So the Democratic National Committee — eighteen months after the body cooled, eighteen months after the toe tag was tied, eighteen months after the rest of us stood around the grave in the rain asking what the hell happened — has finally, mercifully, released its official autopsy on the 2024 election1.

They called it “Build to Win. Build to Last.”

I had to set down my Caucasian when I read that title. I had to actually set it down on the lane, man, and just stare at the pins for a while.

Because here is what “Build to Win. Build to Last.” contains in its Executive Summary section:

The Conclusion?

The Appendices? Same. Blank. Gone. Not provided by author. A 192-page document about catastrophic failure, and the author could not be reached for the summary, the conclusion, or the appendices. This is the Epstein Files of political party self-reflection. The DNC has produced the literary equivalent of a bowling ball with no finger holes. Decorative. Non-functional. Somehow still expensive.

But wait — it gets richer. Because the DNC, in a move so exquisitely self-loathing it almost circles back around to brave, slapped its own disclaimer on the front page. Page one, man. Before you even get to the table of contents that leads to the blank Executive Summary. The disclaimer says, and I want to be precise here, that the DNC cannot independently verify the claims presented in its own commissioned report.

This is what passes for accountability in a party that lost to a convicted felon running on grievance, gold sneakers, and the cognitive architecture of a novelty sponge.

Now. Let’s talk about what the report actually admits, because buried under the bureaucratic styrofoam packing material, there are some genuine confessions. Confessions that would have been useful, oh, I don’t know, before the election.

The autopsy’s own pollsters — on the record, in writing — admit that the Trump campaign’s “Kamala is for they/them” ad was, and I am quoting the document here, “very effective.” They admit the campaign was “boxed in.” And then they deliver what might be the single most expensive shrug in American political history:

Nothing. Would. Have. Worked.

Pour another Caucasian, and read that again. These are the people who charged somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars to run the Future Forward operation — a boondoggle so prodigious in its uselessness it deserves its own wing at the Museum of Political Malpractice — and their official, documented, on-the-record conclusion about the most effective attack ad of the cycle is: we had no answer, there is no answer, please stop asking.

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Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project — a group of former Republicans running on spite and tactical fury — went from concept to finished counter-ad in thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours. No Zoom calls with allies seeking permission. No focus groups in Bucks County. No blowback-score calculations run by consultants billing $40,000 a month out of converted DC townhouses. They pointed out, accurately and with receipts, that the gender-affirming care policy Trump’s ad attacked was Trump’s own federal policy. They flipped the script in a day and a half while Harris HQ was still work-shopping whether they were permitted by a fraction of a fraction of their own base to respond at all.

And here is the part of the autopsy that is so obvious it physically hurts to read — the part where the document, in chapter after chapter, accidentally writes the obituary it couldn’t bring itself to write in the conclusion section it left blank.

Josh Stein won the North Carolina governorship. The autopsy notes, plainly, that his path to victory involved focusing “less on abstract issues and identity politics” and connecting with voters on “the economy, disaster relief, and housing affordability.” Jacky Rosen won in Nevada running on healthcare costs and wages. Ruben Gallego won in Arizona by being a working-class guy who didn’t speak to working-class people like they were a diversity seminar he was running slightly behind schedule. Elissa Slotkin outperformed Harris in sixty-eight of Michigan’s eighty-three counties by talking about manufacturing jobs like she actually gave a damn about Macomb County.

The pattern is so blazingly, insultingly clear that you could read it from the International Space Station with your eyes half-closed. When Democrats talk about the price of eggs, the cost of rent, the wages people take home, and the dignity of their work — they win, or they at least lose like contenders. When they campaign on the boutique concerns of the activist-class ecosystem — the issues that peaked politically sometime around 2021 and have been radioactive with working-class voters of every background ever since — they get vaporized.

The autopsy knows this. The autopsy says this. In plain English. Multiple times. And then the consultant class that produced it will go back to their converted DC townhouses and charge somebody $40,000 a month to not implement it, because telling the loud edges of the base that their priorities are electoral poison is the one thing that absolutely cannot be done. Blowback, you know. The focus group might wince.

