Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump walks onstage at a rally on July 31, 2024 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Pennsylvania drivers might begin seeing more billboards featuring ordinary people, like a white-haired, red-shirt wearing man named “Mike,” and a simple message: “I’m a former Trump voter. I’m a patriot. I’m voting for Harris.”
The billboards are paid for by a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, a project of the Republican Accountability PAC, that is hoping the voices of ordinary voters will sway conservatives and independents to support Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, in November.
On Tuesday, the group announced a new $11.5 million campaign that will feature voters like Mike on billboards, online ads and tv and radio commercials in Pennsylvania and other swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona.
But the bulk of the spending, $4.5 million, will target Pennsylvania, which could end up being the decisive state in the 2024 election.
A billboard from Republican Voters Against Trump
John Conway, the D.C.-based director of strategy for Republican Voters Against Trump, is leading the campaign (He claims no relation to perhaps the most famous never-Trumper, George Conway).
“Our campaign is built on the idea that you need to establish permission structures in order to get voters who have historically identified as Republican to vote against their party’s nominee,” Conway said. “The ads themselves are coming right from the same people we’re targeting with these campaigns: center-right former Trump voters who don’t want to vote for him again.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Conway says the group has collected the testimonies of roughly 300 voters who previously cast ballots for former President Donald Trump, but who no longer support him. They constitute the heart of the new advertisements.
While Conway and others leading the project identify as Republicans — Conway supported former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary — some of the Republican Accountability PAC’s biggest donors are liberal. They include Linkedin co-founder and political mega-donor Reid Hoffman and the investor and philanthropist John Pritzker.
“Everybody understands that putting country first is more important than their partisan ideology or partisanship generally,” Conway said. “So we work with people across the aisle to create a pro-democracy coalition in this country.”
Republican Voters Against Trump was established in 2020 to convince conservatives to vote against Trump because of his anti-democratic tendencies. The group bought advertisements during the last presidential election as well as the latest midterm.
In 2022, for example, it ran ads opposing far-right state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin) when he was the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania. Mastriano was a promoter of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen and even spent money apparently bussing supporters to Washington, D.C. ahead of Jan. 6, 2020..
Ahead of the current election, the group operated focus groups and controlled trials to find what messages were most persuasive to center-right voters who may agree more with Republicans than Democrats on many issues, but are concerned about another Trump term.
As of now, Republican Voters Against Trump plans to stay active through the rest of the election cycle. Conway estimates the group will spend a total of $50 million during the 2024 campaign.
“We want to create a surround-sound effect for these swing voters,” Conway said. “Whenever they turn on their TVs, or listen to the radio, or are driving around, we want them to see our billboards, we want them to hear our ads, we want them to see our ads.”
According to an Axios report, Pennsylvania is set to be the largest target for political spending by the Trump and Harris campaigns and outside spending groups supporting them this cycle. Both candidates would likely struggle to win the country without it.