Most Republicans, including former critics like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Club for Growth President Dave McIntosh, have publicly coalesced around Trump despite past misgivings over his 2020 loss and subsequent efforts to overturn the election.

But privately, some are supportive of Vice President Kamala Harris defeating him, believing it would be a temporary setback that brings the party back to its pre-Trump identity.

“Our party has been hijacked by Trump and MAGA since 2016, so I think there’s a feeling among some of us that we’d like to move on,” said an aide to a Republican senator, speaking on condition of anonymity to reflect candidly on the matter. 

“We’ve seen what has happened to those who come out against the former president, so I think many of these conversations are going on quietly,” the person continued. “If Trump loses this election and impacts down-ballot races, we’re going to have to take a good, hard look at ourselves in the mirror.”

As the presidential race enters the final stretch, a select number of anti-Trump voices have remained a needle in Trump’s side, arguing he disqualified himself over his role in the Jan. 6 riot. On Wednesday, Liz Cheney, the ousted House Republican who served on the Jan. 6 committee, announced at Duke University she would be voting for Harris.

But those sounding the alarm argue the GOP opposition to Trump is understated and that the protest votes against him in the Republican primary, in which former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley received in some states a fifth of the vote, extends to a quiet group of Republicans who hold public office.

“I think that there’s probably a third, I would say, of Republican elected officials, not to mention rank-and-file voters, who actually feel this way, and they obviously can’t express it in public,” said Craig Snyder, the director of Haley Voters for Harris, in an interview with the Washington Examiner. 

“There’s also this idea that they want to see Trump and the people who support Trump lose their power in the party,” Snyder said. “There’s kind of a push and a pull that I think is motivating a lot of these voters.”

Snyder pointed to a handful of high-profile Republicans who did not attend the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July and those who have decided not to endorse Trump as a sign of the lingering discontent within the party.

“We have the last vice president of the United States who doesn’t support the current nominee,” Snyder said of former Vice President Mike Pence, another ally-turned-Trump critic. “I don’t know when that’s happened before in American history.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment by press time but in recent days has emphasized a theme of “unity,” highlighting the support he’s received from former Democrats such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ex-GOP foes like Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA).

At the same time, the inclusion of Haley and another primary rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), at the GOP convention was seen as symbolic of the party mending fences. Each urged reluctant Republicans to go out and vote for Trump in speeches from the convention stage.

But Trump still has high-profile critics, among them former Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who said Tuesday that he could not vote for Trump or Harris in the November election during an interview on CNBC.

“When you lose an election and you try to overturn the results so that you can stay in power, you lose me. You lose me at that point,” said Toomey, a centrist who represented Pennsylvania in the Senate for 12 years.

Snyder believes a decisive loss is the only way for the party to move forward and rebuild.

“It’s not a majority of the rank-and-file voters, and I wouldn’t pretend that it is, but it’s a chorus of people who have served the party and have served the country through the party, you know, who just really see this as — it’s a fork in the road moment,” Snyder said.

Former Republican Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention and urged fellow Republicans to abandon Trump in a speech in prime time, similarly predicted losing is the only way the party will turn away from Trump.

The former congressman, who retired from the House in 2023, also served on the House’s Jan. 6 committee and was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on the charge of inciting the attack. 

“I think the only way that the Republican Party will wake up again is to recognize Trump is not a winning formula,” Kinzinger said, speaking to the Washington Examiner on the Democratic convention floor in mid-August.

Stephanie Sharp, the co-founder of Women4U.S., an organization of center-right women working to defeat Trump, argued defeating Trump now would set the party up for a presidential win four years from now.

“If Donald Trump wins this year, there is no way a Republican will be elected in 2028,” she said in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. “The entirety of the Republican bench should be working for a defeat of Donald Trump this year because the only way that a Republican has a chance in 2028 is if Kamala Harris is elected.”