The most damning number in the whole document isn’t in the messaging sections or the organizing sections. It’s in the spending analysis. Outside spending on federal campaigns in 2024 reached $4.5 billion. Four and a half billion dollars. And the official conclusion of the people who spent it is that nothing would have worked.

Nothing would have worked. Four and a half billion dollars. Nothing would have worked.

Man, I am going to need another Caucasian.

Look — the document does, in soft flashes, demonstrate something resembling a pulse. It acknowledges Democrats have lost ground at every level since the 2008 Obama landslide. It calls for a ten-year strategic plan. It talks about organizing everywhere to “Win Anywhere.” These are the right words in the right order, and if someone with actual authority and actual accountability and actual willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation with the activist base ever acted on them, something might change.

But knowing isn’t doing. And the Democratic Party, by its own forensic confession, has spent sixteen years knowing and not doing. Studying the last defeat while staging the conditions for the next one. Commissioning the autopsy while protecting the lifestyle of everyone who performed the surgery that killed the patient.

The Republicans spent decades doing the unglamorous, untweetable work — the Federalist Society, ALEC, the evangelical ground game, the state legislative pipeline, the patient construction of a judicial infrastructure that now owns the Supreme Court for a generation. Nobody went viral. Nobody got a podcast. They just kept bowling, frame after frame, building a consistent game.

The Democrats got the biggest electoral mandate in modern history in 2008 and spent the next sixteen years failing to lock in a single structural advantage, disinvesting in state parties, vacating working-class communities, and then expressing genuine surprise, cycle after cycle, when the results came back.

And now they’ve written it all down in a 192-page document with a blank conclusion.

The Dude is not abiding today, man. The Dude is, for once in his life, genuinely, specifically, non-philosophically furious. There are people in windowless rooms in Alexandria right now storyboarding the next “they/them” ad, the next culture-war carpet-bombing, the next cycle of attacks specifically designed to exploit the Democratic Party’s inability to respond without first convening a permission structure. And the official response of the opposition party, certified and documented, is that there is nothing which would have worked.

Somebody had better find something that works. And fast. Because the next election isn’t waiting for the Executive Summary to be provided by the author.

Okay, so, look. Polling. I know. I know, man. Just the word makes some people reach for their phone to doom-scroll their favorite newsletter and makes other people reach for... well, whatever they reach for. I reach for my White Russian, personally. But hang with me here, because the way people are talking about Trump’s numbers has gotten so sloppy it’s making my head hurt, and my head is, uh — it’s usually pretty good at not hurting.

First, let me say something nice. Then I’ll stop.

Political pollsters took a beating for like fifteen years, man, and some of it — look, some of it they had coming. The whole switch from landlines to cell phones basically pulled the rug out from under their whole operation. And this rug, man, this methodological rug — it really tied the room together. You know? It held the whole joint in place. And then it was just... gone. 2016 was bad. 2020 was better but still off. 2022 gave some of them what I can only describe as a collective bad trip that never fully resolved.

But here’s the thing, and I want you to really hear this: they adapted. They got smarter. The aggregators got better at separating the garbage polls from the real ones. Are they perfect? Hell no. But the aggregate picture they’re painting right now is probably the most accurate it’s been in a decade, and I need you to hold onto that because I’m going somewhere with it.

So what does the aggregate actually say, man?

As of mid-April 2026, most of the major tracking outfits have Trump’s approval sitting around 41%, with about 6 in 10 Americans disapproving. Nate Silver’s got him at 39.7%, net approval around -16.6, economic approval at -22, inflation approval at a truly spectacular -34. CNN’s most recent numbers put overall approval at 35%, handling of the economy at 31% — which is a career low — with roughly two-thirds of Americans saying his policies made things worse.

Those are bad numbers, man. Objectively. CNN’s chief data analyst called Trump the “weakest president this century” at this point in a second term, and noted he’s been underwater every single day since March 12, 2025. I mean — that’s an historically awful record. If this were a bowling score, he’d be asked to leave the alley.

But — and this is a big, load-bearing “but” that I want you to sit with like you’d sit with a particularly good joint on a Friday night — he’s not at 32%. He’s not even trending there in any clear, sustained way. He’s sliding, yeah. Slowly. Gradually. Like a glacier that really, really doesn’t want to leave the lane.

