for something beyond the restoration of respectable political management. The last Republican can be pursued with a TV ad. The missing Democratic voter has to be organized. That's slower, less glamorous, harder to fund, and it generates zero cable-news bookings.It's also where the future of the coalition has to come from. There's no version of this where the growth comes from the vestibule.

VI. A different job for Never Trump

None of this means the Never Trumpers should leave. They remain genuinely valuable witnesses to the radicalization of their party. They understand conservative institutions, donors, media, and language. They can reach some voters nobody else can, and a coalition against authoritarianism wants them inside it.

But the next chapter of that contribution comes with a humility requirement. They moved the people they could move. Now the coalition has to grow in ways that won't look or sound like them. Their strategic preferences get heard alongside labor organizers, local party leaders, Black voters, young activists, rural Democrats, and the communities that have carried the Democratic Party for decades — not above them.

They get a seat at the table. They do not get to pretend they brought the table. And they should stop treating their own cultural comfort as a neutral definition of electability. We've seen where that model leads. It leads to spending 2022 obsessing over Mandela Barnes's parking tickets while Ron Johnson tries to hand fake electors to Mike Pence.

VII. Stop searching the woods

Maybe there are a few more Republicans are still wandering around in the suburban timber, clutching a Journal editorial, trying to remember what conservatism was supposed to mean.

Fine. Leave the porch light on. Welcome them when they arrive. Give them a chair. Listen to what they know.

But it is long past time to stop sending the whole fucking party into the woods to find them. There are millions of voters standing in plain sight who have never once been given a compelling reason to believe Democrats are fighting for them[3].

They're harder to reach, harder to organize, less reassuring to donors, less familiar to consultants, and far less likely to appear on a Sunday show explaining how the party wins by becoming more acceptable to people who still won't join it.

The last gettable Republican has already been gotten. The future is not hiding in the woods. It never was.

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1 - These are the Never Trump pundits, The Bulwark, The Lincolc Project, et. alia

2 - Yeah, I am making a poor taste reference to The Last of the Mohicans, deal with it.

3 - How do we know this? If it wasn't the case, the Trump administration and the SCOTUS wouldn't be so hell-bent on curtailing the right to vote, and trying to re-jigger the maps.