With President Trump set to leave office next week, it is naturally leading to conversations about the direction that the Republican Party will move in once his first term has concluded. While there will be plenty of debates in the coming months and years about the shape of the party, ultimately, there are three basic paths down which the party could go.
Briefly, they are:
MAGA Forever: In this scenario, a significant portion of the party sticks with Trump once he leaves office. Candidates running for office embrace him to stave off primary challenges and to coast to reelection in safe seats. Many of the candidates are ones who the Trump family has recruited or endorsed. And in 2024, either Trump himself, a family member, or another certified MAGA politician emerges as the presidential nominee. The hope would be that this could resurrect the winning coalition that vaulted Trump to victory in 2016. The thinking would have to be that opposition to President Biden, the media, Big Tech, and so forth energizes this crowd in the midterm elections and beyond. The risk of this approach is obvious — in the wake of the Capitol riot and with Trump’s approval rating dipping to as low as 29% in a recent Pew poll, the outgoing president is damaged goods. The longer the GOP remains tied to him, the more out of reach many voters who might otherwise vote with the GOP would become.
Trumpism without Trump: Under this scenario, Republicans would attempt the delicate dance of trying to extract some of the lessons from what appealed to voters about Trump while trying to distance themselves from Trump himself. Such a Republican Party may be more pugilistic than the pre-Trump party, more populist and less corporate, more anti-Trade and less driven by limiting the role of government, and so on. The hope would be that Republicans could maximize performance by appealing to many of the voters that Trump brought into the party while turning off fewer other voters no longer bombarded by crazy Trump tweets. The risk is that Republicans end up with the worst of both worlds — that they remain tainted by Trump and thus turn off many swing voters, but that without his celebrity appeal, they don’t turn out enough of his passionate supporters either. This is more in line with what happened in the Georgia Senate races.
Divorce with Trump: This could take a number of forms. The most dramatic would be that Senate Republicans end up deciding to join Democrats in voting to convict Trump and bar him from ever running from office again. Short of that, it could also mean a willingness of an increasing number of party members to criticize Trump without fear of retaliation. The hope would be that doing this would put some of the suburban districts back in play, which would be one of the easiest paths Republicans would have to retake Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. Ideally for Republicans, they could win back at least some of these suburban voters without turning off a critical mass of Trump supporters. For this to happen, there may have to be significant enough opposition to the Biden administration among MAGA-types that they are even willing to vote for more milquetoast establishment-friendly Republicans. The risk, of course, is that there is a more permanent cultural shift in the suburbs away from Republicans and that Republicans are unable to win back enough votes in them to offset an exodus of disgruntled Trump voters, whipped into a fury by Trump and his allies over the betrayal and abandonment of MAGA.
There are, of course, many subcategories and nuances to all of these directions. And in practice, it may be a mixture of several of them, with some candidates embracing Trump and others seeking more distance. But, broadly speaking, these are the choices facing Republicans.