Which brings me to Sarah Longwell and what she calls the Bush Line.

Longwell runs The Bulwark and has been doing this thankless work longer than most people have been paying attention, and I respect that, I do. She argues that the magic number is somewhere in the 32-33% range. Her theory is that George W. Bush left office at 32%, and was so epically unpopular that not only did the next two Republican presidential candidates lose, but it left the whole party open for the reshaping that Trump ultimately carried out — by just torching the Bush legacy in the driveway and roasting marshmallows over it.

Her hope is that Trump hitting that floor would trigger a similar reckoning. That the Republican Party would finally, finally be forced to look in the mirror.

I like Sarah. I do. Her focus groups are genuinely illuminating, even if listening to them is roughly as pleasurable as getting your car stolen. But this particular theory, man — this theory has a structural problem the size of a fucking aircraft carrier, and I am going to tell you about it because nobody else at the bowling alley seems to want to.

The Bush analogy doesn’t hold. Not even close.

When Bush bottomed out at 32%, the Republican Party was still, at some level, capable of shame. They had institutional memory of a pre-Atwater, pre-Gingrich operation that occasionally gave a damn about governing. I am old enough to remember this. It was real. The Tea Party was born out of that shame, sure, but it was also born out of genuine, if completely unhinged, ideological energy. They wanted something — even if what they wanted made about as much sense as a bowling ball with no finger holes.

The response to that reckoning? The party commissioned what became known as the Growth and Opportunity Project after the 2012 Romney disaster. The “autopsy.” Reince Priebus stood up and said their message was weak, their ground game was insufficient, they weren’t inclusive — and the report laid out this whole extensive plan to reach women, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and gay voters. Comprehensive immigration reform. Abbreviated primary process. Real outreach infrastructure.

You know what happened to that autopsy?

Less than four years later, Donald Trump won the White House doing the exact opposite of nearly everything the autopsy recommended, riding landslide-level white voter support all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue.

The report was toilet paper, man. Lovely, earnest, well-researched toilet paper. It got used once and flushed. The party didn’t absorb the lesson. Didn’t even pretend to for very long. The Tea Party energy that was supposed to be channeled into coalition-building got hijacked by grievance entrepreneurs who figured out — correctly, god help us — that the base didn’t want outreach. It wanted validation. It wanted to be told that the problem wasn’t them, it was everyone else.

And Trump, man — Trump understood that better than anyone. Say what you will about the man, and believe me, I have said many, many things about the man, often loudly, in a bathrobe — his lizard brain locked onto that frequency like a laser.

So Longwell’s theory requires us to believe that a party which used a serious, substantive post-mortem as scratch paper is suddenly going to have a come-to-Jesus moment because Trump dips to 32% during an active presidency with no electoral consequence attached. That the institutional GOP, which has spent a decade systematically purging anyone with even mild reservations about the personality cult, is going to look at some polling numbers and decide to grow a spine.

I’m sorry, man, but what the fuck is she smoking, and can she please share it, because that is some good shit right there.

Here’s what the Never Trump ecosystem does, and I follow them, so I can say this:

They treat every bad poll like it’s the opening notes of something that was promised to them a long time ago. Even Longwell herself, who is sharper than most, has called certain numbers “a bit of a bright spot at least for me emotionally,” which is touching, and also kind of tells you everything you need to know. When your political analysis is being driven by what feels emotionally reassuring, man, you might want to pump the brakes. I thought the Republicans — even the former ones — were the “Fuck Your Feelings™” party. Apparently the feelings are load-bearing when they’re your feelings.

The core constituency is not moving, man.

“Strong approval” within the Republican Party has softened from about 69% at the start of the term to around 58% now. But 95% of Republicans still support the guy. That’s not a coalition in crisis. That’s a coalition having a slightly less enthusiastic Tuesday. The floor is sticky as hell, and it has been for the entire duration of Trump’s political career — like something spilled in a bowling alley and nobody dealt with it.

As Longwell herself said back in 2024, about 70% of the Republican Party sees Trump as its north star, aligned with those who still think the 2020 election was stolen. You’re not peeling that away with polling data, man. That’s not a preference. That’s a belief system. That’s closer to religion. And I don’t care how many White Russians I drink — I’m not going to bowl my way out of a theology.

