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Their battle plan: Hope for the best next week, then try again in six months in the rematch, when Democrats expect their voters will show up with the presidential election on the ballot.

We dont underestimate how much of a Republican-leaning district this could be in May, but that will be a different electorate in November, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) said, noting that the winner will serve only a limited time in Congress. We dont get in this to lose a race, but I do think that in November, Christy will be successful.

Yet a victory by Republican Mike Garcia, a 44-year-old former Naval aviator and defense contractor, would provide a jolt of energy to the GOPs efforts to reclaim some of its lost suburban territory even as the partys chances of recapturing the House majority appear to be dwindling.

The close race is remarkable, in part, because voters in the district, which spans the northern Los Angeles suburbs, backed Hillary Clinton by 7 points two years prior. And President Donald Trump is still highly unpopular there; one Democratic survey found his favorability ratings underwater by double digits. Those same conditions could be present in several key seats that Republicans hope to flip back.

State Assemblywoman Christy Smith. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo

It is not a unique district. It is similar to many of the districts that we won in the fall, said one Democratic consultant who works on House races. This was an anti-Trump response district, and if were ebbing in those districts we need to find out why. We cant just brush it off.

Trump gave Garcia his "complete & total endorsement" in a series of tweets Saturday.

Because of the coronavirus outbreak, the election will be conducted almost entirely by mail, and ballot return tallies thus far ballots must be postmarked by Tuesday and received by Friday in order to be counted have only contributed to Democrats fears.

The electorate so far is older, less diverse and more likely to favor the GOP. Of more than 118,000 returned ballots counted as of Friday, 44 percent are from registered Republicans, and just 36 percent are from Democrats, according to Paul Mitchell, the vice president of Political Data Inc., a bipartisan company that analyzes voter data.

Look at the age breakdown, Mitchell said in an interview, pointing to turnout rates that showed that 15 percent of voters under 35 years old have returned their ballots thus far, compared to 49 percent of those 65 and older. "Thats a big deal. The Latino population is pretty significant here," he added, "but theyre turning out at half the rate of white voters.

Privately, Democrats are pessimistic about their odds. The DCCC has spent over $1 million on TV ads boosting Smith after the March 3 primary, but the cavalry of outside groups that typically drop millions in special elections has largely sat out the race.

Both House Majority PAC and EMILYs List, which endorsed Smith, concluded the May electorate skewed too heavily toward Republicans and the cost of running ads in the pricey Los Angeles market was too high to justify a major investment when the winner would serve for only a few months before facing voters again, according to sources with knowledge of their spending decisions.

Democrats maintain that the GOP advantage will evaporate in November, when turnout will return to normal levels. Democrats have a voter registration advantage of nearly 30,000 in the district.

I think thats why a lot of groups are kind of pushing the pause button, said Aguilar, who co-chairs the DCCCs program for top offensive targets. And I think its a realization that the dynamics in this race in November are going to just be very different and lean our way significantly.

Yet some worry a Republican victory in the suburbs could set a concerning narrative, spur a surge in donations and energy in other Clinton-won districts that the GOP needs if they have any chance of taking back the House. Plus, Garcia could get a boost from his win, offering him a limited power of incumbency and a solid fundraising perch.

I mean, it wouldnt be good, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) said of a potential loss on Tuesday. This is the only election, and this is a seat we won. So any time you lose a seat thats concerning. You dont take that for granted.

But Bass said she believes Smith will win and predicted that polls trying to gauge an all-mail election during a global crisis were portraying the race to be closer than it is.

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In an interview, Smith, a 50-year-old former school board member who flipped a red state Assembly seat in 2018, said she understood the need to allocate resources wisely and conceded her path to victory would be easier in November. But she also framed this election in dire terms.

The reason Im running is because my constituents cant afford to wait, especially in this Covid recovery moment, she said. We need a seat at the table for all of these decisions that are going to be made and someone who is there stridently fighting for what our community needs.

The race will be the first substantive test of how the pandemic affects federal elections. Both Smith and Garcia have been forced to wage largely virtual campaigns from their homes.

Garcia is running heavily on his bio as a former Naval aviator who returned to the district to work for Raytheon, a defense contractor.

