The Lincoln Project doesn't exist to turn Republicans against Trump.

The Lincoln Project exists to convince liberals that Trump supporters are joining their cause and that they shouldn't vote for candidates supporting wacky things like "healthcare" lest they scare them away.

I'm partially exaggerating: The Lincoln Project is above all else a grifting scheme by Iraq War profiteers who hitched their bets to Jeb in 2016, got humiliated, and desperately needed a new home in the Trump era.

You can't deny that this is the main impact groups like the Lincoln Project have, though. If you look at replies on an LP post 100% of people replying positively are liberals, i.e. the exact opposite of who the Lincoln Project purports to be appealing to.

The psychological toll of this is clear: It convinces liberals that, yes, there are millions of Reasonable Republicans® willing to join your cause... as long as the Democrats don't nominate anyone who wants to stop poor cancer patients from going bankrupt. Don't be too radical!

The biggest problem in American politics is that Republican voters fundamentally see themselves as comprising a majority of the public (there's a reason why "silent majority" rhetoric is so potent) while Democrats see themselves as being constantly on the defensive.

When Obama got into office, Republican voters shifted hard to the right in reaction because they saw Obama as an usurper illegitimately installed by a minority of the population in direct conflict with the interests of "real Americans". (The dark subtext here is obvious)

When Trump got into office, though, many Democrats interpreted it as their fault for asking for too much from their party's leaders and creating a conservative backlash against them as a result.

The dark irony here is that the opposite is basically true: On virtually all issues not only do the general public side with Democrats in polling, but often support positions left of what the Democratic Party is offering e.g. Medicare for All.

If you're a liberal above the age of fifty who grew up seeing TV screens of the 1980, 1984, and to a lesser extent 1988 election maps showing the entire country painted with red, it did signal to you that this isn't a country where the views of people like yourself are respected.

The average Republican voter thinks of America as a nation of 300 million white christian conservatives who vote with their guns, which is why the election of Obama pushed them even harder to the right: They saw him as being an usurper with no democratic legitimacy.

But depressingly, this is also how a lot of Democratic voters see America. This is why, despite the wave of new activism and the radicalization of many "party elites", the median Democratic voter did not shift meaningfully to the left in the wake of Trump's election.

When I say "party elites", I'm not referring to the financier class that consists of people who often fund campaigns of both parties to exert influence: I'm talking about policy tastemakers who have, as a general rule, become more sympathetic to e.g. Medicare for All post-2016.

This thread admittedly went a tad bit off-topic, though Who Care, it was an improvised thread and I think I conveyed some important points in it. I'd love to write an article about this exact concept but I have no idea what publications are open to pitching at the moment.