Here’s what I actually think happens:

Trump doesn’t reach 32. He’s probably got a structural floor somewhere around 37-38%, because that cohort of the electorate has built their entire identity around him. No tariff, no war, no scandal, no unhinged 3am Truth Social post is going to dislodge them. They are not persuadable. They have not been persuadable for a decade.

And even if — by some miracle of economic catastrophe and genuine scandal fatigue — Trump did crater to 32%? The Republican Party’s response would not be self-reflection. It would be a search for the next Trump. Someone slightly more competent, slightly less chaotic, with the same authoritarian playbook but better impulse control. They’d call it a return to normalcy. They’d find somebody who can read a teleprompter without looking like they’re being chased through a parking garage. And then they’d do it all over again.

The autopsy will not be written. Because the patient doesn’t believe they’re sick.

Look, man.

I want the Never Trump project to work. Seriously, even though I have spent the last several paragraphs treating it like a spare I can’t pick up. These are people fighting an important fight. But the polling obsession — the constant searching for the magic number that’ll finally break the fever — that’s magical thinking, man. The Bush Line isn’t a political theory. It’s a coping mechanism. From people who will tell you, straight-faced, that they are not here to sell hope, just unvarnished reality.

I need concussion protocols for that level of cognitive whiplash.

If a reckoning comes — and that is a seriously load-bearing “if,” man, I’m talking structural support for the whole argument — it won’t come from a number on a chart. It’ll come from something structural: electoral losses that can’t be rationalized away, economic pain that can’t be blamed on Democrats, a generational turnover that simply swamps the current coalition. That’s a decade-long project minimum, if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, it’s generations.

So watch the polls. I do. The aggregate is useful. The methodological improvements are real. But if you’re sitting there hoping that a polling number is going to trigger some grand Republican reformation?

That rug, man.

That rug is not coming back.

The Dude abides.

[1] This is meant with respect. Some of my favorite podcasts are in this ecosystem. I am simply noting that there is an ecosystem.

[2] I did not name this. She did.

[3] Sitting with a White Russian through a Longwell focus group is a full-contact emotional experience.

[4] He said this. He really said this. It was a different time.

This is part three of a four part series. Here is part one, and part two to catch you up

So I’m sitting here — bathrobe, White Russian, y’know, just abiding — and I keep seeing these Never Trump podcasts pop up. And look, I got nothing against the guys. Some of them seem like they mean well. But man, I’m watching them, and I’m thinking... who the hell are they talking to?

Because from where I’m sitting, on this very comfortable couch — which, by the way, really ties the room together — the sorting is done, man. It’s over. Like, the rug got pissed on years ago. You can’t un-piss the rug.

Here’s what happened, and I think you’re gonna find this pretty straightforward. Between 2016 and 2024, Republican voters went through this long, brutal thing — every Trump shitshow was a kind of decision point. Access Hollywood. Helsinki. January 6th. The indictments. The conviction, man. Seventy-seven million votes anyway, in 2024. More than before, actually. And at every single one of those moments, the Never Trumpers were out there going, surely this is the thing that breaks it. And each time, the base just... absorbed it. Rationalized it. Came out the other side more committed. The people who couldn’t hang with that left. The rest stayed and built themselves elaborate little internal justifications, man. Really load-bearing stuff.

What you’re left with — and this is not a complicated point — is a Republican Party where the remaining members have by definition already decided that whatever Trump is, it’s fine with them. The 15 to 19 percent of Republicans who view Trump unfavorably right now? They’re not sitting at home waiting for the next Bulwark podcast to drop like it’s a new Creedence album. They’ve already processed the information. They just haven’t left yet.

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The Three Moves That Aren’t Working, Man

These guys essentially got three moves. And all three are, like... not great.

Move one: appeal to the remainers. This is the core of the whole project — go out there, make the character case, the constitutional case, the democratic norms case, hope somebody peels off. The problem, man — and I say this with love — is that you are not going to out-argue someone who has spent three years building a custom internal justification for why a guy with 34 felony convictions is actually fine. You’re showing up to their bowling alley. They know every lane, every dead spot on the approach. You’re rolling a 7-10 split every time and acting surprised.

