Republicans backing Hillary Clinton want history to reflect they didn’t help Donald Trump win the White House. But that’s not the only reason they’re bucking their party’s line.

Access, appointments and influence over a Clinton administration’s policies is the just dessert that a growing slate of conservative policy wonks, Capitol Hill veterans and former GOP administration officials say they expect for endorsing and in some cases raising money for the Democratic presidential nominee.


And they’re already getting it. From messaging help delivered by Clinton’s communications team to direct and regular access to senior staffers and in-person meetings to discuss policy and strategy, Republicans who have abandoned Trump say the Democrat has given every indication that the GOP view will be reflected in her administration.

After she is sworn in, these Republicans say, they expect positions in a Clinton administration that go beyond the one or two seats that are typically reserved for opposition party experts in any White House that aims to win bipartisan support and cast itself as a solutions-oriented bridge-building operation. Indeed, while Barack Obama hired Robert Gates and Ray LaHood to run his first-term Defense and Transportation departments and George W. Bush tapped Norman Mineta to lead the DOT, many Republicans this cycle envision GOP voices sprinkled throughout the upper echelon of a Democratic administration.

“It wouldn’t just be in token positions,” said Chris Shays, a former Connecticut GOP congressman who last month penned an op-ed announcing his endorsement of Clinton. “I think her motivation would be this would enable her to be a better president.”

There are no suggestions of a quid pro quo here. But any moves Clinton makes to satisfy her Republican backers will be closely scrutinized by progressives who were never quite sold on her candidacy in the first place.

Still, Clinton’s team isn’t shy about its efforts to win over some of the very same people responsible for policies that their party has run against in previous presidential election cycles, including former George H.W. Bush White House aide Brent Scowcroft and former George W. Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, and Leslie Dach, a former Walmart executive who worked for both the Clinton and Obama administrations, have taken the lead on the GOP recruitment effort by tapping more than two decades of contacts the two men developed in moving back and forth through Washington’s revolving doors. They’ve been identifying and wooing potential Clinton supporters from different GOP policy, political and business circles, and several Republican defectors who have gone public with their endorsements say the campaign has been quick to swoop in and help them publish and distribute statements and op-eds declaring support, to coordinate media interviews and assisting in wider Republican networking efforts.

By embracing Clinton, these Republicans say they’ve also gained an easy entry point to communicate with the campaign’s senior brass on both policy and political tactics. Come 2017, they hope their campaign access translates to a new Clinton administration.

“They’re not just going through the motions. That says a lot,” said James Cicconi, a senior executive for AT&T and former Republican White House aide who last week co-hosted a breakfast fundraiser in Washington on Clinton’s behalf at a popular Indian restaurant where Podesta appeared for more than an hour as a guest speaker.

“Once you’ve gotten the endorsement, you’ve gotten it. The fact they’re actually working with and seeking feedback consistently is a good thing,” Cicconi added. “It gives me hope. If you’re doing that in the campaign when it’s in the middle of such a hectic race to the finish line, it’s a good signal of how you’d try to govern when you have less time pressure.”

Jake Sullivan, a senior campaign foreign policy aide, has participated in briefings and calls with the campaign’s GOP supporters and last week attended a meeting with leading Republican Party officials at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington. Cookies, potato chips and soft drinks were served during the 90-minute session, which included Clinton supporters who have gone public like John Negroponte, a longtime diplomat who has served under three Republican presidents and the Bill Clinton administration, as well as George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who hasn’t publicly endorsed the Democrat.

In an interview, Negroponte praised Sullivan for meeting privately with a group of Republicans that included former Bush administration officials who’ve previously been in Clinton and Democratic cross hairs. “It’s an indication of their openness to casting a wide net and being exposed to a wide variety of views,” he said. “It’s a pretty statesman-like thing to do.”

Certainly, many of Clinton’s new Republican supporters still openly pine for an alternate reality in which their time, energy and money is being spent on behalf of electing Jeb Bush, John Kasich or Ted Cruz. But with their options winnowed down to Clinton, Trump or a third-party candidate, the Republicans abandoning their party’s nominee see themselves as the conservatives best positioned to shape and influence the Democrat’s domestic and foreign policy.

“Part of what we’re trying to do is help nudge her,” said James Glassman, founding director of the George W. Bush Institute at the former president’s library in Dallas and a former undersecretary of state.

Clinton aides insist the outreach to Republicans isn’t a signal of any rightward shift on policy. The campaign is just following through on a promise their candidate has been making on the stump to pursue a bipartisan governing style as president that will represent “all Americans,” including the people who didn’t vote for her.

“Hillary Clinton has a long track record of bringing people together from both parties to forge solutions, and she’s proud to have the support of a growing number of Independents and Republicans who recognize that,” campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in an email.

But to many of the Republicans who are taking Clinton’s side in 2016, it’s their public commitment that relays an expectation that her administration wouldn’t be shutting them out of the governing process.

“It’d be disingenuous to suggest she wouldn’t be open to and particularly interested in working with those who supported her,” said Scott Evertz, former head of the White House AIDS policy office under President George W. Bush. “There’s a certain amount of that going on right now.”

Should she win, she’ll certainly need Republican support to move any legislative agenda— tax reform, trade or immigration — through Congress where Republicans are looking forward to a more favorable electoral environment in the 2018 midterms.

“She’ll have every incentive to try to work well with Republicans in the majority,” said William Reilly, a former EPA administrator under George H.W. Bush who last month endorsed Clinton.

Some of the Republicans backing Clinton say the bar isn’t exactly that high for the Democrat when it comes to their specific policy issues too. Richard Painter, a former chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House who endorsed Clinton last month, said he’d like a promise from the Democrat that she wouldn’t increase taxes. But most important, he said, was for Clinton to keep pushing on Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, and not to pick someone with a more liberal track record.

“Making sure he gets through, more than anything else, would be a strong indication to Republicans that she’s serious about going down the middle road,” Painter said.

If she’s president, they see Clinton pursuing policies that are much more reflective of her history as a moderate Democrat whose career in federal government has often involved working with Republicans in the majority, both in Congress during six of the eight years in her husband’s administration and in her tenure as a New York senator while Bush was president.

“It’s in her genes,” Shays said in an interview, pointing to the Clinton administration’s advocacy for bipartisan bills on welfare reform and the creation of AmeriCorps and then the senator’s work on behalf of the victims, survivors and rescue workers from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Clinton’s left flank is paying close attention to the Republicans’ rising stock too, and they are threatening to blast the Democrat should she win and then govern with anything less than a progressive mind-set. An early warning of just how close they’re watching: Critics of free trade and fracking ripped Clinton earlier this summer after she put a Democrat — former senator and Obama Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — into a job leading her transition efforts.

Neil Sroka, the communications director for Democracy for America, said he wouldn’t be surprised to see Republicans land jobs in a Clinton administration. “What’s going to be important is where those Republicans are,” he said.

“Overall,” he added, “there’s a broad expectation that Secretary Clinton is going to govern like she campaigned. Difficulties may emerge if that doesn’t appear to be the case.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified Leslie Dach's former employer. It was Walmart.