Sarah Longwell on the Future of the Republican Party

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. The views and opinions of the author are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aspen Institute.  

You’re someone who deeply understands the attitudes of the Republican voting base — and right now, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, you’re entirely focused on trying to change those attitudes. So how do you help someone keep hold of their political identity while asking them to vote against their party?

This is why we built Republican Voters Against Trump, because explicitly what we wanted to do is to create something of a mini tribe. Politics is very tribal. And people have deep attachments to their political party. People say all the time, as one of the key things that define them, "Look, I've been a Republican since Ronald Reagan, or I've been a Republican my whole life, or I've always voted Republican," and that's important to them. So it's a lot to ask people to all at once renounce their political tribe if that's something that has been definitional to them.

What we want to do is help separate for people their party identity from support for Trump. Republican Voters Against Trump is made up of a lot of people who've been lifelong Republicans, people who maybe even voted for Trump —actually our 2024 campaign is almost exclusively people who voted for Trump at some point.

One of the things that we have found through all of our research in terms of who people trust, you know, they don't trust experts a lot anymore. They certainly don't trust politicians. They trust people like them. So Republican Voters Against Trump is about elevating the voices of people who say, "Look, I'm a Republican, but I'm not going to vote for Trump," and to create sort of a mini tribe of people who still feel like they are committed to certain values, conservative values or Republican values, but absolutely won't support Trump.

You’ve joked that you are “just your average, traditional lesbian Republican.” Reflecting more deeply on this, you’ve said, “To be a gay Republican was to recognize that Republicans were going to dislike you because you were gay, and Democrats were going to dislike you for being Republican, and you had to walk your path because you felt like it was the right thing to do.” What have you learned from walking this path? How do you draw upon your personal experience when talking to voters?

To me, it's just about showing up authentically and being able to talk to people and say, "Look, I'm a multidimensional human just like you are." When people talk about politics, they tend to put people in boxes, you know, demographic boxes and age boxes and geographical boxes. And the fact is, people don't really fit super neatly into a lot of these boxes. And what people respond to and what makes them willing to talk to me and my team as we pursue the work of trying to understand voters, is that both we approach it without a lot of judgment, with a lot of curiosity as to why people think the way they do, but also we're very clear about where we stand.

I don't calibrate my political opinions for anybody. It's really been about freeing myself from the idea that I need to be part of any particular political tribe. Obviously, I come from the center right and I still believe in a lot of things like limited government and free markets and American leadership in the world, but I also believe in pro choice and pro LGBT rights. So it's about being able to talk about all that complexity and helping other people share their complexity.

Since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, you’ve conducted some 250 focus groups with Republican voters. What have you learned about the mindset and behavior of these voters? What stands out the most?

Because I've been doing them now for years, some of what has interested me the most is just how much the Republican Party has changed. I often tell people when I give talks, "If there's one thing you remember about me, this person that you've never heard of, the random Republican and what I said, it's that the Republican Party is not going back to the days of Mitt Romney or George W. Bush." It'll just save people time.

When people ask "Well, where's it headed?" Obviously, I don't know for sure where the party is headed affirmatively, but I can tell you it is not going back to the days of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. Because the voters don't want it. They like what Donald Trump is offering with his burn it all down mentality. And people feel like things are bad and they want to shake things up.

There's a lot of talk about authoritarianism and strongman, and if you say to a voter, "Do you want to live in an authoritarian country?" they'll be like, "What's authoritarianism?" Or they'll say no. But what has really struck me is the extent to which voters want certain policy outcomes, but they do not want their elected representatives to compromise. And compromise is the necessary mechanism through which policy is forged and which results are gained. So if you punish politicians for compromising, you will find yourself without any results. And when you become frustrated that there are no results, that's why you reach for somebody who basically says without compromise, and without working with anybody else, I'm just gonna get these things done. I think that's how you lapse into something that looks like authoritarianism, is when you've decided that compromise is a bad thing. And voters really do think it's a bad thing. So to me, one of the fundamental things we've got to reignite is people's sense that compromising with the other side is good.

You’ve argued that we need to tell a better story of democracy, saying, “We are not going to stave off this dangerous version of the Republican Party by telling people to put democracy over party…The fact that voters don't think much about democracy is actually our greatest opportunity.” What do you mean by that?

Another observation about voters is how not tuned in they are oftentimes. For people who exist in the world of politics, they assume everybody has the same information they do. But actually, most people are just out there living their lives. And if you ask them, "What is democracy?" they're gonna have a hard time answering or you'll get a ton of different answers. Some people might say voting. Some people might say checks and balances. But mostly, people are kind of sitting there. It's an idea that they have a hard time articulating, because in America, democracy is just "that thing we do here." To tell a better story about democracy, to make people believe in democracy, to make people support democracy and think that it's a thing worth fighting for, you have to tell a better story about America.

One of the reasons I became Republican, one of the things that attracted me to conservatism in the first place, was that I felt like the left didn't think America was a great place. And one of the things that's been stunning about watching Donald Trump in the Republican Party is the extent to which Donald Trump's vision of America is incredibly dark, so different from Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill." Donald Trump talks about American carnage and a nation in decline. This vision of America as a terrible place is something new on the right, something pretty unique to Trump that now is broadly felt.

As Democrats have tried to defend democracy in the face of Trump's attacks, I think people have tried to figure out how do you talk to people about democracy? How do you make them value democracy? How do you make them vote on this issue? And my belief is simply that getting people to feel better about democracy is getting them to feel better about America.

You want them to believe in our elections, it's about believing that in America, we do things the right way. We used to think our election system was the envy of the world, we would go teach everybody else how to hold democratic elections, and now we say that they're rigged and stolen. And of course, that's not true.

But look, liberal democracy is nothing other than a collection of institutions. And institutions don't protect themselves. Figuring out how to rebuild faith in American institutions and rebuild faith in the American experiment is essential to figuring out how to get people to reengage and believe in democracy. What I mean by it's our biggest opportunity is that voters don't think about democracy much, which means we have an opportunity to define it for them again, to rephrase the conversation, to get them to recommit to what it means. When you think about toxic political tribes and what do you do to get over that, well, you get them to invest in the bigger tribe, which is America.

When you think about the future of your party, what do you hope for?

I wish for a healthy Republican party, because we don't have one right now. I think we need at least two healthy political parties in this country. What I hope for in the short term is that the Republican party endures sustained electoral defeats so that it has an incentive to change away from this dangerous thing that it's become. I think only through those sustained electoral defeats do you create the incentives for the party to change and to become a healthier version of itself. Honestly, I don't care if ultimately it ends up being quite different from the party that I joined, as long as it's not actively threatening all of the institutions and norms and values of liberal democracy.