Win or lose, Trump’s power over the Republican Party will be hard to break

The former president’s grip on the party, win or lose, will take a long time to loosen, Gustaf Kilander writes

Mitt Romney wants a voice in the Republican Party after Donald Trump is gone.

The retiring Utah Senator and 2012 presidential nominee has declined to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, even in the face of his clear disdain for the former president.

But he might not be the only one looking to lead the party - whether it’s in a week or four years.

While Trump is in charge of the party now, his position as the undisputed GOP leader will likely soon come to an end. Future Republican presidential hopefuls are already positioning themselves to be the heir apparent. But which direction the party takes next remains up in the air and depends heavily on the results after Tuesday’s showdown.

In early October, Romney said that officially backing Harris may damage his ability to play a significant role in the rebuilding of the party, which may become necessary following a possible election loss.

Donald Trump has an iron grip on the Republican Party - for now (Getty Images)

Speaking at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, Romney said: “I want to continue to have a voice in the Republican Party following this election. I think there’s a good chance that the Republican Party is going to need to be rebuilt or reoriented.”

But the former standard-bearer of the GOP may be too late. Since he was the leader of the party, it has been remade in the image of Trump and MAGA. That includes the party’s base.

Duncan Braid, the coalition director at the conservative think tank American Compass, tells The Independent that the voters and the coalition that backs the party have changed, and the policies the party will support are developing in accordance with the base.

No way back to the ‘old way of doing things’

“I don’t really see a way forward to go back to the old… way of doing things where it’s just low taxes,” Braid said during a phone call.

The director of strategy at the group Republican Voters Against Trump, John Conway, notes that there’s a large “divide” in the party between the Trump-loving base and the mostly “college-educated suburbanites who have historically always voted for the Republican nominee for president, but since 2016 have been slowly realigning with the Democratic Party because of Donald Trump’s extremism and … behavior after the 2020 election.”

The base of the party has moved significantly from when Mitt Romney was its leader in 2012 (Getty Images)

While Romney has yet to abandon his party, many of those who voted for him in 2012 have. Conway adds that many in the base of the party now despise him as much as Democrat and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Political science professor at the University of South Carolina David Darmofal argues that there may be a push for a “non-Trump-like” nominee in the party if the former president loses by a landslide to Kamala Harris next week.

Polling, however, indicates that the country is in for a historically close race.

Darmofal suggests that someone such as Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance could rise to the top of the GOP ticket in 2028 if Trump narrowly loses. That is, of course, unless Trump chooses to run for an unprecedented fourth time - an idea he has scoffed at already.

A fourth Trump campaign?

“It seems unlikely that Trump would run again in 2028 if he loses this year given that he would be 82. If he does run, however, he likely will be the nominee in 2028,” Darmofal told The Independent in an email.

The realignment happening between the parties was on display during the 2022 midterms, when candidates such as Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Katie Hobbs in Arizona, ran against what Conway described as “extreme Maga Republicans.”

These voters are “up for grabs” for Harris, Conway noted, and she has been making significant outreach efforts, including campaigning alongside former Republican Representative Liz Cheney.

But the base is not going back to Romney’s version of the Republican Party.

“These voters are anti-establishment. They don’t like even Republicans who they deem as establishment Republicans, and that can be a shorthand for Republicans who existed before the rise of Donald Trump, Republicans that aren’t made in the image and likeness of Donald Trump,” Conway adds.

This year, a small portion of Republican primary voters backed former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in protest against Trump during the primary season. The rest of the base views the ex-South Carolina governor as the “establishment” and “part of the problem,” according to Conway.

Ramaswamy or Haley?

Vivek Ramaswamy speaks before Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump takes the stage at the campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. He could try to become the face of the party after Trump (Getty Images)

Someone such as entrepreneur and MAGA enthusiast Vivek Ramaswamy, another 2024 primary candidate, has a better chance of becoming a future Republican presidential nominee than Haley will ever have, the strategy director argues.

The base cares much more “about grievances and attacking their enemies than actually proposing policies,” he says.

But the party also has to take on the changing policies of the Trumpified GOP.

“I think that whoever does end up being GOP nominee will have to strongly contend with the policies that he has promoted,” Baird says. “I think the GOP has almost entirely changed its tune on their relation to trade policy, and that is all President Trump and his influence. So whoever the nominee would be in 2028 will likely be far from the old GOP on that issue.”

