Emergent Strategy in the Republican Party

Welp, it finally happened. After a solid two years of flailing and futility, Trump and the Republican Party got their asses handed to them in the 2026 midterm elections, surprising no one who'd been paying attention. Anybody wondering how the orange idiot ever managed to learn to tie his shoes, never mind get elected president, should know that he didn't win in 2016 because of anything he did himself. He didn't charm voters with his brilliance and charisma or overwhelm his opponents with superior organization. He was just a guy saying the right things to the right people at the right time, a time when Republicans were desperate for a new strategic approach. They had watched a Black man whose middle name is Hussein not only take the White House in 2008, but win reelection in 2012, defeating Mitt Romney in spite of losing the white vote in every age demographic. Electoral politics had failed Republicans miserably, leaving them wide open to a fascist candidate who told them it was OK to be racist and promised to eliminate the need for voting permanently. Trump was the natural culmination of the GOP's drift to the right that began in the nineties under Clinton.

Fast forward a decade, and Republicans are once again adrift and seeking a new approach, but this time there is no obvious solution at hand. One thing is certain, that Trump has failed the party as surely as did his predecessors. His stupid tariffs that nobody asked for have jacked up the price of beef (and much else), his stupid war with Iran that nobody asked for has jacked up the price of gas (and therefore everything else), and he has accomplished almost none of what he promised his various followers. His coalition, held together far more by self-interest than loyalty to the far-right cause, is splintering irreparably. Let's break it down.

Billionaire tech bros: These guys have most of their money tied up in AI and cryptocurrency, already exorbitantly expensive and deeply despised technologies. They backed Trump hoping he would fend off regulatory restrictions and let them build all the data centers they wanted. Last Tuesday's blowout is what they got for their trouble. Elon Musk alone dropped almost half a billion on GOP candidates, not a single one of whom prevailed. The bros are finding out that their money, like AIPAC's, isn't just ineffective, it's actively damaging to candidates who accept it. They have little reason to spend any more. Let's not forget either that these same bros own most of the major social media platforms, giving them algorithmic control over which posts are seen by which viewers. Even that didn't help. The data centers they already have couldn't crank out enough AI-generated propaganda to convince anyone to let them build new ones.

Evangelicals: For all its power to mobilize grassroots voters, the Christian right has not had much success getting its own candidates into high office, forcing evangelicals to accept Republican candidates whose personal lives were, let's just say, somewhat less than exemplary. The two before Trump were cocaine-snorting frat boy George W. Bush and Mormon elder Mitt Romney, who isn't even a Christian. Trump is the worst of the lot, a non-religious child abuser who has had three wives and countless affairs, and who openly admires other men's butts. Christofascists have stuck with the GOP for one reason only, the promise of outlawing abortion. They attained their holy grail with the repeal of Roe vs Wade by Trump's Supreme Court in 2022, only to be stymied by modern technology. Thanks to abortifacient drugs and telemedicine, abortions are nearly as easy to get now as they were when Roe was still in effect. Trump 2.0 has done practically nothing to restrict abortion access. Republicans never attempted a nationwide ban, and evangelicals were told to wait until 2027 for the FDA to rescind approval for the abortion drug misoprostol to avoid damaging the party in the midterms. Those midterms were a disaster anyway, and a lame duck administration is going to have a much harder time implementing such an unpopular policy, especially with the Democrats in control of Congress. This is something Trump could have gotten done if he'd wanted to. If he had spent half the effort and political capital on outlawing abortion as he did on demolishing the East Wing of the White House, misoprostol would be a Schedule I drug and people with unwanted pregnancies would be forced have it smuggled in from abroad or travel to Canada for abortions. Don't think evangelicals aren't mourning what might have been.

Antivaxxers: There are couple of great articles on Ars Technica in which a whistleblowing hacker named Rob Willis describes how he more or less singlehandedly sucked millions of wingnuts into the GOP's orbit by way of Natural News, a web site purveying quack cures and spurious medical advice. They've been kept on board since by Trump's appointment of their guru, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as secretary of Health and Human Services. Unlike the evangelicals, the wingnuts have been getting what they wanted. Under Kennedy, HHS has gutted biomedical research funding and dropped federal requirements for several childhood vaccines, causing an explosion of preventable illnesses among children. This has cemented the GOP's reputation as the party of measles. While antivaxxers have no reason to abandon the Republicans, the rest of the party is going to have to decide, in a post-Trump world, if the voters they offer outweigh the voters they drive away. It's going to be interesting to see if Kennedy mounts another independent bid for president in 2028. If he decides to run, he'll probably resign from Trump's cabinet soon.

