Donald Trump is expected to do it all.
The GOP’s strategy heading into the 2026 midterm elections, according to Axios’s Alex Isenstadt, is pretty conventional. Republicans hope to recruit strong candidates, curb retirements, convince ambitious House members to forego Senate runs or gubernatorial bids, and raise gobs of money. The only thing that’s unique here is that Donald Trump is expected to do it all.
It’s Trump who must lean on Republicans in competitive districts to convince them to put their careerism on hold. Trump and his movement’s fundraising mechanisms, like American Greatness PAC, will generate and disburse the hundreds of millions of dollars that will be necessary to hold onto the GOP’s slim House majority. Trump is expected to put pressure on “would-be primary challengers before they get off the ground,” too. And the president will play a key role in selecting candidates to run in open races. “Trump will play the role of ‘closer’ in getting prospects off the fence and into contests,” Isenstadt concluded.
As Donald Rumsfeld pensively meditated, “You go to war with the army you have.” The president is the most dominant figure in the GOP. His moods and predilections determine the Republican Party’s suite of policy preferences. Even if Republicans experience political headwinds moving into the 2026 cycle, their candidates cannot plausibly dissociate themselves from the president — as some members attempted in 2018 to little avail. Moreover, although it is premature to draw broader conclusions about the electoral landscape next November, the Democratic Party’s image is still so badly tarnished that the opposition should not expect that it will regain the public’s trust by default. Democrats will have to earn it back.
Donald Trump will not, however, remain the central figure in the GOP in perpetuity. A unified theory of Trumpism in practice remains elusive, so the party has rallied around the president’s personality as the only fixed point of reference around which they can erect an organizing principle. The GOP is in for a personality crisis when that lodestar is gone. We need look no further than the post-Barack Obama Democratic Party for evidence of how that goes.
In much the same way that Donald Trump has proven relatively adept at getting himself elected, Obama demonstrated the same skill. There is little evidence that Trump’s mystique has a transitive property that extends to Republican candidates further down the ballot. When Trump’s name isn’t at the top of the GOP ticket, Republican candidates have suffered. That was Obama’s experience, too.
Between 2009 and 2017, over 1,100 Democratic elected officials surrendered their seats to Republicans. In January 2009, Democrats held 257 House seats and claimed 57 senators. By the time Trump took the oath of office, Democrats lost 63 House members and eleven senators. Obama’s party controlled 31 governorships in 2009, a number that dwindled to just 17 by the end of his term. The Democratic carnage at the state legislative level was so appalling by the eve of the 2016 race that Obama issued 150 down-ballot endorsements in the effort to stanch the bleeding. It didn’t work. The GOP took control of chambers in Minnesota, Iowa, and Kentucky on election night, leaving the GOP with control of 62 of the country’s 99 legislative chambers.
That would prove the GOP’s high-water mark. Rudderless and adrift, Democrats managed to limp along, finding enthusiasm where they could and exploiting it heedless of the downside risks. It remade itself first as an anti-Trump party, then as a progressive party, then as a moderate party, then as a progressive party once again. In a tightly divided country, Democrats won their share of electoral victories, even narrowly retaking unified control of government in Washington, albeit with small majorities unable to reproduce the legislative exploits it undertook under Obama. But the Democrats never gave up on those ambitions despite their unfeasibility because, since 2016, it has had no conception of itself outside of the image Obama crafted for it. Long after that identity reached the point of diminishing returns, the party had no organizing principle that proved viable outside its opposition to Trump’s GOP. In that sense, Democrats made themselves hostage to Trump, and he has set the terms of American politics for the better part of the last decade.
Republicans may avoid the fate that traditionally awaits the party that emerges victorious in presidential election years, but they will need an identity based on a shared set of ideals and policy preferences if they want to retain control of their own destiny after 2026. Otherwise, the GOP may succumb to the Democrats’ fate by looking forever to the spent force that once led it for a sense of purpose or, if that guidance proves insufficient, allowing its opponents to define it.