Asked about possible successors to Trump, Baird points to the “populist wing” of the Senate GOP, mentioning Vance, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

“The great thing about this is there are more people all the time, more people who are sort of rising to prominence, who reckoned with where the old GOP wasn’t working, and are developing new policies and ideas,” he says.

However, the party may choose a different route, if Trump and Vance lose by a “large margin,” according to Darmofal.

“The most likely successor at this point seems to be JD Vance,” he says. “If Trump and Vance were to lose by a large margin, that would increase the likelihood that the party would turn to someone like Nikki Haley in 2028.”

Haley, unlike Romney, has endorsed Trump, despite campaigning against him during the primary, and she has offered to hit the campaign trail for the former president.

‘Trump has a unique charisma and connection to his base’

Regardless of who manages to take over the leadership of the party, they’re “unlikely” to be able to replicate what Trump has created.

“Trump has a unique charisma and connection to his base that even JD Vance does not have,” Darmofal said.

The Republican Party is not going back to the pre-Trump days, simply “because the voters won’t let them,” Conway noted.

Trump arrives at a campaign rally at Albuquerque International Sunport on Halloween. His connection to his base remains strong (Getty Images)

Similarly to Darmofal, he argues that “the only way that the Republican Party is going to change is through sustained electoral defeat.”

“We need to make sure that Donald Trump loses in 2024 not only because it’s a threat to our democracy, but because we need to try and change the incentive structures within the Republican Party,” Conway added.

Conway hoped that losing elections would also remove any candidates in the “MAGA mold” from the party, such as Kari Lake who’s running for Senate in Arizona and Doug Mastriano, who lost the 2022 race for the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion.

“But at the same time, the core base of the Republican Party doesn’t want to change,” Conway said. “They want to continue nominating candidates like Donald Trump or Kari Lake or Doug Mastriano, and until that fever breaks when they realize that if they keep doing that, they’re going to lose elections, I think the Republican Party is going to continue to be in the image and likeness of Donald Trump.”

‘Wielding power is always healthy for political parties’

Meanwhile, Baird at the conservative American Compass, said that victory is always better for the long-term health of a party.

“Wielding power is always healthy for political parties, it disciplines the policy messaging by putting you in touch with the basic reality of actually governing,” he stated.

When Trump took power in early 2017, the Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House. By the time he left office in January 2021, they had lost all three.

Since the start of popular elections for the Senate, only one other president has lost all three bodies or offices in a single term – Herbert Hoover, who served between 1929 and 1933.

With moderate GOP voters fleeing the party, Conway said “what’s going to be left of the Republican party is a party that’s solely devoted to the MAGA movement.”

Changing that is “going to take a long time, and it’s not going to happen overnight,” he added.

The main issue, according to Conway, is changing the GOP from an anti-democracy party to a pro-democracy one. Even if Trump loses, the 2028 nominee is likely to be someone who’s fully supportive of the MAGA agenda, the strategy director argued.

“The party is not going to nominate Mike Pence or Nikki Haley or Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio,” he said. “They’re going to nominate somebody that’s like Donald Trump, both in temperament, in the way that he attacks the media and the way that he taps into grievance, in the way that he or she would be divisive in order to gain attention, but also the policy preferences that they hold.”

The GOP is in the middle of a reckoning with the new coalition of voters that support the party, Baird said, adding the party is set to change from policies that emphasize the “elite perspective to one that emphasizes the working class perspective.”

Past GOP policies have been ‘discredited’

The policies of the Republican Party’s past have been “discredited,” Baird contended.

The “free trade, maximalist approach” has been “discredited by the rise of China” and the “neocon, hyper-interventionist perspective” has been “discredited by our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

“I think there’s a lot of disenchantment with that sort of policy mix,” he said, adding there’s still “some place” for Bush and Romney Republicans in the party, “if they’re able to actually recognize they’re part of a coalition.”

Meanwhile, Conway noted that the Republican voices critical of the former president are a dying breed, such as the retiring Romney, and that the party now belongs to people such as representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.

Republican voices critical of the former president are a dying breed, and the party now belongs to the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, one expert said (Getty Images)

He added that the “realignment” of Republicans leaving the party for the Democrats is likely to continue and that the GOP base will shrink.

The strategy director argued that there’s a “pernicious” triangle of the rightwing media ecosystem, the voters and the elected officials and they’re all “reinforcing” each other, a dynamic that will be “incredibly hard” to break.

“What’s going to be left is going to be diehard MAGA supporters, both at the voter level, but also at the institutional level,” he said.