As the 2016 presidential election approaches its final stretch, Republicans who oppose the candidacy of Donald Trump are ramping up their efforts to ensure a Trump loss.
John Stubbs, a co-founder of Republicans for Clinton, spoke to The Daily Caller this week about what his bluntly-named group stands for — and about how he believes Trump is unfit for the presidency.
Stubbs, who was a senior advisor for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative during the George W. Bush administration and a policy director for Jack Kemp’s Empower America, describes Republicans for Clinton as a group dedicated to returning the GOP to its principles in the pre-Trump era.
His journey from Trump opponent to avid Hillary Clinton supporter has been a long one, he told TheDC.
“It’s not like Trump got the nomination and I decided, overnight, ‘Oh my God,'” he said.
Instead, Stubbs explained, his view of the 2016 presidential race evolved slowly — from “amused” when Trump announced his candidacy, to “bewildered” as Trump piled up primary wins, to “concerned” when Trump finally clinched the nomination.
“Trump is kind of like a parasite who came into the party and is now eating the host,” the pro-Clinton Republican said. “This is one of the reasons I hope he is beaten like a drum.”
Stubbs believes that Trump’s annexation of the Republican Party will cause irreparable harm.
“If Trump controls the brand, the Republican brand is done,” he said.
“The Republican Party to my children is Donald Trump — just like to me it was Ronald Reagan,” he said. “My kids don’t want any part of the Republican Party now. It is literally the opposite of everything I worked on as a Republican.”
Many of Trump’s supporters have “outright racist intentions,” Stubbs charged. The Trump movement amounts to “a dog whistle for white racial identity” and “needs to be a fringe party — something like Le Pen in France,” he also said. (RELATED: Trump Campaign Memo: Primary Strategy Was To Provide ‘SAFE SPACE’ For Voters Called ‘Bigots’)
The way forward, Stubbs told TheDC, is for Republicans to roundly reject Trump and instead embrace a Clinton presidency.
“It cannot be the case that any major party candidate empowers people who have such ill will to enter polite society,” Stubbs implored.
“The only thing to do now is to say to Republican voters: ‘We have to vote for Clinton.'” he urged. “There is imminent danger and we have a moral obligation to make that step.”
Voters who don’t like Clinton or Trump “can still agree that Trump is a full-on catastrophe and they can agree that Clinton will not be a disaster,” he also suggested.
The Republicans for Clinton founder admitted that his rationale for giving Hillary Clinton a four-year presidential term isn’t exactly the stuff of a hope-and-change-style mantra.
“It’s not that inspiring,” Stubbs quipped.
At the same time, Stubbs and Republicans for Clinton insist that a vote for Clinton isn’t merely a vote against Trump.
In a Washington Post op-ed published July 22 — the day after “Trump’s apocalypse speech in Cleveland,” as Stubbs describes it — the pro-Clinton Republican praised Clinton for her history of willingness to reach across the aisle to get things done.
The gist of the op-ed was that Trump’s unpopularity among so many otherwise disparate segments of society has created the potential for a peculiar window of bipartisanship the likes of which the United States hasn’t known for decades.
“Although she’s taken criticism for overstating her record of bipartisanship, she was hardly a partisan shill in the Senate,” Stubbs wrote. “Sixty-eight percent of her bills had GOP co-sponsors.”
Those co-sponsors included Jeff Sessions, Sam Brownback and Tom DeLay.
Stubbs said his initial plan for Republicans for Clinton was to create a website that would function as something of a support group for grieving Republicans grappling with the decision to vote for Clinton.
In recent months, the group has advanced considerably beyond that vision.
In anticipation of Wednesday’s third and final presidential debate in Las Vegas, for example, Republicans for Clinton will run a large anti-Trump mobile billboard along the Las Vegas Strip. An image of Trump looking at his own hands and the message “DON’T GROPE. VOTE” will be emblazoned on signs up and down the famed stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard.
Friendly reminder ahead of tomorrow’s #Debates2016 #dontgropevote pic.twitter.com/fZVvduJrzU
— Republicans4Clinton (@r4c16) October 18, 2016
“We are sending a clear message that sexual assault does not belong in a presidential race, and we should use our vote to ensure Trump loses big,” Stubbs said.
Republicans for Clinton has also rolled out a vote-swapping honor system — a “Never Trump” market, really — “for all the people who agree on one main thing: Trump should lose.”
The site, called Trumptraders.org, is designed to match third-party voters with people who refuse to vote for Trump — and to facilitate a two-to-one bargain which will increase third-party votes in noncompetitive states and add votes for Clinton in swing states.
In an op-ed this week in The New York Times, Stubbs and his Republicans for Clinton colleague Ricardo Reyes recommended “the new #NeverTrump app, which will organize your contacts into safe states and swing states, enabling an easy trade.”
“Clinton supporters stuck on the sidelines in safely blue or red states can now get involved in battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania,” Reyes said in a press release sent to TheDC.
Beyond his dedicated opposition to Trump, Stubbs is not particularly optimistic about the future of the Party of Lincoln.
“The Republican leadership has lost a lot of credibility and future votes,” he said.
If, as most polls predict, Clinton does win, Stubbs mused that “it will be interesting to see what happens in the bloodletting in the immediate aftermath of the election.”
Stubbs said he is not as confident as some recent polls suggest he should be. He frets that the 2016 presidential election will mirror the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum to leave the European Union. A number of pollsters notoriously failed to predict Brexit accurately just this summer.
Regardless of the outcome in November, though, Stubbs is wearily convinced that Trump won’t be exiting the U.S. political stage.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Stubbs told TheDC — with a decided hint of resignation.
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