Republican group planning $50M campaign to block Trump from reelection

An anti-Trump Republican group is planning to spend $50 million in a campaign to stop the former president from winning a second term in the White House.

Republican Voters Against Trump plans to share testimonial videos of Trump’s past backers who will share why they won’t be supporting the former president come November. 

The campaign is orchestrated by Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has long been critical of Trump. The plan is to target “moderate Republican” and Republican-leaning voters in swing states with videos. The group had a similar strategy in 2020, when they shared more than 1,000 testimonials during an election that President Biden won. 

The ads featuring the former Trump voter testimonials will be deployed on TV, streaming platforms, billboards, radio and digital media. They will run in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. 

Longwell believes the anti-Trump coalition built up in 2020 was one of the determining factors in that contest, and that expanding the demographic in 2024 could be a determining factor in whether Trump returns to the White House.

“Former Republicans and Republican-leaning voters hold the key to 2024, and reaching them with credible, relatable messengers is essential to re-creating the anti-Trump coalition that made the difference in 2020,” Longwell, the president of the group’s Republican Accountability PAC, said in a Tuesday statement.

“It establishes a permission structure that says that — whatever their complaints about Joe Biden — Donald Trump is too dangerous and too unhinged to ever be president again. Who better to make this case than the voters who used to support him?”

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The voters who are sharing their testimonies are generally not applauding Biden or arguing why he should be reelected in 2024, but mostly sharing which incidents made them oppose the former president. 

“I voted for Donald Trump in 2020. January 6 was the end of Donald Trump for me,” Ethan, a Wisconsin resident, says in the video. He will be voting for Biden. “The peaceful transfer of power is one of the defining pieces of our democracy, and I could not believe that someone I had formerly supported would get behind an effort that would throw that under the bus … There is no choice.”