Move two: push the Democratic Party rightward. Okay, I’ll give ‘em this one — at least it’s strategically coherent, y’know? The idea being, if Democrats moved toward some kinda pre-2016 Republican orthodoxy, they’d attract the educated suburban conservatives who already bailed on the GOP. Some of these guys — Goldberg, others — have been pretty explicit about wanting exactly this. The problem is it requires the Democratic Party to reorganize itself around the preferences of a few million people who already left, which is... not a compelling pitch to the base voters who actually run the primaries. It’s like telling the bowling league they should change the rules to attract guys who stopped showing up. The guys there have other opinions, man.

Move three: moar self-congratulation. Okay, this is where I get a little exercised, man. This isn’t even really a strategy, it’s just a habit. A significant chunk of Never Trump content is basically a victory lap — we were right from the beginning, here are the receipts, here’s the contrast with the people who were wrong. And look, maybe you were right! Fine! But telling someone “I told you so” as their first introduction to your argument is — and I want to be precise here — a real dickish move, man. It turns the whole operation into a club that’s proud of itself rather than a coalition that wants to grow. Nobody who’s just now getting uncomfortable about tariffs and whatever the hell is happening with Iran wants to walk into a room full of people going, oh, finally figured it out, huh? That’s not how you get new members. That’s how you lose ‘em before they even sign up.

The No-Man’s Land, Man

Here’s what’s actually interesting, and I don’t think these guys talk about it enough, possibly because they’re too busy recording podcast intros about how correct they’ve been.

Pew data — and I’m not, like, a huge Pew guy, but this is real — shows genuine erosion in Republican confidence in Trump through late 2025 and into 2026. So movement is happening. But erosion in approval is not the same thing as somebody becoming a Never Trumper. Most of those soft disapprovers don’t see the Democratic Party as a viable alternative. They’re pissed off — quietly, privately pissed off — but they’re not crossing over. They’re in no-man’s land.

And that no-man’s land is the most interesting persuasion target available. But the Never Trump brand is working against them here, man, because Never Trump implies a destination. You either stay Republican and resist, or you leave the party. And neither of those options is appealing to someone who’s just quietly having a bad time with tariffs and doesn’t wanna vote for a Democrat. That person is just... standing in the alley, holding the ball, not sure where to throw it.

You wanna reach that person? Don’t show up in a bathrobe going “dude, your party sucks.“ Even if it does. Especially if it does.

What Would Actually Work

Look, I’ll be honest with you the way a good friend is honest with you — the way Donny would’ve been honest, God rest him — electoral persuasion at the margins right now is less important than building institutions and arguments for what comes after. Trump turns 80 in June. The coalition he built is genuinely fragile — nearly a third of his 2024 voters were “new entrant Republicans” whose loyalty to the party is substantially weaker than the core base. The post-Trump Republican Party is going to be a real fight, and that’s where Never Trump could actually matter.

But to matter in that fight, you need credibility with people who don’t already agree with you. And right now, man, this whole operation is breathing its own exhaust. Sealed up tight like a submarine. Very pleased with the air in there.

Getting out of that requires something that is, at present, in genuinely short supply in this corner of political media.

It requires accountability.

Which, I understand, is a whole other thing. And I’m gonna need another White Russian before we get into it.

The Dude abides.

This is part 2 of a series. See here for part one

Okay so look. The Never Trump guys — these are the dudes who saw Donald Trump in 2016 and were like, “No man. No. Not ever. Not under any circumstances. I don’t roll that way.” That’s a whole thing. That’s the whole thing man.

But then there’s this other group. These are the guys who looked at the Never Trumpers and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not be hasty here.”

These are not Trump supporters. They’ll tell you that. At length, man. With footnotes.

They just spend a really... really suspicious amount of energy yelling at the people yelling at Trump instead of, you know, yelling at Trump. The aggression will not stand, man. Or something. I don’t know, I’m a little hazy on it.

Who are these people, man

We’re talking National Review — been around since like ‘55, very serious, William F. Buckley started it, very fancy. There’s The Dispatch, which Jonah Goldberg put together after leaving National Review. There’s this Erick Erickson fella down in Atlanta. The whole kind of center-right-but-too-classy-for-MAGA-but-also-not-Never-Trump scene.