He landed a Twitter endorsement from Trump but is also hoping to pick up independents turned off by the president. He has avoided many recent requests for media interviews, including for this story. And Democrats complain that has allowed him to avoid taking positions on key issues, including the administrations Covid-19 response.

Democrats dominate the congressional delegation in California, holding 46 of the state's 53 seats after netting 7 seats in 2018, including the 25th District. Republicans haven't flipped a House seat in California since 1998, when the GOP won two open seats that were held by Democrats.

After Hill resigned from the seat last fall, former Rep. Steve Knight (R-Calif.) announced a comeback bid. The DCCC and HMP, eager to face a foe they had easily dispatched, spent over $1 million to try and knock him into the runoff with Smith. But Knight (17 percent) finished a distant third place behind Smith (36 percent) and Garcia (25 percent) in the all-party election.

Privately, some Democrats have questioned the efficacy of expending precious resources trying to choose Smiths opponent in the runoff.

Republicans have hammered Smith as a Sacramento politician with a weak track record on education. And they seized on a gaffe she made on a livestream in which she appeared to mock Garcias time in the Navy. (She has since apologized.)

Christy Smith is a horribly flawed candidate who spit in the face of Mike Garcias military service and the public school teachers she voted to fire, NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said in a statement. These issues are going to sink her campaign next Tuesday, and they will keep her sunk in November.

Democratic strategists believe the fall election will be more of a referendum on the president, and that the shadow of Hills resignation will have subsided. Private Democratic polling from December found Hill's unfavorable rating exceeded her favorable rating by double digits, according to a source familiar with the survey.

Hill waded into the race in April with her new PAC, cutting a direct-to-camera TV ad aimed at juicing Democratic turnout. Her $200,000 expenditure caught the DCCC by surprise, according to a source familiar with spending in the race.

In an interview late last month, Hill said she believed she was still popular with Democrats in the district and hoped her familiar face would boost turnout among her partys low-propensity voters.

I was hoping that the race would be much easier to win, right? she said. And we want to be smart about how we spend the money. Do you spend it now, or do you spend it in November?

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Democrats are on verge of the unthinkable: Losing a swing district in California - POLITICO

Its ridiculous, said one Democratic operative familiar with the dispute, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the situation. There were dozens of candidates [with qualified employees] and the parties are being asked to prioritize the rich guys staff over everyone elses.

David Bergstein, the DNCs director of communications for battleground states, did not dispute that the DNC is pushing some state parties to hire ex-Bloomberg aides. But he said that every potential staffer goes through a competitive hiring process.

Bergstein added that the Bloomberg campaign ended with a very large pool of available and talented staff in many battlegrounds, and were making sure they, along with others who are interested, have opportunities to apply to our state organizing programs."

The state parties' resistance has in turn irked Bloombergs team. If people don't want the money, they can return it and it will be put to use in alternative efforts to defeat President Trump," a Bloomberg spokesperson told POLITICO. The Bloomberg campaign made the largest transfer in DNC history, $18 million, to help boost the DNC's coordinated efforts, including by enabling them to hire field organizers of ours who wanted to continue through November. It is certainly our hope that effort not only continues, but accelerates.

The rancor has highlighted Bloombergs growing influence in the Democratic Party as a donor and power broker after his failed presidential campaign, which now extends to hiring and contracting decisions. The rift over Bloomberg staffers is not an academic matter for Democrats: As Joe Biden ramps up his digital operation and shifts increasingly to online campaigning, the battleground organizers are some of the only on-the-ground infrastructure Democrats have in swing states right now.

Bloombergs digital operation has also been a point of contention since he left the race. The digital firm he started, Hawkfish, is seeking to take over large parts of Bidens digital operation for the general election, a possibility that has caused a clash inside the campaign.

Part of the disagreement over the staffers seems to stem from differing expectations of what Bloombergs money would be used for. The Bloomberg team argued that $18 million is enough to hire 500 additional organizers, but the DNC said it is using that money to hire people faster and ahead of schedule rather than increasing the expected size of its battleground organizing teams.

