The Never Trumpers, Man. The Never Trumpers.
Look, I'm not gonna get into the whole — okay, I am gonna get into the whole thing.
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?
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.