CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ For many Fox TV viewers, former Matthews Mayor Shawn Lemmond will be the uninvited guest at Saturday' star-spangled Salute to America event with President Donald Trump.
Lemmond will be featured in an ad during the Fourth of July spectacular for "Republican Voters Against Trump," a group spending $1 million on cable and digital ads in the state this week.
"The Republican Party that I knew and loved was an honorable party," Lemmond says in the ad. "What's taken over our party is wrong. And as a Republican, as a Christian, we simply cannot allow this man to be reelected."
The group is an offshoot of Defending Democracy Together, an advocacy group formed by conservative Bill Kristol, founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard.
It's one of several Republican groups working to defeat Trump in North Carolina and a handful of presidential swing states. Democrat Joe Biden holds a narrow lead in the Tar Heel State, according to Real Clear Politics polling average.
One group, Republicans for a New President, plans to bring like-minded Republicans together in Charlotte next month for a gathering that would offer four days of counter-programming to the GOP national convention in Jacksonville.
What such groups have in common is the hope of making Trump a one-term president.
"It's a growing sentiment that the president is really out of touch with this moment, and that he is proven to be divisive when we need a uniting president" said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina and now a director of Defending Democracy. "The ground has shifted underneath President Trump. There are real lives being taken as a result of that kind of unthinking, unsympathetic, uncaring rabble-rousing."
Trump's overall approval among Republicans remains high.
Seventy-eight perdent of Republicans and those who lean Republican support him, according to a Pew Research Center survey released this week. That's down from 85% in March. A YouGov poll this week showed the president with an 82% job approval rating among Republicans. (President George W. Bush had a 75% approval among Republicans near the end of his second term; Barack Obama had a 95% rating among fellow Democrats.)
Trump campaign spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez did not comment on the ads. But she lauded the president's economic policies.
"The Great American Comeback is happening much faster than expected," she said in a statement. "President Trump continues to defy economic expectations, and this is another sign of American optimism that President Trump built the greatest economy America has ever seen and he is doing it again."
An anti-Trump group called The Lincoln Project also has been advertising in North Carolina. Its leaders include George Conway, whose wife Kellyanne is a Trump adviser, as well as Steve Schmidt and John Weaver, both strategists for the late GOP Sen. John McCain.
"We see North Carolina as a keystone," said Reed Galen, one of the group's founders. "I don't think Trump can win without it."
Galen said the group is targeting what he called "soft Republicans or conservative independents" who voted for Trump in 2016 because they didn't like Democrat Hillary Clinton. Now, he said, "those people are seeing his failures across the board this year."
To Inglis, the president's June 1 stroll to Lafayette Square after law enforcement used pepper spray to clear protesters from the area could be "the defining moment" of the race.
"All across the Carolinas there's a squeamishness among Republicans about whether that's who we want to be and that's who we are," he said. "Many Republicans are saying, 'No, that's not who we are'."
Lemmond, who served two terms in the North Carolina House, rejects what he calls the "Trump cult." He considers it "the biggest threat to the country since World War II and the biggest threat to the party since Nixon."
"I think there's a fairly significant number of Republicans who are just disgusted with what they're seeing out of Trump and his minions," said Lemmond.
Some Republicans don't expect commercials from the anti-Trump groups to work.
GOP strategist Larry Shaheen of Mecklenburg County said the ads are "not designed to move Republicans, they're designed to make the Unaffiliateds in urban areas more comfortable not voting for Trump and voting for Biden."
"Republicans are not going to walk away from voting for the president," he said. "It's either going to be the party of anarchy (and) damage to property ... or the party that has rebuilt the economy and has one of the greatest economies in the history of the country."
Though most of the GOP convention is moving to Jacksonville next month, some Republicans still plan to gather in Charlotte that same week.
"Republicans for a New President," organized by Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer who ran an independent campaign for president in 2016, hopes to bring together other disaffected groups like the Lincoln Project and Republicans for the Rule of Law.
Organizers have said they'll be "deliberating and ratifying a new vision for the future of Republican leadership and political renewal in America."
"We want to be juxtaposed against whatever reality show they're putting on down there in Florida," said Republican Bob Orr, a former N.C. Supreme Court justice.
Some Republicans say they're not sure who to vote for _ or against.
"I might not vote for either one of them," former GOP Gov. Jim Martin said about the major candidates. "They both have some good characteristics and they both come up short in a lot of ways. A lot depends on who can appeal to the center."