The DNC has also been committing money to other areas, such as recently reserving $22 million in YouTube ads for the fall.

One of the three senior state party aides said some of the Bloomberg staffers were underqualified and overpaid on his presidential campaign, and had outsized expectations. Entry-level organizing staffers on the Bloomberg campaign were paid at a rate of $72,000 a year, nearly double the salary of similar positions on other presidential campaigns.

Theyve been frickin spoiled, the person said. The two trends we noticed: They overshot what they were applying for and some felt as though they should have been compensated more than we were willing to go.

[The DNC] did make it clear it was a priority for them, the state party aide added. It was clearly a priority that they be able to show that they hired a lot more ex-Bloomberg [staffers] than they had to that date.

Other state party officials expressed gratitude to the DNC and Bloomberg for the large infusion of resources.

These early investments have helped us dramatically grow our organizing programs and ensure we have the folks we need to connect with voters early and across the Commonwealth, Lauren Reyes, Virginias Democratic Coordinated Campaign Director, said in a statement through a DNC spokesperson.

Even state party officials who were frustrated by the pressure to hire Bloomberg staffers, however, said they ultimately blamed Bloomberg for the problem. In order to ramp up his campaign quickly, Bloomberg enticed employees with a pledge that they would have jobs through November. After he lost the primary, Bloomberg abruptly fired most of the 2,400 members of the staff, leaving them unemployed and without health insurance amid an economy in freefall. The former New York City mayor, who is estimated to be one of the richest 10 people in the world, is facing two class-action lawsuits from former aides over the situation.

After a barrage of criticism, Bloomberg relented last week and offered to pay for health care coverage for his former campaign staff through COBRA until November, citing these extraordinary circumstances.

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Democrats fume over having to clean up Bloomberg's mess - POLITICO

Between the governor and the mayor of Charlotte, who is also a Democrat, they really do control whether or not [the Republican convention] will happen, said David McLennan, director of the Meredith Poll, a statewide public opinion poll of North Carolina voters.

As one of a handful of Democratic governors in a Trump-friendly state, Coopers handling of the coronavirus is a test of his leadership and political savvy. So far, his wait-and-see approach to reopening North Carolina has boded well for him: A late April Meredith Poll showed two-thirds of North Carolinians including a plurality of Republicans approve of his job performance.

Those numbers have made Cooper a slight favorite to win a second term. But his popularity surge could be short-lived if the health crisis grinds on for months. Some Republicans have pushed Cooper to accelerate statewide reopening measures as other Southern states such as Georgia, Tennessee and neighboring South Carolina are doing in the face of skyrocketing unemployment and economic stress.

But what makes Coopers situation unique is the authority he wields over the other partys national convention. Trump has been adamant about having a full-scale in-person convention, but as those plans forge ahead, Cooper will have to walk a fine line between protecting and alienating his constituents.

The governor could ban such a large gathering outright. Or he could limit the number of people allowed to gather in any given place. But any moves to curb the convention could inflame Trump and his base and prove politically costly to Cooper in November.

It would be horrible for the governor to get out and try to clamp down on a nominating convention, said Daniel Barry, the former chairman of the Union County Republican Party. It would take something very dramatic for the state or the City of Charlotte to react in such a fashion and pull the plug.

The Republican National Committee is still scheduled to hold its convention in Charlotte, N.C., in late August. | Chuck Burton, File/AP Photo

Cooper has steered clear of predictions about the fate of the convention. Aides and Democrats in the state who work closely with him say he sees the event, which was expected to inject $200 million into the states economy, as a boon to North Carolina. If hes forced to call it off or scale it back, they said, it will be because public health officials whose advice he has heeded say it's too dangerous.

Republican officials said they havent had extensive discussions with Cooper about the convention; most of the talks have been between Charlotte's Mayor Vi Lyles, a Democrat, and GOP brass. But they said theyre not concerned that Cooper will pump the brakes on their convention plans.

On April 28, Charlottes Democratic-dominated city council voted 6-5 to accept a $50 million grant from the Justice Department to cover insurance and security costs for the convention, marking an important step forward. Opponents said holding a 50,000-person convention would be impossible to pull off and dangerous to public health.

