George Conway, Other Ex-Republicans Running as Democrats Are Getting Crushed at the Polls

Anti-Trump former Republicans are discovering that a media profile built on opposing Donald Trump does not automatically translate into Democratic primary votes.

In May 2026, two high-profile Never Trump Republicans who had switched to the Democratic Party suffered decisive primary losses, exposing a significant gap between the national attention these figures command and the trust they can earn from left-leaning voters. The defeats came before George Conway, the former conservative lawyer and ex-husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, faces his own test in New York's 12th Congressional District primary on 23 June 2026. An Emerson College poll released in May placed Conway fourth in the field with just 9 per cent support.

The losses are prompting a frank reassessment among Democratic strategists about what the party's primary voters actually want from candidates with Republican histories. The answer emerging from the May results is clear: a record of fighting for working people matters far more than a record of fighting Trump on cable television.

Duncan in Georgia, Crosswell in Pennsylvania: The May Defeats

On 19 May 2026, former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, who had served as a Republican before breaking with Trump over his false claims about the 2020 election and later speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 2024, finished a distant fourth in the state's Democratic gubernatorial primary. Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won with 58 per cent of the vote, avoiding a runoff entirely. Duncan had been polling at 7 per cent in the final Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey released before election day, nearly 50 points behind Bottoms.

Duncan had built his crossover appeal carefully. The Georgia Republican Party formally expelled him in January 2026. In his campaign announcement video, he addressed that directly: 'Georgia Republicans threw me out of their party. I was leaving anyway. Now I'm running for governor as a proud Democrat.' The message resonated in national media. It did not resonate with Georgia Democratic primary voters, who had deeper and more obvious options available.

The same day in Pennsylvania, Ryan Crosswell, a Marine veteran and former federal prosecutor who resigned from the Department of Justice in February 2025 after the Trump administration ordered his section to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, lost the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District by 20 points. Firefighters union president Bob Brooks won with 41 per cent of the vote, with Crosswell finishing second on 21 per cent. Brooks secured the backing of Governor Josh Shapiro, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The DCCC also backed Brooks.

Crosswell outraised Brooks during the campaign, which made his loss all the sharper. He told NBC News his candidacy was undermined by outside spending on Brooks's behalf, but he was also candid about the broader message. 'Democrats would be mistaken to not be thinking long and hard about how we're going to change those numbers, how we're going to message in a way that brings independents and Republicans,' he said. The 7th District is rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report ahead of November.

What Democratic Primary Voters Are Looking For

The pattern in the results is not difficult to read. Bottoms was a former Atlanta mayor and Biden administration official with deep roots in Georgia Democratic politics. Brooks was a retired Bethlehem firefighter with two decades of union organising behind him. Both beat opponents who had more recently held Republican Party membership and who were running, at least partly, on the strength of their conversion.

Andrew Mamo, a spokesperson for The Bench, a group that backed Brooks, put the shift plainly in an interview with NBC News. 'It is much more about authenticity and who have you always been, and what have your fights looked like,' he said. 'And frankly, a lot of these folks have either worked in D.C. or worked in government, which I think is in a lot of cases a con, not a pro. And being like, "hello, I'm from the federal bureaucracy, and I'm here to help," the base is not exactly fired up for those types of people.'

Democratic strategist Eric Stern, who counted Brooks as a client, drew a direct line between the May results and the 2024 campaign. 'Based on what we know now, I would be surprised if you had Kamala Harris out there campaigning with Liz Cheney,' he told NBC News. 'That was a strategic choice the party made that, based on the results, we absolutely would not make now. Why would we hand over the keys to the people that drove us off the cliff in the first place?'

Olivia Troye, a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who became a vocal Trump critic after leaving the White House in 2020, announced in April 2026 that she was running for Congress in Virginia's newly drawn 7th Congressional District. She later ended that campaign after the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the electoral map voters had passed in April. In an interview with NBC News, Troye pushed back against the idea of lumping all Never Trump Republicans together. 'If you put George Conway, me and Geoff Duncan in a room, we probably differ on a lot of things,' she said. 'And I think that is the problem that I'm worried about for the Democratic Party.'

Conway in New York and Jolly in Florida: Two Very Different Trajectories

Conway announced his bid for New York's 12th District in January 2026, seeking to succeed the retiring Representative Jerry Nadler. He relocated back to Manhattan from Bethesda, Maryland, after acknowledging in an interview with the Associated Press that the seat was on his old stomping grounds and he had looked it up on Wikipedia before deciding to run. He co-founded the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump Republican group, in 2019, and has spent years building a large social media following on the strength of his criticisms of the president.

The field he entered is formidable. His rivals include state Assemblymen Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, who have represented portions of the Manhattan district, and Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy. Prediction markets put Conway at less than one per cent chance of winning as of May 2026, and the Emerson College poll placed him at 9 per cent in fourth place. Conway, who has spoken directly about the odds, told NBC News he views the race as one about more than winning. 'My view is that the two are much more inextricably intertwined than others portray,' he said, referring to fighting Trump and advancing an economic agenda.

The outlier in this cycle is former Republican Congressman David Jolly, who left the GOP years before his current run and is now the frontrunner in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Florida. A Change Research poll conducted in May 2026 for Freedom Project USA showed Jolly leading his sole primary rival, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings, by 15 points at 42 per cent. Jolly has also led in general election polling against Republican frontrunner Byron Donalds among likely voters in a state Republicans have dominated since the late 1990s. His trajectory suggests the distinguishing factor is not party history but credibility earned over time.

The results in May made one thing plain: the Democratic base is not rewarding the act of leaving the Republican Party, it is rewarding people who have spent years proving why they left.