The Surreal Experience of Being a Republican at the DNC

Geoff Duncan served as the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, and with his conservative suits, power ties, and neatly coiffed hair, he looks the part. But last night at the Democratic National Convention, he delivered an impassioned plea for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

“Let’s get the hard part out of the way: I am a Republican. But tonight I stand here as an American—an American that cares more about the future of this country than the future of Donald Trump,” he said. “Let me be clear to my Republican friends at home watching: If you vote for Harris in 2024, you are not a Democrat. You are a patriot.”

Duncan is one of several Republicans who have spoken at the convention. The former Trump spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham made some news Tuesday night in a speech in which she said Trump called his own supporters “basement dwellers.” Ana Navarro, the CNN personality and former Jeb Bush aide, hosted part of Tuesday’s program. John Giles, who is the mayor of the conservative Arizona city of Mesa, and two former Trump voters spoke in the first half of the week, and former Representative Adam Kinzinger is scheduled to do so this evening. Many conventions have featured a speaker from across the aisle—think Joe Lieberman’s backing of John McCain in 2008 or John Kasich’s support of Joe Biden four years ago—but the number of Republicans at this DNC is remarkable.

For these speakers and for the Democrats, this was a little surreal. Olivia Troye, who worked in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump and who spoke last night, recalled staffing the 2000 Republican National Convention. “If you would have asked that Olivia if I would ever imagine myself at the DNC, I would have laughed and said you were probably crazy,” she told me.

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I watched Duncan’s speech from the floor of the United Center with members of the Georgia delegation. I asked whether they ever expected to be applauding Duncan at the DNC, and they shook their heads and grinned incredulously. “Never. Never,” one said.

“There’s not a lot of Republicans that show up at the DNC, so it was certainly awkward, but I’ve rarely been to a political event where people were as inviting as they were,” Duncan told me this morning. “Not one person walked up to me and questioned my policy positions, my conservative track record. They said, ‘Hey, welcome to the team for this election cycle.’”

Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, came to the convention not as a Harris supporter but as a political analyst for Scripps News. He’d written a social-media post explaining to Republican friends that he was merely attending for work. They might be forgiven for wondering: Hutchinson ran for president in the GOP primary this year, becoming a prominent Trump critic and declining to endorse him (though he has since suggested that he might vote for Trump). Hutchinson has been a Republican official since 1982, and this was his first DNC, too. He told me he was getting a friendlier reception in Chicago than he had at the RNC in Milwaukee. “A lot of people have said, ‘You know, I donated to your campaign,’” he said.

That makes sense: Democrats are happy to celebrate Trump critics. The harder task is getting ordinary Republicans to vote for Harris—or at least to stay home and not vote for Trump. The Harris campaign sees the large number of GOP primary votes cast for Nikki Haley and other non-Trump candidates—including after he had sewn up the nomination—as an opportunity in November. The campaign even has a Republican on the payroll, running outreach to GOP voters. Democrats don’t expect a mass exodus, but they believe that in battleground states a small number of Republican defectors could make a difference.

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That will require winning over not just longtime Never Trumpers, but people who previously were open to Trump and might still be. That’s why the DNC has featured speakers, like Troye, who haven’t been fiercely anti-Trump since the start, and why many of them emphasized their continued political disagreements with the Democratic Party and with Harris herself.

During her speech, Troye described her upbringing as a conservative, a Catholic, and a Texan. “Those values made me a Republican,” she said. “And they’re the same values that make me proud to support Kamala Harris, not because we agree on every issue but because we agree on the most important issue: protecting our freedom.”

Freedom has been a big motif at the Democratic convention, an attempt to frame Harris’s agenda in a way that steals a traditional issue away from Republicans. Democrats in Chicago have embraced the idea. But whether many Republicans are convinced, besides those in attendance here, is a question for November.