During an April 3 Twitter town hall, Lyles hesitated to echo the GOPs full-speed-ahead message but said the city is "proceeding in that direction" [of hosting the convention] and has a contractual agreement with the Republican National Committee to do so.

Lyles addressed growing concerns during a second online forum on April 17, saying, I dont have an answer to say yes or no [about whether the convention will occur]. I have an answer to say we will be guided by the best decisions for our residents.

Democrats in the state who want the convention mainly point to the economic lift it would provide. Republicans see it as a needed boost for Trumps base and means of propelling Coopers challenger, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, in the fall governors race.

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. | Chuck Burton, File/AP Photo

According to a report from the governors office, North Carolina is flattening its coronavirus curve. But if North Carolina sees a second wave of infections close to August, Cooper will have to make a decision on whether or not Trumps show will go on.

Neighboring states like South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee relaxed stay-at-home orders as early as April 30, allowing residents to begin dining in restaurants and shopping in retail stores.

Cooper, by contrast, has taken a more measured approach. Hes employed a three-phase reopening strategy that allows nonessential businesses to reopen as early as Saturday but keeps a stay-at-home order in place for two to three more weeks, well beyond the edicts of other Deep South states.

I know people want their lives and their livelihoods back, Cooper said at an April 23 news conference at which he unveiled his reopening plans. And I have a plan to do that. But first, we need to hit certain metrics because the health and safety of North Carolinians is our No. 1 priority.

Cooper declined an interview request. But a senior political adviser, Morgan Jackson, said the governor "is not making any decisions based on Facebook comments and angry tweets, or signs that people are walking around carrying. Hes making them on health experts, data, science and also in consultation with business leaders and economists.

Cooper, 62, has been a fixture in North Carolina for more than three decades, including four terms as state attorney general. In 2007, he made national news in the infamous Duke lacrosse case, declaring that three players accused of sexual assault were victims of a tragic rush to accuse. In 2016, Cooper defeated Republican Gov. Pat McCrory after an uproar over the states bathroom law, becoming the first person to defeat a sitting governor in modern state history.

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The Southern Democrat with the power to shut down Trump's convention - POLITICO

SALT LAKE CITY Americans and the world have come to realize that, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, China isnt just another trading partner, Rep. Chris Stewart said Friday.

Theyre not just a guy across the ocean who builds really cool plastic things, he said on KSL Newsradios Live Mic. China has an ambition to be not just one of, but to be the single dominant influence in the world militarily, politically, economically, diplomatically.

Stewart said the Republican-led congressional task force he was named to Thursday has an opportunity to recognize that as it looks at issues in the U.S.-China relationship regarding coronavirus, intelligence military, education and others. Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, is also a member of the group, which held its first meeting Friday.

China was a geopolitical threat well before COVID-19, and the past few weeks have only increased the urgency to address existing and emerging threats head on, according to Stewart.

There is a broad scope to this, he said.

The 15-member panel was originally supposed to include Democrats, but they withdrew from the project after several months of discussion, and Republicans decided to move ahead without them.

We were about to make an announcement about mid-February, and the day before they backed out of it, and I really dont understand that, Stewart said.

Jon Huntsman Jr., the former U.S. ambassador to China, said on Live Mic that the lack of bipartisanship on the task force concerns him because the Chinese know how to divide and conquer. Theyll know exactly that it isnt a unified group.

Huntsman said if Congress cant figure how to make the coronavirus a matter of national interest, then something has gone horribly wrong.

What would really resonate with the Chinese as opposed to another working group or task force, which theyre probably not going to take too terribly seriously, would be a unified Congress making an expression about Americas outrage with respect to the coronavirus and what we are prepared to do about it long term, he said.

China, he said, fears the U.S. when it is unified.

They dont fear us when were divided because they figure thats never going to amount to very much at all, he said.

Huntsman, a former GOP Utah governor who is running for his old job, said when China knew about the outbreak and for how long it withheld that information are the biggest issues facing the U.S. right now.

They lied, and everyone suffers the implications, he said.

Curtis said in a statement Thursday there is a need for a unified and bipartisan voice on China and hoped the Democrats would soon join the group.

