No, “Never Trump” Republicans Didn’t Deliver the Election to Joe Biden
Never Trumpers are pushing the narrative that their efforts, like the Lincoln Project, played a key role in securing Joe Biden's victory. All you have to do is take a cursory glance at the numbers to see that isn’t true at all.
Donald Trump on May 30, 2020 in Washington, DC.(Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images)
Republican operatives and their allies now frantically seeking credibility in the post–Donald Trump world have spent the week criticizing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and suggesting that their television ads were responsible for defeating the president in the election.
One conservative pundit even attacked the Daily Poster and asserted that so-called “Never Trump” Republicans delivered Trump’s defeat, even though Trump won more GOP votes in 2020 than in 2016.
It’s a fun clickbait fairy tale designed to marginalize progressives and make sure nothing fundamentally changes — but there’s a big problem with the narrative: ad test data reviewed by the Daily Poster show that many of the Never Trump Republican groups’ ads were ineffective, and few of them stood out as particularly persuasive compared to spots from other groups that aren’t being cast by the media as a decisive force in the election.
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