Conspiracy freaks: The nuttiest thing about QAnon wasn't the idea that there was a secret cabal of pedophiles at the highest levels of government and industry, it was that there actually was one, and Trump was BFF's with the guy running it. As one might imagine, this has caused some consternation in whack-job circles, exacerbated by Epstein's mysterious death in jail during Trump's first term. Trump's refusal to release all of Epstein's emails has only added fuel to the fire. Conspiracy theorists are known for extreme mental flexibility, accommodating any and all inconvenient facts into their worldview by increasingly convoluted fantasizing, but this is a toughie even for them. It hasn't helped that Trump has failed to drain the swamp. In two terms he has made no attempt to lock up Hillary Clinton, let alone Obama or Biden. The officials he has gone after are far more obscure than those he targeted during the campaign (Lisa Cook, srsly?), and his tame prosecutors have failed to secure indictments against any of them, let alone convictions. Some fraction of this crowd has defected to the Democrats, hoping to get their hands on the Epstein files. Much like their antivaxxer cousins, conspiracists' votes have to be weighed against the PR damage their inclusion invites.

Police and security apparatus: Cops and soldiers are a reliable voting bloc for any Republican administration, but Trump has managed to fuck this up too. State and local cops still love him for his expansion of the 287(g) program in which local police assist ICE in kidnapping immigrants. At the federal level though, Trump has thrown away much of what could have been a natural base of support. His insistence on firing and even attempting to prosecute FBI agents whose only offense was being assigned to the various investigations against him during the Biden administration has led to a wave of resignations and early retirements. The firings also very probably cut into his support even among the agents who stayed. Trump's popularity is likely higher among ICE personnel, but he's screwed them over too. It was revealed shortly after the immigration enforcement surge began that rookie ICE agents were not only not receiving their promised signing bonus, but some of them weren't getting paid at all.

The military has every reason to feel betrayed by Trump. In his first term he appointed career soldiers to run the Pentagon, Jim Mattis followed by Mark Esper. Both were combat veterans with long years of experience in the military behind them. In his second term, determined to avoid anyone who might push back against his dumb ideas, Trump saddled the defense department with Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host who began his tenure by accidentally adding a reporter to a Signal chat discussing classified intelligence. He went on to fire scores of career officers for insufficient personal loyalty to Trump, and is attempting to force those who remain to take illegal testosterone supplements. In this environment, a losing war in the Middle East waged only for the president's political convenience is just the icing on the cake. Much of the Republicans' difficulties in North Carolina, which has a large population of soldiers and veterans, can be laid at Hegseth's door.

Farmers: Another voting bloc with specific interests that, like the soldiers, wields disproportionate influence in a few states - like Iowa and Kansas, for example. The farm bloc enthusiastically embraced Trump's immigration agenda while blithely assuming ICE would never come for their immigrants, the virtual slave labor that underpins the agricultural economy. More understandably, they also weren't expecting a war on Iran that supercharged the price of fertilizer and diesel fuel both, two commodities essential for large-scale food production. It's easy to laugh at the farmers' naivete (Leopards? MY face??), but when Republicans start losing rural white men, you know they're in real trouble.

(Some) Hispanic voters: Trump's support among Hispanics has been overblown by the media, but there's no denying that a lot of Latinx voters in Texas crossed over to the Republicans in 2024. Taking their continued loyalty for granted, Texas Republicans redrew the state's district lines in an attempt to squeeze out even more GOP seats in Congress, based on the assumption that their new friends would stick around. The move backfired badly. Gerrymandering's inherent pitfall is its vulnerability to shifts in the political winds. Creating many districts with slim Republican majorities while packing all the Democrats into a few mega-districts fails when the slim majorities turn into slim minorities. This is exactly what happened to the Texas GOP when Hispanics returned to their historical voting pattern in 2026, contributing significantly to the Democrats' flip of the US House of Representatives.

MAGA bitter-enders: By definition, these are the folks who drank the Kool-Aid. Trump is for all intents and purposes their god, and nothing he does will cause their support for him to waver in the slightest. Even their ranks have been thinning recently, however. Their signature issue is immigration, the one area where Trump has worked hardest to keep his campaign promises. But like so much else Trump "succeeds" at, the backlash against his abusive and unconstitutional immigration enforcement tactics cost his administration support in the medium term. Intense community resistance in the streets of LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis, among many other places, forced ICE to shift to more covert tactics, snatching immigrants quickly in targeted raids and getting out before protests could form. Sadly for the GOP's electoral prospects, tactical effectiveness has come at the price of reduced entertainment value. Dodging protests means also dodging publicity, which in turn breeds discontent among chuds deprived of daily arrest footage in their TikTok feeds. Some of them have called out new DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin for being too woke. Yes, really.

Trump's biggest fans have an annoying habit of not showing up at the polls unless he's on the ballot, but paradoxically they are also heavily represented in primary election voting. They can be counted on to vote out any Republican politician who crosses their favorite orange pedophile in primaries, which has afforded Trump his stranglehold on the party. In a midterm, these competing trends propel weak, Trump-backed candidates like Ken Paxton into general elections - where they find that the relative handful of MAGATs that got them there is insufficient to overcome the opposing Democrat. This helps explain why the GOP has never done well in midterms under Trump. Yet hardcore Trumpkins aren't all going to stop voting when he's gone, and no candidate who wants their support can afford to criticize Trump or oppose his signature policies. The ongoing necessity of appeasing MAGA in primaries will continue to hurt GOP candidates' prospects in general elections, especially if Trump keeps meddling in politics after he's out of office.