Stewart, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the China task force is different from other congressional working groups. He said he has dedicated one staff member to work on it full time.

This ones got teeth, he said. We will have the backbone to actually create something.

Stewart the group would produce a readable report to help inform people about the challenge China poses to the U.S. and also craft legislation to deal with some of the issues.

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How effective will GOP-led task force on China be without Democrats? - KSL.com

Anti-Donald Trump activism among conservatives known informally as the #NeverTrump movement started in early 2016 as a way to stop the businessman from winning the GOP nomination. It failed.

Even by the slightly broader standard of influencing Republican politics, #NeverTrump has been largely unsuccessful. Trump won around 90 percent of self-identified Republican voters in 2016, similar to past GOP presidential nominees. About 90 percent of Republicans have approved of Trump throughout his first term, similar to George W. Bushs standing in his first four years in office. And with Trump as the face of the party, Republican congressional candidates won around 90 percent of the GOP vote in the 2018 midterms, just as in recent midterm elections. There is really only one anti-Trump figure among the 249 Republicans on Capitol Hill: Sen. Mitt Romney.

Never Trumpers tried to draft a high-profile Republican like Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to run against Trump for the GOP nomination. That didnt pan out either. Facing fairly weak opponents, Trump easily won the GOP primaries that occurred earlier this year. Polls also suggest most Republicans will be strongly behind Trump this November too he is getting about 90 percent of the Republican vote in head-to-head match-ups with the presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.

But Never Trumpers are increasingly involved in the Democratic Party and have gradually shifted their tactics in that direction effectively becoming a Never Trump and Never Bernie Sanders coalition. And they appear to be having more success shaping their new party than the one that many of them had been associated with for much of their lives. Heres how that shift has happened.

By pure numbers, the anti-Trump conservative bloc is both fairly small and not that remarkable. The group of Republican voters who disapprove of Trump is similar (but slightly smaller) than Democrats who disapproved of then-President Barack Obama during his first term. Conservatives who really hate Trump probably no longer identify as Republicans 11 percent of Republicans switched their party affiliation between December 2015 and March 2017, according to Pew. But surveys suggest that the share of Democrats switching affiliation in that same period is about the same. Its hard to be precise about this: Data suggests at most 10 percent of American voters overall are anti-Trump but generally lean Republican. Thats not nothing, but between 40 and 50 percent of Americans are likely to vote for Trump in November.

But while this hard to prove conclusively, anti-Trump conservatives are arguably way overrepresented in elite media, at least compared to their numbers in the general population. The New York Times, for example, has three conservative-leaning but Trump-skeptical opinion columnists David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and no columnists who regularly align with the president. MSNBC has programs fronted by two anti-Trump hosts once closely aligned with the GOP establishment ex-Rep. Joe Scarborough and Nicolle Wallace, a former communications director for President George W. Bush and no explicitly pro-Trump hosts. Among the 53 Washington Post opinion writers highlighted on the papers website, seven are people who have identified with conservatives and/or the Republican Party in the past but regularly attack Trump. Just four are conservatives who regularly defend the president. Numerous anti-Trump conservatives are also featured prominently on CNN.

How did this happen? Well, from the media perspective, the prominence of Never Trump conservatives makes perfect sense. The readers and watchers of The Post, The Times and MSNBC in particular are disproportionately left-leaning. So these audiences probably dont want too much explicitly pro-Trump commentary. At the same time, news outlets usually like to present themselves as both offering a diverse set of voices and not too closely aligned with one party or the other. So by featuring, for example, George Conway, a conservative lawyer turned Never Trump leader who sharply criticizes the president in his cable news appearances and columns in The Washington Post, the press can essentially suggest, Its not just the liberal media, even Republicans were angry when Trump did X.

But its not simply as if the media has hired every Republican who says that they dont like Trump. Many of the conservatives in high-profile media slots (like Brooks) were there before Trumps rise. Robert Saldin, a political science professor at the University of Montana and co-author of a new book on anti-Trump conservatives, said the kind of conservatives who get jobs at places like CNN were predisposed to dislike a Trump-style GOP politician.