Now here’s the thing about these guys. They don’t have a huge audience. The Dispatch has maybe 100,000 paying subscribers. National Review is more of a... boutique operation. They collectively reach maybe a million, maybe two million people. In a country where 155 million dudes showed up to vote.

But man, if you wander into that world, there is a lot of... self-congratulation happening amongst themselves. A lot of that, man.

Small audience. Very large sense of themselves. And they need you to believe several things simultaneously that do not entirely add up.

The impossible position, man

Here’s what they need you to hold in your head at once:

One: Trump is bad. Dangerous. A threat. They said so, publicly. They have the receipts, man.

Two: But also the Never Trumpers are annoying and hyperbolic and suspiciously cozy with Democrats. Somebody oughta push back on them.

Three: Conservative policy stuff — tax cuts, deregulation, hawkish foreign policy — that’s all still correct and good, regardless of the chaos happening while it gets implemented.

Four: They, personally, are the last honest adults in the room.

Holding all of that at once requires a flexibility that would impress... I don’t know, some kind of gymnast. The New Republic said National Review is trying to “broker détente with a Trump administration it cannot fully embrace.” They called it “incoherent.” That’s about right, man.

The Faustian situation

Look, here’s where I’d be, uh, charitable to these guys, because they did sort of get the stuff they wanted. Tax cuts. Three Supreme Court justices. Deregulatory agenda. For people who spent their whole careers arguing for certain policies, watching those policies actually happen — badly, chaotically, delivered by someone they found deeply distasteful — that’s a genuine pickle.

Do you oppose the man so hard you oppose the outcomes? Or do you hold your nose and take the wins?

You know how that story ends.

Some researchers put it plainly: conservatives disgusted with Trump are being asked to give up a lot in policy terms if they fully oppose him. That’s a real tension. I get it.

But here’s the thing, man. The chaos and the policy are not separate. The tariffs, the institutional degradation — that’s not a bug in the program. That’s the program. These guys have never really squared that circle. The rug really tied the room together, and they keep pretending it didn’t get peed on.

The identity thing, man

But the real explanation is simpler and less flattering. These people built their whole thing — their careers, their identities — as conservative intellectuals. And fully joining the Never Trump crowd would require admitting that the movement they spent decades building either failed badly... or was always something considerably uglier underneath the Buckley-esque intellectualism.

That is a psychologically costly thing to admit, man. So instead, they critique the critique.

Goldberg himself is genuinely smart and genuinely conflicted and you can watch the tension in real time. He wrote, recently, something like: “Trump changes his positions constantly, and his supposedly principled defenders change with him — and I’m the deranged one for not doing that?”

Fair point, man. That’s a fair point.

And yet The Dispatch consistently spends as much energy targeting Never Trumpers and mainstream media as they do targeting MAGA. The symmetry is... telling.

Early in Trump’s first term, Goldberg wrote a piece called “Never Trump is over.” Said he’d give Trump a chance. That piece did not age well, man.

What they’re actually doing

What these guys have built is a very comfortable place to stand where they can feel principled without paying the full price of principle. It’s like... standing on the edge of a volcano and pissing into it and thinking you’re helping.

They get to say they opposed Trump on character grounds. They get to defend conservative policies. They get to be the Reasonable Center between MAGA craziness and Never Trump hysteria. And they get to keep their conservative audience — which they’d lose if they went full Never Trump — and their intellectual credibility — which they’d lose if they went full MAGA.

It’s a business model as much as an ideology, man. And it works, on its own terms. The Dispatch is financially successful. National Review still publishes. Erickson still has his radio show.

What it isn’t — and we’ll get into this — is any kind of political strategy that’s gonna move the electorate. But that’s a problem for, uh... the next post, man.

So here’s the thing. I follow a lot of political commentary, man, and over the past few years I keep finding myself pulled into this whole “Never Trump” conservative scene. The Lincoln Project cats, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger — who we’ll get back to, man, because I have thoughts — Bill Kristol, the Bulwark crowd. Former Republicans who saw Trump coming in 2016, said “no thank you,” and have been saying it ever since.

