MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Once, he said Trump should never be president, but he just accepted the Republican Party's nomination to serve as Trump's vice president last night.
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J D VANCE: For the last eight years, President Trump has given everything he has to fight for the people of our country.
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MARTIN: That's Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. He used to be a vocal Trump critic. But now with Trump the GOP's dominant force, Republicans who still oppose him from within find themselves looking beyond the party. NPR's Sarah McCammon has this report.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Michael Steele is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, but that was more than a decade ago, and things have changed.
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MICHAEL STEELE: Joe Biden got COVID today. Oh, my God. Here we go. But you know what? Joe Biden could be in his underwear, sitting in the corner drooling with COVID, and I'd still vote for him.
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MCCAMMON: While thousands of Republican delegates met in the arena down the street to cheer for their party's vice presidential nominee, Steele and a few dozen other disaffected current and former Republicans were gathering in a Milwaukee brewery. At a forum hosted by the conservative anti-Trump group Principles First, Steele, a longtime Trump critic, said he takes Trump's word seriously.
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STEELE: If I told you that I want you to give me power so I can be a dictator, would you do it?
MCCAMMON: Never Trumpers like conservative commentator Charlie Sykes have spent years trying to push back, only to see Trump's ideas engulf the GOP.
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CHARLIE SYKES: This is a party that is very, very clearly intending on forcibly deporting perhaps 10 million human beings when they get into power, which means that we may be a couple of years away from one of the great humanitarian disasters of our time. We got to talk about it.
MCCAMMON: And for many, there's the question of what to do about it. Anti-Trump groups, including The Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump, are targeting Trump-skeptical conservatives with ads in several battleground states.
Another group, the Haley Voters for Biden super PAC, is going after supporters of former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who received double-digit support in several states, even after dropping out of the primary. Jason Watts, a Haley delegate from Michigan, said he'd hoped Haley would stand her ground against Trump.
JASON WATTS: But in the end, she was looking out for Nikki Haley, and that's her decision. But I'm here to represent the 300,000 voters that did not support Donald Trump.
MCCAMMON: Watts says he feels like a man without a party now. He's voted third party in the last two elections and says he'd consider voting for Biden in November, but he's just not sure.
WATTS: I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I don't recognize the party anymore. It's all about personality.
MCCAMMON: Kendal Unruh, a longtime conservative activist from Colorado who led an unsuccessful effort to challenge Trump at the 2016 Republican convention, also feels that isolation.
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KENDAL UNRUH: And that is actually what I have really grieved over - watching all of my friends morph into people that are unrecognizable to me.
MCCAMMON: Charlie Sykes tried to encourage the group that they are not alone.
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SYKES: The party's down the road. We're the people who are not at the party.
MCCAMMON: But then Sykes ticked off a litany of once-prominent Republicans who've been critical of Trump and were also absent from the party's convention, from former House Speaker Paul Ryan to Trump's former Vice President Mike Pence.
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SYKES: That tells me that every time you're tempted to think, I'm just here on this island, and, you know, what's wrong with me? - that's not the right question. There's nothing wrong with you. You are not the crazy ones.
MCCAMMON: Some never Trumpers, like former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh of Illinois, think that Trump will eventually destroy the GOP.
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JOE WALSH: Something else is coming after this election. This party's done.
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MCCAMMON: But for now, the Republican Party is Trump's party - a party that seems to be done with critics of its nominee.
Sarah McCammon, NPR News, Milwaukee. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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