Many prominent Never Trumpers, Saldin said, operate and make a living in liberal institutions. They think of their jobs as translating conservative ideas to liberals. They had invested in the idea that conservatism was respectable, he said. In particular, Saldin said, these figures had worked hard to suggest that racism was not a major feature of conservatism.

So they were particularly horrified by Trump because he embodied what they had spent their careers saying was not conservatism, he added.

In my interviews with several prominent Never Trump conservatives, they not only suggested the groups high-media profile was somewhat accidental, but were kind of defensive about it.

Tim Miller, a prominent Never Trump activist who worked on Sen. John McCain and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bushs presidential campaigns, dismissed the notion that Never Trumpers are only in green rooms.

But getting into media consumed by liberals is in some ways the only game in town for anti-Trump conservatives, since Fox News is very pro-Trump and features few critics of the president. And that platform to reach Democrats has been particularly useful for Never Trump conservatives because

The core argument of Never Trump Republicans goes something like this:

This argument may not be totally true. And the Never Trump narrative is clearly self-serving of course a group of conservatives who feel like they dont fit in the current Republican Party prefer a more conservative Democratic Party that they can align with.

But true or not, this narrative matters because it has mirrored and likely influenced the Democratic Partys post-Trump strategy. Since Trumps victory, Democrats have done a lot of soul-searching. Is the party too left? Or is it too establishment and centrist? Are Democrats ignorant of the concerns of the Americans who dont live on the coasts? Are they too focused on nonwhite voters or not focused on them enough?

Faced with these complicated questions in 2017 and 2018, Democrats took an approach that was broadly similar to the Never Trumpers attacking Trump as a uniquely dangerous threat to American democracy while resisting more liberal policy ideas and recruiting fairly centrist candidates in key congressional races. This approach led some Never Trumpers to get behind Democrats in the midterms moving beyond simply opposing Trump to fighting the Republican Party more broadly.

By at least early 2018, if not late 2017, there was general understanding that we needed to build a cross-partisan pro-democracy coalition that could prevail over Trumpism, which meant helping to unite Democrats, independents and principled conservatives, said Evan McMullin, the anti-Trump conservative who ran for president in 2016 and now runs a group called Stand Up Republic that focuses on defending democratic values.

Fortunately, Democratic leadership and many candidates in competitive districts naturally understood this opportunity and what it required, he added. Unifying candidates like Ben McAdams in Utah and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia were examples of those who attracted the support of principled conservatives and Republicans.

Its hard to quantify exactly how many anti-Trump conservatives backed Democrats in 2018 and how big a role they played in Democrats taking the House and winning many key governors races. But that temporary alliance between Never Trump Republicans and Democrats was strengthened in 2019 for two reasons. First, Never Trump Republicans found there was little appetite in the GOP for a primary challenge to Trump another illustration of their declining influence within the party. And second, in a final blow for some of them, Republicans largely stood by Trump even as details emerged about his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

I was so sure there was going to be a handful of Republicans who were going to say it was clearly wrong, said Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican strategist who was heavily involved in the effort to recruit a challenger to Trump. She added, Its been a slow realization that there isnt anybody left who is going to say anything.

In response, many of the Never Trumpers decided to get even deeper into Democratic politics, injecting themselves into the partys fractious presidential primary. And they had an obvious path to take: While Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were pushing Democrats to take more liberal policy stands, several candidates were echoing the views of the Never Trumpers. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was arguing that a Democratic candidate with fairly moderate policy ideas could win over Republicans in a general election, emphasizing his potential appeal to future former Republicans. Sen. Amy Klobuchar made similar arguments. Biden was publicly noting how much he likes the writings of The New York Timess Brooks, who was calling for Democrats to avoid going too far left.

When Sanders did well in the early primaries and seemed like he could win the Democratic nomination, Never Trump conservatives turned into a Never Bernie coalition. The Never Trumpers argument that Sanders couldnt win the general election, in part because anti-Trump Republicans (like themselves) wouldnt vote for him was compelling, particularly for a Democratic Party obsessed with beating Trump. And the Never Trumpers were already in the ideal positions to make these arguments and reach Democratic Party elites and primary voters the web pages of The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post and on MSNBC. Miller, in an anti-Trump publication called The Bulwark, described how he and other Republicans had failed to mobilize effectively against Trump in the 2016 GOP primary and laid out a step-by-step guide for how Democrats could avoid the same fate. (The piece was widely circulated on Twitter.)