This resonates with me, man. I’m a center-left Democrat. I share some stuff with the progressives, particularly on human issues, and I’m more fiscally conservative. But my fiscal conservatism is: I want the social goodies, and I’m willing to raise the taxes to pay for them. That’s not a contradiction, that’s just, like, being responsible, man.

I’m not naïve. I know temperamentally these Never Trump ex-Republicans are not the same as me. What really ties my rug in a knot is their insistence that they have some vision to rescue American democracy, when really they’re just trying to cement their brand of small-c conservatism inside the Democratic Party. And that dog, man — that dog will not hunt.

They love to say the Republican Party left them. My answer to that is: what they thought the Republican Party was was always a fantasy, man. Built on tissue paper.

I’m gonna spend a few posts digging into all this. Because I think there are some things these people get seriously wrong. They’re still important, they’re still allies, but — are they actually helping? Before I can get there, we need to answer the essential question, man.

How many of these people actually exist?

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Some Numbers, Man

The Census Bureau says about 154 million people voted in 2024. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are around 27-30% of the electorate, so you’re looking at roughly 75-80 million people in that whole coalition. And 82-85% of them are all in on MAGA. Just let that wash over you for a second.

Of the rest — how many actually view Trump unfavorably? PRRI data from February 2026 puts Trump’s favorable rating among Republicans at 81%. YouGov/UMass Lowell from March 2026 found 16% 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 Trump-skeptical people within the GOP. Sounds like a lot, man, until you realize this includes everyone from “I wish he’d tweet less” all the way to “I will never vote for this man under any circumstances.” The actual committed Never Trumpers — the ones who’ve actively opposed him across multiple election cycles, voted third party or Democrat specifically because of him, identify with the label? Much smaller number.

A poll found about 9% of Republicans strongly favor impeaching Trump, which is probably the closest proxy we’ve got for the hardcore slice. That gets you to 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. Five to eight million people. Real — but nowhere near 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, man. Professional Republicans. Operatives, consultants, writers, commentators who built careers in the pre-Trump GOP. Wikipedia describes the movement as “generally made up of long-standing, professional Republicans or conservatives, donors, consultants, operatives, writers and commentators.”

This is not a mass movement, man. It’s a guild.

And it shrank after 2021. Some elected Republicans — people who’d been artfully dodging direct “what the actual fuck” questions about Trump in exchange for tax cuts — finally broke publicly after January 6th. McConnell, Graham, claiming they were done. But then Kevin McCarthy made his little pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago at the end of January 2021, and the flood of these so-called “principled” Republicans rushed right back into Trump’s arms.

It was, man. It was sickening.

The ones who didn’t go back — Cheney, Kinzinger, Romney, the Bulwark crew — paid real prices. Cheney lost her Wyoming seat by 37 points. Kinzinger didn’t even bother running again — and man, keep that in mind the next time you read one of his hard-hitting missives on Substack, because that takes a lot of nerve when you couldn’t even show up for the fight. Romney retired. The message inside the party was clear: this costs you everything and gains you nothing.

That lesson was learned, man.

The Elephant in the Room

Here’s the thing 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 decided, for various reasons, that the policy wins are worth the character chaos. They don’t read The Bulwark. They probably couldn’t name a single Lincoln Project ad. And if they stumbled across one, they’d shrug it off as partisan sludge and move on.

The Never Trump coalition that gets all the media coverage is a relatively small number of high-profile commentators and former officials who are very good at generating coverage. Which creates this illusion of scale, man.

Pew Research from 2026 does show real erosion in Republican confidence in Trump — approval among Republicans slipped to 73% in January 2026. But soft disapproval doesn’t automatically become Never Trump. Most of those people don’t see the Democratic Party as a viable home either.

So What Does This All Mean, Man?

The sorting is done. Read that again, man. The sorting is done. The Republicans who were persuadable have been persuaded, one way or the other, across three elections and a term and a half of the Tangerine Tyrant. The people who were going to leave, left. The people who were going to stay made their peace. The people who were going to go full MAGA went full MAGA.

This matters enormously for figuring out what the Never Trump coalition can actually accomplish, which I want to get into next time. 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, man, but it rings pretty hollow that they’ve got the orbital mechanics to get us to the better world.

That’s a conversation for next time.

The TL;DR, man: 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.

The Dude abides.

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