At last week’s Democratic National Convention, a number of these people were given speaking slots. This included former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, and former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan. 

The general pitch was this: “We don’t agree with the Democratic Party on policy, but we are voting for their candidate because Donald Trump is such a horrible threat to democracy that he must be defeated, and we are willing to cross party lines to save the Republican Party from itself.”

But no matter what these people may have said on the convention stage, on cable news, or in their million-dollar books, their break from the Republican Party has as much to do with policy as it does with Trump. Whether they admit it or not, by breaking with the GOP and embracing the Democrats, these people are, in fact, finding their true ideological home in 2024.

The list of Republicans for Harris is long, and assessing the political ideology of each one will require a dive into history that would far exceed the word count of this column. However, the writings, public statements, and votes in Congress by these people are important for understanding how they went from GOP stalwarts to aligning themselves with the most liberal presidential ticket in U.S. history.

Trump has orchestrated an ideological realignment within the Republican Party the likes of which has not been seen in generations. He has brought new working-class voters into the party who were the bedrock of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama coalitions while pushing educated suburban voters toward Democrats.

And he did it by challenging Republican orthodoxies on a number of policies. The first and most important was repudiating the idea that the party needed to moderate on immigration and embrace amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Then, to top it all off, he pledged to build a wall and “make Mexico pay for it.”

Just two years earlier, a group of 14 Republicans joined with every Democrat in the Senate to vote for the so-called Gang of Eight bill, which would have provided millions of illegal immigrants with a pathway to citizenship. While the bill died in the House, the Republican support for the bill highlighted just how strong the desire was in the party for amnesty leading up to the 2016 election. The belief was that without Hispanic voters, the party would soon be reduced to irrelevancy and that supporting a pathway to citizenship would lead to more of these voters considering Republican candidates in the future.

Trump also orchestrated shifts in trade and foreign policy. Prior to 2016, the unquestionable position of Republican politicians on trade was that all trade is good and any attempt to restrict trade will lead to more expensive goods and fewer profits. Trump came on the scene and started assailing every trade deal passed in the past 30 years by both parties. At the same time, he challenged the Republican orthodoxy about foreign aid and involvement in conflicts overseas such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The emergence of a populist wing of the Republican Party was a first for the 21st century GOP, but it proved to be a winning message that resonated everywhere except for Washington, D.C., Wall Street, and San Francisco, propelling Trump to the presidency in 2016.

But for the members of a party that had for a long time enjoyed a cushy relationship with large corporations, banks, and the Chamber of Commerce, Trump’s victory presented an uncomfortable reality. They could either cozy up to him while voting against his agenda and likely stay in power, or they could repudiate him publicly and lose any hope of enjoying the support of the party’s grassroots. The majority opted for the former. But in 2018, a large number of Republicans lost their seats as Democrats took control of the House of Representatives.

Over the next six years, the ranks of the anti-populist GOP started to thin further through retirements and primary losses, replaced with more politicians who were far more on board with the Trump policy agenda than their predecessors. And when the riot took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a group of those same anti-populist Republicans thought that Trump would be gone for good if they publicly opposed him once more. 

But then Trump roared back from political death and is now in a stronger position to win the presidency than he ever was in his prior two campaigns. This has left the anti-Trump Republicans with three choices: stay silent, vote third party, or publicly endorse President Joe Biden and, later, Kamala Harris.

It should be noted that no two Republicans for Harris are the same. And there are members of this group that have little interest in policy and instead have a track record of dishonest behavior. But a not insignificant number of these former Republicans left their party because of concrete policy differences, not abstract appeals to the preservation of democracy.

For many of them, it starts with support for a foreign policy regime that has lost favor with the Trump-led GOP. 

New York Times columnist David French, who previously worked for National Review and the Dispatch, explained that his support for Harris was due to foreign policy. In a recent column, French, who is pro-life, said he was voting for the pro-abortion Harris to “save conservatism from itself.” He boiled his support for Harris down to this: “The most concretely conservative action I can take in this election is to vote for the candidate who will stand against Vladimir Putin.” 

French said he fears that if Trump were to win, “it will validate his … ideological transformation of the Republican Party.” His position is entirely consistent with his prior public statements. In 2019, he was still defending the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Trump famously said was a mistake during the 2016 campaign.

Kinzinger, who spoke at the DNC, is pretty similar. Throughout his last term in Congress, Kinzinger made Ukraine funding a major cause of his remaining time in office. But his voting record also betrayed someone who is fundamentally at odds with the populism of the Trump years. In fact, it is among the more liberal voting records for a Republican in Congress in recent years.

During the first two years of the Biden administration, he joined with Democrats to pass several gun control measures. But during the Trump administration, he stymied efforts to balance the budget. During the Obama administration, he voted in favor of protecting the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program, an Obama-era policy that shielded illegal immigrant children from deportation, and in favor of expanding the selective service to women while voting against bills to curb wasteful spending. He also voted to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, a massive expansion of government power in K-12 education from the Bush years. 

Not all Republicans for Harris are simply aligning themselves with the party that was always their natural fit. Some anti-Trump former Republicans have undergone an ideological shift that coincided with their decision to oppose Trump publicly.

Former Rep. Joe Walsh, who served one term in Congress in the 2010s, is one of those people. In 2016, Walsh, then a talk show host on conservative radio, famously claimed that if Hillary Clinton won the election the next day, he was “grabbing my musket.” By 2020, he had written a book titled F*** Silence and was running against Trump in the Republican primary. He publicly supported Biden that year and is again supporting the Democratic ticket in 2024.

Walsh’s most astonishing flip has been his full-throated embrace of the Democratic Party’s appeal to identity politics and accepting the premise of critical race theory, which claims the United States is systemically racist against racial minorities, particularly black people.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

In an X post last year, Walsh said police treat people differently based on their skin color, and he has said he is now “more aware of systemic racism & basic injustices.” He has also endorsed the claim that Republicans who remove pornographic material from school libraries are “banning books.”

This is hardly an exhaustive list of the wide range of policy positions and motivations within the Republicans for Harris tent. And certainly these former Republicans will disagree with the Harris agenda on some issues. But when they say that opposing Trump is about “defending democracy,” they are omitting the fact that for most of them, it’s about policy, too.