Sanderss allies noticed all of this, of course, and started to publicly complain that MSNBC, in particular, was covering his candidacy too negatively. Its hard to prove that a lot of Democratic primary voters were Never Trumpers or that Democratic voters were particularly swayed by the groups warning about Sanders. But Never Trump conservatives were thrilled with Bidens victories on Super Tuesday and think they played a part in it.

One group that really mattered in the primaries were the high-information voters, the people who watch MSNBC, listen to The Daily, said Miller, referring to a popular New York Times podcast. A lot of these people went from Harris to Warren to Buttigieg and finally landed on Biden. For these voters, it was all an assessment of who could defeat Trump. For them, we [Never Trumpers] have a unique experience and insight.

Our message before and during the early primary elections was that principled conservatives and Republicans were a winnable bloc and could provide the decisive votes in general election swing states as long as Democrats didnt nominate a divisive, far-left candidate, McMullin said. Appropriately, Democratic voters prioritized replacing Trump in 2020 above other issues.

As I explained earlier, it is possible that 5 to 10 percent of the people who will vote for Biden in November backed either Romney in 2012 or Trump in 2016 and at some point identified as conservative or Republican. So while Never Trump conservatives are a smaller and less formal constituency in the Democratic Party than black voters, for example, some of them feel exiled from a Republican Party dominated by Trump, backed Democrats in the 2018 midterms and participated in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Michael Halle, a strategist on Buttigiegs campaign, said about 50 of the campaigns county precinct captains in Iowa were former Republicans who changed their party registration to become Democrats so they could participate in the caucuses and back the former mayor.

Those exiled Republicans are already mobilizing behind Biden in the general election. They are urging fellow conservatives not to support Rep. Justin Amash, who left the GOP in 2019 and last week announced an exploratory committee for a presidential run as the Libertarian candidate. They argue Amashs candidacy might increase Trumps chances of reelection.

So Never Trump conservatives can probably make some demands of Biden, just like any other constituency in the party, and he might feel some need to court them.

And that seems to be happening. The former vice president hinted recently that he might name some Republicans to his cabinet or transition team. Rumors of his consideration of Klobuchar for vice president is no doubt largely about her potential appeal to voters in the Midwest, but her more centrist politics also make her a favorite of some moderate Republicans.

I dont know that Biden needs a message for Never Trumpers most Never Trumpers are going to vote for Biden, Miller said. But, he added, I do think eventually the campaign should have a message for them.

Mostly, Never Trumpers simply want Biden to run a general election campaign similar to his primary run, emphasizing more moderate policies and appealing to more centrist voters.

I dont want him to make crazy sacrifices to the left that he doesnt need to make, Miller said.

The extent to which Never Trumpers become card-carrying members of the Democratic Party might have broad implications for the partys future. Are we seeing the birth of a new, ex-conservative faction in the Democratic Party or the resurgence of an existing one, with Never Trump conservatives joining with longtime Democratic moderates? Could that wing of the party become as strong as it was in the 1990s? The 2018 general elections and the 2020 primaries suggest more centrist Democratic candidates are winning among white, college-educated voters in the suburbs against both Trump Republicans but also Sanders Democrats. Thats an opportunity for Democrats to expand their coalition after all, white voters are the majority of American voters. Its also likely to be a challenge: The more liberal bloc of the Democratic Party increasingly favors big, transformative policies on economic issues that longtime moderate Democrats and ex-Republicans are unlikely to ever embrace.

On the other hand, the alliance between Never Trump conservatives and Democrats could be a fleeting one. If Trump loses badly in November, perhaps anti-Trump Republicans can regain influence in the party many of them still want to be in.

If he loses, there is a lot of room for a fight over the soul of the party, Longwell said.

If he wins, then its pretty definitive.

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How Never Trumpers Crashed The Democratic Party - FiveThirtyEight