A billboard featuring the picture of Steve Clark, part of a campaign by Republican Voters Against Trump. (Photo courtesy of RVAT)

Starting Friday morning, commuters driving in and out of Milwaukee will see a barrage of billboards with the faces of men and women who previously voted for Donald Trump but won’t in the 2024 election.

The “billboard takeover” is the capstone project of a $40 million campaign throughout the long election cycle by Republicans and conservatives who oppose returning Trump to the Oval Office.

With just five days to go until Election Day, Republican Voters Against Trump has purchased the time for the mass billboard project in the principal metro areas of three swing states that have been labeled the “Blue Wall” essential for a Democratic victory: Detroit in Michigan and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, along with Milwaukee in Wisconsin. More than 150 electronic billboards in the three states will feature the messages.

Republican Voters Against Trump is a project of a superPAC called the Republican Accountability Project. 

The billboards bear the faces of people who identify as previous Trump voters and who have disavowed the 45th president and GOP nominee for 2024.

Some declare they are voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. Others state only that they are not voting for Trump. Participants in the campaign include four people from Michigan and two each from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“There is a critical mass of Americans who cast votes for Trump in the past and are supporting Harris this time around,” said Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump. “These are the strongest possible messengers for reaching persuadable, conservative-leaning swing voters in the Blue Wall. We couldn’t think of a better closing message.”

One of the Wisconsin participants in the campaign, Steve Clark, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison immunology professor, said he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, writing in the name of his running mate that year, Mike Pence, instead.

But during his four years in office, “Trump did a fairly good job. I’d give him a C-plus,” Clark said, and so in 2020 he voted for Trump for reelection.

Trump’s refusal to accept he lost that year, and his response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters who sought to stop the certification of Joe Biden as the next U.S. president, turned Clark against Trump.  

Clark said he doesn’t blame the former president for instigating the Capitol attack, but “he certainly did not do anything to quell it.”

He also opposes Trump’s foreign policy stances, his advocacy of tariffs and his isolationism in international affairs.

“A lot of what Trump is doing is not conservative,” said Clark, who admires Ronald Reagan. “He stood up to tyranny” in the old Soviet Union, he said of Reagan.

“I think the world is too dangerous right now for someone like Trump to lead the country,” Clark said.

While at least some of the campaign’s participants are affirmatively lining up to support Harris, however, Clark is an exception. He plans to vote for Republicans down the ballot and write in the name of Nikki Haley for president.

Clark supported Haley, the former UN ambassador under Trump, in her primary campaign against Trump earlier this year, when she criticized the former president harshly.

After running a distant second, however, Haley went on to endorse Trump when he had secured the Republican nomination.

“That was disappointing,” Clark said. “She’s loyal to her party, and so I understand.”