Steve Willing is retired, but he made a career out of taking struggling businesses and turning them around.
That’s more or less the idea behind a relatively new organization, Our Republican Legacy, a group that formed last year “to provide a contrasting voice to the MAGA movement” within the GOP. The Republican Party needs to be “restored,” the group argues, to one without the “chaos and division that populism has unleashed.”
In other words, a party with choices that are not carbon copies of President Donald Trump and his frenetic, often defiant and anti-establishment governing style.
And with just over 500 days until the 2026 midterm elections, the group has mobilized a grassroots campaign “to restore the party’s core conservative principles and reclaim its future.”
In California, it’s Willing, an Encinitas resident, leading those efforts.
in San Diego, California. (Alejandro Tamayo / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
“We feel there are a lot of people who have been part of the Republican Party in the past but don’t feel there is a place for them anymore, or for people who have traditional conservative values, and they don’t see MAGA as being the same,” said Willing, referring to the “Make America Great Again” slogan linked to Trump.
So Willing, and Our Republican Legacy, has set out to recruit like-minded Republicans, with a goal of attending local GOP events and driving conversations about the party’s goals and future.
“We want the debate, but we want it to be civil,” said Willing. “We want to try to work with the Republican Party the best we can, but it can be difficult sometimes when it gets caught up in MAGA or ‘our way or the highway’ mentalities.”
The group boasts big-name former Republican lawmakers among its founders and leadership team, including former House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, former Vice Presidents Mike Pence and Dan Quayle and former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele.
“Faced with the chaos and division that populism has unleashed in our party, we are stepping forward to give Americans a Republican alternative they can once again be proud to support,” said former Sen. John Danforth, a Missouri Republican and one of the Our Republican Legacy founders.
The group also includes among its leadership former Sen. William Cohen, who served as defense secretary in the Clinton administration; former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024; and former Rep. Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who backed Joe Biden in 2020.
Those Democratic connections are important to note, said Jon Fleischman, a veteran political strategist in California and former executive director of the state’s GOP.
“One of the challenges for this group is they have to decide: Is it the case that Donald Trump is so bad that we’d rather have a liberal Democrat as president,” Fleischman said.
“They want to have a conversation inside of the Republican Party, but they’ve made it clear they have no problem leaving the Republican Party, and that makes it harder for them to make their case because they are not loyal or diehard Republicans,” he said.
But former Rep. Mimi Walters, a founding member of Our Republican Legacy, was more optimistic that pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps can coexist.
Walters — who climbed the ranks in Orange County politics and served two terms in Congress representing an Orange County seat before losing to now former Rep. Katie Porter in a 2018 blue wave election — likened the GOP divide to a married couple who might not share every viewpoint but still respect each other’s ideas.
“The president has brought in many new people into our party and a lot of viewpoints in terms of populism, which absolutely there is a place for that. We want to be a big tent,” said Walters, who, when she was in Congress, voted to support Trump policies nearly 99% of the time, according to data from FiveThirtyEight, which in 2018 was a news site that analyzed political data.
“We just want to also make sure that people know that our party stands for,” Walters added, noting that those values include adherence to the Constitution, fiscal responsibility, free enterprise and a “peace through strength” foreign policy strategy.
The group says it’s “deeply concerned about the future of our country,” on its website.
But its focus is on the future of the Republican Party.
In a recent op-ed, Danforth wrote said the country’s “core political well-being depends on the existence of a healthy two-party system.” Members of Our Republican Legacy, he said, are “may be Republicans in exile,” but they vow to “serve as the resistance to the new populist direction taken by the GOP.”
For now, it’s still fairly early days for Our Republican Legacy’s mobilizing efforts. The group convened in Washington, D.C., last week for what Willing described as a “kick-off” event.
Although he’s a longtime Republican voter, Willing, 59, is making his first foray into Republican politics.
But he’s drawing on his experiences in the business world and his international travels as he heads up the group’s efforts to mobilize like-minded Republicans in California.
“I didn’t want to just complain about the government,” Willing said.
“All my experience tells me we are throwing away something valuable.”