We shouldn't let the differences between Republican factions blind us to the one quality they share in common - they're all fascists. Regardless of which plank of the far right platform got them on board, none of them have any problem with children dying of measles, with immigrants dying in concentration camps, with AI chatbots driving teenagers to suicide, or any of the other horrors Trump is enabling. Back in 2016, when no one thought Trump could win, antifascists were reminding each other that the real problem wasn't him, it was his followers. That hasn't changed. Fascists might be abandoning Trump, but they aren't abandoning fascism. They faced three choices in the midterms. One, to soldier on and vote a straight Republican ticket, ignoring the chaos and stupidity of the Trump administration to support their president and their party through thick and thin. Plenty of them did just that, as GOP victories in Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, and seven other states attest. Two, they could stay home in disgust, another popular option. Or three, they could hold their noses and vote blue, in recognition that the Trump experiment has failed and the fascist agenda can now only be carried forward with the aid of Democrats. A decent number of them took this route. Democratic gains in Texas, Iowa, Mississippi, South Carolina, and North Carolina cannot be explained solely by an enthusiasm gap. A lot of registered Republicans voted Democrat for the first time in their lives to make the blue wave happen.

Plenty of "centrist" Democrats will be glad to welcome this sudden influx of fascist political refugees. Here, finally, are the fabled swing voters that must be courted at all costs, in the flesh at last, instead of just the fevered imaginations of New York Times opinion columnists. If Democratic National Committee types can round up enough Republican defectors, they will no longer have to worry about keeping progressives on board, freeing them up to do things like fund ICE, outlaw trans health care, and continue military aid to Israel. That will give most of the defectors most of what they really want, with the added benefit of a sensibly run economy.

Hakeem Jeffries, the presumptive next Speaker of the House, appears to be taking point in organizing this new left-right alliance. Back in August, Jeffries had a widely publicized sit-down with Jared Kushner, and while it's not known what they talked about, it seems likely that life under a putative Speaker Jeffries would have been on the agenda. At the time, Democrats were favored to retake the House, if not necessarily the Senate, and Jeffries was probably preparing the ground for his return to the second most powerful position in Washington. An interesting possibility is that Jeffries offered concessions in return for Republican support reclaiming the Speaker's gavel should a progressive challenger arise.

That theory was bolstered last Wednesday, when Jeffries, barely a day out from the most sweeping Democratic electoral triumph of his career, made a public speech saying, in essence, "We can't have nice things." Or as he put it, "The American people don’t want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf..." "Not getting even" is code for letting Trump's flunkies skate on wholesale constitutional violations and rampant corruption. It's not hard to imagine what Jeffries would want in return for such a pledge. (Jeffries claimed to be a "hard yes" on impeaching Hegseth a few days later, an indication he doesn't expect the Secretary of War to still be around by January.)

Nothing is set in stone, however. It's early days yet, and both parties are in uncharted territory. Republican turncoats will expect a reward for their service, but they might be underestimating the propensity of Democratic leaders to disappoint anyone who puts their faith in them. One early test will be how Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, likely the next Senate Majority Leader, approach the Iran war. Congress has the power to end the war by cutting off its funding, simply by putting a provision in the next defense appropriations bill that the funds cannot be used for the war. Trump would then have to choose between vetoing the whole bill and leaving the military unfunded, or making a deal with Iran before existing funding ran out. Given the war's unpopularity with voters from both parties, this tactic seems like a no-brainer, but that's only if whoever ends up running Israel approves. Schumer and Jeffries are both far more committed to Zionism than to their constituents or their party, and if an Israeli prime minister wants them to keep the war going they will happily accept diesel at six dollars a gallon in perpetuity. If this happens, a lot of the refugees will nope right back home again, returning many newly-blue states to the Republican fold, and maybe even giving the GOP presidential nominee a chance in 2028.

Nevertheless, there's a decent chance that a new fascism will emerge from the current chaos wearing a Democratic mask, luring disaffected Republicans and pacifying restive progressives with (mostly false) promises of economic revival and a coherent foreign policy. Centrist 2028 presidential prospects like Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, to name but a few, will soon be vying for the position of benevolent fuhrer, the fascist who actually does make the trains run on time. It's a pitch that a lot of financially strapped voters who couldn't abide Trump will fall for, especially if the alternative is JD Vance. Meanwhile, back in 2026, governor-elect Gina Hinojosa of Texas has already appointed a Republican to her transition team and announced that she is "...not going to be the governor for just Democrats. I am going to be the governor for all the people of Texas." That sure doesn't sound like she'd be open to, for example, eliminating the death penalty in Texas, or probably any other measure that might alienate her party's newfound base of support.

There's no point relying on progressive Democratic politicians to turn back this new fascist creep. There aren't enough of them, and many of them aren't as progressive as they pretend to be anyway. Even their godmother, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is tacking to the right ("Woke 1.0 was crazy, right?") in preparation for a presidential bid in 2028. Opposition to blue fascism, like to all fascism, has to come from the grassroots. Right now western Europe, not to mention Bangladesh and India, is awash in protests over everything from government corruption to insufficient wages to decrepit high schools, driven by people who have concluded that waiting for politicians to solve their problems for them is a losing game. Americans may wish to take notes.