would oppose the Democrats' effort
to force the Senate to hear testimony
from new witnesses. It was only a mat-
ter of days witil the President's preor-
dained acquittal.
Despite Longwell's months of work,
the President was emerging from im-
peachment emboldened and Wl.Checked.
Republicans for the Rule of Law had
run about two million doll2l's' worth of
impeachment-related ads in thirty-nine
states and congressional districts, six-
teen ads nationally, and twenty-eight
digital billboards targeting Republican
members of Congress in nineteen states.
But they had been up against what
Longwell's team estimated was almost
certainly more than forty million dol-
lars in ad spending by pro-Trump furces.
Her mantra in politics was all about
managing public opinion, yet public
opinion about Trump remained essen-
tiallyuncbangcd. "On an objc:ctivc scale,"
she said that morning, of her impeach-
ment campaign, "it was a failure."
She was also frustrated with the
Democrats. "It has really started to
fed like they decided to impeach but
they never really invested in impeach-
ing, n she said. In key swing states, the
ads from Republicans for the Rule of
Law had been the only ones counter-
ing the Trump barrage. She pointed
out that public support for impeach-
ment shot up over fifty per cent after
the Ukraine allegations emerged, but
never moved after that. "Public opin-
ion is like cement-it's soft at first and
you can move it, and then it hardens,"
she said. By December, it had hardened.
"The Democrats played no offense and
the Republicans pla:ycd a ton of offense,
ultimately putting the Democralll on de-
fense," Longwell said. For a disciple of
Berman, that was unforgivable. When
you are on defense, you lose.
She had mist:ilkenly believed, she ad-
mitted, "that there were elected Repub-
licans who want to do the right thing,
to act as a course correction. That has
not happened." Her allies agreed. "The
capitulation has been amazing," Kris-
to! told me. Conway said, when we met
after the Senate trial; "The institutions
of the Republican Party are completely
at his beck and call There's no erring
whatsoever. No dissent is tolerated and
it is absolute and complete."
I asked Longwell if she thought that
20 THE NEY~ MARCH 30, 2020at least Mitt Romney, the one Repub-
lican senator who had consistently
sounded a publicly skeptical note about
the President since John McCain's death.
in 2018, might vote to convict Trump.
"I do have a thought that he will," she
said. "I think he may." I joked with her
that she was a living example of the
Russian saying "Hope dies last."
Five days later, on February 5th,
Romney announced that he would vote
to convict Trump on one of the two
counts, abuse of power. It was a long
way &om the doun or so Senate Re-
publicans who were once Longwell's
targets. Still, Trump did not get a unan-
imous Republican acquittal, which
at that point cowited as a victory for
his opponents. "Mitt comes through!"
Longwell e-mailed me. "Hope is not
entirely in vain."B
ut new disappointments loomed.
"Everything's bad," Longwell told
me the morning the Senate trial came
to an end. Bernie Sanders was leading
in the polls heading into the New
Hampshire primary, just days away. E-vcn
for a diehard Never Trumper, the Ver-
mont socialist, who promised aa revo-
lution" with trillions of dollars in new
government spending, was a reach.
Longwell was still, at least nominally, a
Republican. "If you end up with a Ber-
nie-Trump showdown, we're in such a
fundamentally different place as a coun-
try, and I'll tell you that place is really
far from where I am 1 " she said.
Last April, Longwell wrote a piece
for the Bulwark, warning Democrats,
"Do NOT IGNORE BERNIE SANDERS.
HE IS GOING TO WIN THE NOMINA-
TION.AND HE IS NOT GOING TO BEAT
DONALD TRUMP."When I asked that
morning if she would vote for Sanders
against Trump, she hesitated. '1 don't
know. I don't think so," she replied. She
considered Sanders essentially a Trump
of the left. "All of the things I hate
about Trump I hate about Bernie, too,"
she said.
She had dedicated her careerto :fight-
ing Trump's takeover of her party, but
her plan rested on the premise that
Democrats would offer a centrist alter-
native. She was willing to vote for Bickn,
but not Sanders. Longwell worried that
she had built "a data machine to figure
out how to swing voters, with no oneto swing them to. n After four years of
setbacks, this looked increasingly like
one :final unwelcome turn. "It's like being
shot or poisoned," she said.
But Longwell was not conceding de-
feat. A few days after the Senate trial
ended, she launched an ambitious new
get-out-the-primary-vote effort, which
she called Center Action Now. Work-
ing with Tim Miller, the Never Trump
activist from the failed Bush 2016 cam-
paign, Longwdl raised more than three
million dolhrs and contacted her lists
ofTnunp-dubious Republicans in states
that allowed them to participate in
Democratic primaries, among them
Michigan, TCXllS,and Vuginia.All told,
Center Action Now logged eight hun-
dred thousand phone calls and text mes-
sages as Longwell turned her new office
into an impromptu call center and she
and her staff activated the Never Trump
network they had spent the past few
years building.
In late February, Biden won a huge
victory in the South Carolina primary,
followed by a remarkable forty-eight
hams in which he amsolidated the Party's
fragmented center behind him. Turnout
surged in the Republican-leaning sub-
urbs, and Biden, so recently written off
as politically dead, won ten of fourteen
states on Super Tuesday. Longwell and
the NeverTrumpcrs cheered Bic:len's res-
urrection---and their awn.
Soon, the coronavirus pandemic and
Trump's disastrously slow and dishon-
est initial response to it seemed to
threaten his Presidency more than im-
peaclunent ever had. The inside game
in Washington was still over and lost.
The Republicans on Capitol Hill had
made their choice to stick with Trump.
But the election is another matter. Long-
well does not need the entire Party to
abandon the President, just her slice of
it. At her most optimistic, she dreams
of a "blowout defeat" to end Trumpism
once and for all But she would settle
for persuading enough suburban Re-
publican moms in places like Dillsburg,
Pennsylvania, to vote against him this
time. It might just be enough. In some
Republican-leaning districts, turnout in
the Democr.a.tic primaries was up a hun-
dred per cent over 2016. "Hope renewal,"
Longwell wrote, when I e-mailed her
after Biden's comeback on Super Tues-
day. "We're back in the game."•