There Are No More Republicans in the Woods

On Never Trump, the myth of the persuadable suburbanite, and why chasing ghosts in the woods is not a strategy.

Okay, so, I’m at the lanes last Tuesday, minding my own business, nursing a White Russian, and Walter’s going off again about how the whole Never Trump thing reminds him of Charlie. Not the boy who could bowl, the other Charlie. The one in the jungle.

“They said he was hiding out there too, Dude. Deep in the tree line. Command kept sending more guys in to find him. More guys, more choppers, more fuckin’ guys. You know how many times we found the last guy in the woods?”

I did not know.

“Never, Dude. We never found the last guy. There is no last guy. This is not Vietnam, but it is exactly like Vietnam.”

Walter’s insane, obviously, he’s always been insane, but every once in a great while the man accidentally backs the ball into the pocket. And this is one of those times, man, because that’s the whole racket, isn’t it. Ten years now, this country’s been standing at the edge of the woods, rattling a bag of NATO commitments and tax credits like a dog treat, waiting for the last reasonable Republican to come mosey on out from behind a tree. They’re in there, man. Somewhere past the cul-de-sac. Wall Street Journal folded under one arm, still wondering what they did with Paul Ryan, waiting for a Democrat sufficiently housebroken to earn their vote. Every cycle, same pitch. Nominate someone calmer. Trim a faction. Get one more retired four-star general to frown into a camera. Do that, and they’ll finally walk out of the trees. I got bad news, man. That lane’s been bowled. Frame’s over. Score’s on the board.

The Project Actually Worked, Man

Now look, I’m not here to shit on the Never Trump crowd entirely. That’d be un-abiding of me. They did real work. Real strategists, real money, real ads, real ex-Republicans standing in front of a camera telling other Republicans it was okay to bail without becoming, like, a card-carrying member of anything. That mattered. It moved actual votes in actual states. Helped put the man out to pasture in 2020, kept doing work since. That rug tied the room together for a minute there, man. I’ll give ‘em that.

But here’s the thing about a rug, and here’s the thing about a finite pool of persuadable voters: eventually it gets threadbare, and no amount of Febreze™ changes that. The voters who were gonna bail over January 6th already bailed. The ones spooked by the corruption have had a decade of corruption to sit with. The ones who left over “he’s just not who I thought he was” left. That’s it. That’s the whole box of Kleenex™, man, and it’s empty. So somebody’s gotta ask the impolite question, and since nobody else at this lane’s gonna do it — how many of these people do we honestly think are left in the woods?

The Orchard’s Been Picked Clean

I stopped by Maude’s loft to run this by her, figuring she’d have a colder read than a stoner in a soiled bathrobe with a bowling ball. She did not disappoint.

“The remaining Republican electorate is not confused, Jeffrey. Confusion implies a deficit of information they do not have. They have the information. Some admire the cruelty. Some believe the accusations are manufactured regardless of evidence. Some have simply decided their opponents forfeited the right to govern. This is not a persuasion problem. It is a preference.” Then she went back to whatever art thing she was doing with the harness, and I did not ask. Man, she’s a lot, but she’s rarely wrong. Point is, persuasion ain’t mining, dude. The vein doesn’t refill itself just ‘cause the consultants show up with a nicer drill. You can strip an orchard once. After that you’re just standing under bare branches insisting there’s one more apple in there somewhere.

The Last of the Romneyicans

Donny leans in around frame six, all earnest. “What’s a Romneyican, Walter?”

“DONNY. It is a mythological creature, like a unicorn, except instead of a horn it’s got a subscription to the Journal and a mild, deniable prejudice about tax brackets. It lives in a tasteful kitchen renovation. Nobody has photographed one since 2012.”

“Huh,” said Donny, and went back to his nachos, having once again asked the only honest question in the building. That’s the guy, man. College-educated, suburban, fiscally tight, socially fine with whatever as long as it’s quiet about it, dislikes the vulgarity more than the policy. Some of those people exist! Some voted Democrat already. Some split tickets. Fine. Good. Welcome ‘em. But the political class treats this guy like Sasquatch with a Roth IRA — everybody’s real sure he’s out there, everybody’s built a whole hunting expedition around finding him, and meanwhile every other voter who might actually show up gets talked about like a liability. The nonvoter’s lazy. The young voter’s flaky. The union guy’s a lost cause. The rural voter’s a lost cause. But the Romneyican, he’s always one more Lincoln Project ad away from coming home. An endangered species doesn’t get to run the zoo, man.

Chasing the Ghost Costs You the Whole Team

Here’s what happens when you build a strategy around the last guy in the woods: you start recruiting a bowling team designed to offend nobody instead of winning games. Nobody talks about the guy who owns the lanes anymore. Nobody swings hard. Conflict with money gets recast as bad manners. The preferences of people who still won’t join the team get a permanent veto over the people who showed up and paid league dues for twenty years. A coalition can welcome converts. Sure. Abide by that. But it doesn’t have to hand the new guy the keys to the equipment room on his first night. And after ‘24, man, this isn’t theoretical. Harris ran with a stack of former Republican endorsements as long as my bar tab. Cheney, generals, the whole respectable-adult roadshow. Might’ve helped some. Might’ve kept the score closer. She still lost all seven battlegrounds. That’s not proof the coalition was too moderate — elections don’t hand you clean proofs like that — but it sure as hell isn’t proof that doing the same thing again, harder, with even more deference to the center-right guys who showed up late, is the move. You don’t get to lose every swing state and then declare your strategy permanently exempt from criticism. That’s not how any of this works, man.

Who Hasn’t Been Gotten, Man

Alright, dropping the bit for a second, because this part actually matters to me. Instead of pouring another decade into finding the last Republican in the woods, maybe try asking who’s standing in plain sight that nobody’s bothered to organize. Young people who’ve concluded the whole system’s rigged and don’t see much reason to argue. Working folks who don’t feel like either party’s fighting for their check. Rural voters who haven’t met a Democrat who showed up between elections. Union households drifting away because nobody’s knocked on the door. People who don’t love either party but respond to somebody willing to name who’s cashing in and who’s getting squeezed. You can’t get those people with a TV spot and a retired admiral. That crowd needs a local candidate they’ve actually met. It needs school board races and county commission races and someone showing up to the union hall in March instead of October of an election year. It’s slower. It’s less glamorous. Nobody’s booking that on Sunday morning television. But it’s where the future’s actually sitting, man, in plain sight, not behind some tree line.

Leave the Porch Light On

I’m not saying kick the Never Trump folks out of the party, man. They know the terrain. They can testify to what happened in there. Let ‘em stay, let ‘em talk, pour ‘em a drink even. Just stop reorganizing the whole outfit around the preferences of people still standing in the vestibule deciding whether to come in. Leave the porch light on for the stragglers. Fine. Give ‘em a folding chair. But quit sending the whole fuckin’ team out into the dark to beat the bushes for a guy who left the building years ago. There’s a bowling alley full of people right here, man, who’ve never once been asked to join the league. The last gettable Republican’s probably already been gotten. The Dude abides.