The man — bearded, shirtless, a Marlboro Light clutched between two fingers as it smolders uncomfortably close to his temple — looks as if he has something heavy he wants to get off his chest. Like a person attending his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, he seems at once eager and apprehensive. “Hi, my name is Josh. I live in North Carolina, and I voted for Donald Trump,” he begins, in a tone of abject resignation. He cocks his head and rolls his eyes. “My bad, fam,” he apologizes. “Not my proudest moment. I will not be voting for him again.”
The confession comes from Josh Harrison, a 40-year-old exterminator from the Raleigh area, and it appears on the website and social media platforms of a group called Republican Voters Against Trump. Created by the conservative writer Bill Kristol and a handful of his fellow Never Trump Republicans, RVAT, as its name indicates, is dedicated to defeating the president this November. Toward that end, the group has curated an online collection of more than 500 selfie videos from Republicans, many of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and all of whom plan to vote against him in 2020.
Harrison recorded his confession in June, sitting on his back deck around 2 in the morning, after consuming some White Claw and red wine. “It’s the first time I’ve ever voted for a Democrat,” he says in the video. “But if Joe Biden drops out and the D.N.C. runs a tomato can, I will vote for the tomato can, because I believe the tomato can will do less harm than our current president.” When Harrison sent the video, unsolicited, to RVAT, he felt as if he were shouting into a void. But since RVAT posted the video online, it has been viewed more than a million times on the group’s Twitter account, seen more than 100,000 times on its YouTube channel and received plenty of media attention.
The Never Trump Republican advertising space is a crowded one this campaign. The Lincoln Project releases new spots seemingly every day — one blaming Trump for the pandemic, another claiming that he’s seriously ill, yet another intimating that his genitalia are small. But while the slick Lincoln Project ads “work exclusively on the predispositions of the faithful,” as Andrew Ferguson has written in The Atlantic, the bare-bones RVAT testimonials are intended to do that rarest of things in politics these days: persuade. And the method RVAT has chosen to persuade Republicans to vote against Trump is an interesting one: These videos are the group’s attempt to help create a “permission structure” for voters to act in ways they never expected.
The permission-structure strategy was used to great effect by Barack Obama’s old political strategist, David Axelrod. Before Axelrod went to work for Obama, he cut his teeth helping to elect Black mayors in cities like Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. The key to winning those races, which often featured multiple African-American candidates, was attracting a sizable percentage of the white vote. To do that, Axelrod spent a lot of time and effort working to win his Black clients what he called “third-party authentication” — endorsements from individuals (like elected officials) and institutions (like newspaper editorial boards) that white voters trusted to make safe, conventional decisions about whom to vote for. Once Axelrod’s Black candidates had those stamps of mainstream validation, white voters believed they had permission to vote for them.
Axelrod’s track record of selling Black candidates to white voters is a big reason Obama hired him to run his 2004 Senate campaign in Illinois. In that race, Axelrod planned to use Paul Simon, a former Illinois senator, as a third-party authenticator, but Simon died, suddenly, before he could make an official endorsement. Instead, Axelrod filmed an ad featuring Simon’s daughter, Sheila, in which she said Obama and her father were “cut from the same cloth” — a powerful signal to the rural white Illinoisans who had repeatedly cast votes to send Simon to the Senate.
RVAT has taken Axelrod’s strategy and updated it for our current political moment — in large part by inverting where voters are looking for permission. The group isn’t seeking third-party authentication from conservative institutions, or notable politicians, or decorated military officials, or even former members of Trump’s administration — Republicans’ loss of faith in precisely those people is why they voted for Trump in the first place. Instead of Mitt Romney or The Weekly Standard-in-exile or William McRaven or John Bolton telling Republicans that it’s OK to vote against Trump, RVAT has turned to Tom from Arizona (“I’ve been a Republican all my life, and this November I’m voting for Joe Biden for president”), Kelly from Florida (“Biden has my vote because we need to do whatever we can to get that monster out of the White House”) and Josh from North Carolina to grant permission. Scrolling through the testimonials on RVAT’s website, the message to Biden-curious Republicans is clear: You are not alone.
That sense of belonging, after all, was part of what propelled voters into Trump’s corner in 2016. They may not have seen many elected officials or éminences grises getting behind Trump, but they didn’t need to; it was enough to see their friends and neighbors, or people who looked like their friends and neighbors, packing airplane hangars or lining up outside arenas. Those crowds signaled to potential Trump voters that the outré reality-TV star they liked watching in the debates — the one all the pundits dismissed as a novelty act — was, in fact, a realistic candidate to support.
As Axelrod’s career attests, this kind of social permission isn’t a rare thing to try to offer voters. It’s fascinating, though, to watch it happen at a moment like this. Americans find themselves seeking permission for a lot of actions these days, like abiding by (or flouting) mask requirements and sending (or not sending) their children to school. Things once viewed as inconceivable are now unavoidable; things once taken as givens are now in doubt. The unfamiliarity of the moment has also made its political possibilities seem endless, ranging from drastic public-health and economic measures to aggressive changes in policing.
When everything is abnormal, social guidance becomes all the more powerful. That reassurance is what RVAT is trying to provide. In an era of extreme polarization and negative partisanship — one in which political allegiances are determined less by affection for one party than by hatred of the other — the notion of a Republican voting for Biden feels aberrant. But there’s so much aberrant about America right now that nothing, presented in the right voice by the right messenger, seems especially outlandish. Not even voting for a tomato can.
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