As the 2024 election rapidly approaches, a familiar debate is on the horizon: the future of a post-Trump GOP.
Whether that point remains a blurry dot more than four years in the future or an imminent battle to be waged just months from now depends on one’s confidence in a Trump victory next month.
But the reality is that the party will eventually have to face a future without the man who has been its center of gravity for nearly a decade, as well as the question of what to do with the movement he created.
“There will be a sort of concerted push from GOP elites to try to reestablish a Republican establishment that’s conducive to their interests,” Duncan Braid, coalitions director at American Compass, told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think that they will be successful, largely because the voters have changed so much.”
The effort to start this process after former President Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 was short-lived; the former president announced his third bid for the White House historically early, in November 2022. His campaign launch came on the heels of midterm election losses for Republicans who had been expecting a red wave at a time when some in the party sought to place blame for their underperformance on Trump himself.
But the presidential primary that followed revealed the extent to which Trump remained in command. Few of the serious candidates who challenged him departed meaningfully from his proposals. The ones who criticized him most aggressively found their poll numbers stagnating. And the lone candidate who embraced something resembling the pre-Trump Republican consensus, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, managed to win just one primary contest: Washington, D.C., which voted 93% Democrat in 2020.
Still, the question remains of what the party becomes after the Trump era, and the answer will be closely tied to what becomes of the MAGA movement after its creator is no longer its standard-bearer.
Social conservatism’s secular makeover
One dramatic effect of Trump on the party has been moving its mainstream positions on social issues closer to the center and stripping them of the explicitly Christian rhetoric that once dominated social conservatism.
Trump helped usher in the end of Republicans’ same-sex marriage opposition in 2016 when he signaled more openness to gay rights than any previous Republican nominee had on the campaign trail. In 2024, he similarly bucked the conservative Right by opposing national abortion restrictions.
But the fight within the GOP over how to approach social issues is far from over.
“If social conservatism dies, the Republican Party will die and it won’t stand for anything meaningful,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, told the Washington Examiner.
Schilling said Trump’s ascendance coincided with a shift in the types of social issues Republicans have viewed as most important.
“I think the culture war is changing. I think the ’90s culture war, up until the 2010s, was abortion and gay marriage, and now it’s just going to look a little bit different,” Schilling said. “I think the culture war is going to be much more about protecting children because that’s where the Democrats have gone.”
“For Republicans, it’s mostly been responsive,” he added. “We get accused of being culture warriors, but we’re very reactive in reality. We’re not trying to put Bibles in schools; we’re trying to get LGBT porn out of schools.”
Trump has managed to appeal to evangelicals in the party while reframing some of the issues they care most about in largely secular terms. His rhetoric on abortion, for example, often focuses more on the grim realities of late-term abortion and less on the Christian view of the sanctity of life in the womb.
His stance on abortion restrictions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade has left divisions within the GOP, however. Former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, called Trump’s abortion position a “slap in the face” to Republican voters earlier this year.
Some Republican lawmakers, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-SC), have pushed a national 15-week restriction on the procedure, while others, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), have gone even further, signing into state law a six-week abortion restriction that polls suggest would be unpopular with a national audience.
That could set the party up for a fight over how to approach abortion after Trump’s exit from politics. Trump has promised to veto a national abortion ban if he becomes president, meaning the issue will likely remain unsettled even after four years of another Trump presidency.
“In 2028, I think the most likely situation is that the culture war will look very similar to where it’s at now,” Schilling said. “I think that the Republicans will still be supporting the protection of children and their innocence, and that goes for women’s sports, sexual procedures, and getting this junk out of schools.”
However, he noted, “I also think that it’s possible that the abortion fight will come back.”
Battle for the base
Trump accelerated a political realignment that saw the GOP become more multicultural, blue collar, and male dominated than it had been in years. The Democratic Party became decidedly more elite over the same period, aligning itself with corporate America and highly educated, highly credentialed voters.
Despite its leftward lurch on identity politics, the Democratic Party has become whiter and more concentrated in cities and the affluent suburbs that surround them. Trump’s GOP, by contrast, has made gains with black and Hispanic voters not seen in decades.
“Mr. Trump’s tallies today — 14 percent support among Black voters and 41 percent among Hispanic voters — would still represent the highest level of backing a Republican presidential candidate has received in pre-election polls since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964,” New York Times analyst Nate Cohn noted last month.
Whether the next GOP presidential candidate can replicate Trump’s coalition remains unclear.
Some have questioned whether Trump’s outsized personal appeal has exaggerated the appearance of voters’ support for his populist agenda.
“People underestimate Trump’s personality as the key ingredient in his initial rise, mistaking it for a hunger for a specific set of policy prescriptions,” GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini said this week.
But others see the Trump base as a permanent feature for the party.
“Trump has fundamentally changed the demographics of the Republican Party,” Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner. “It didn’t begin with him. Reagan began a lot of that. But we used to think of the Republican Party as kind of moderate conservatives with a lot of country club members from the North Shore suburbs of New York and Chicago and so forth.”
“It’s not that party anymore,” Lipson added. “Those people are Democrats, mostly for social reasons.”
Democrats underwent their own struggle to replicate a coalition cobbled together by a charismatic party leader during and after former President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. The Obama coalition of young and minority voters that handed him decisive victories proved difficult to recreate in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014, when Democrats suffered losses, and in 2016, when Obama’s chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, lost five of the states Obama had won just four years earlier.
Like the Obama coalition, the Trump coalition could prove elusive for the GOP in 2028 and beyond, even for a successor who hews closely to Trump’s MAGA agenda. The need for the next Republican presidential hopeful to reanimate Trump’s base without him is likely to weigh heavily on how much the party can evolve after he is gone.
Defining future conservatism
The conservative movement and the MAGA movement overlap significantly, like a Venn diagram with a bloated middle and crescents on the sides, but they are not the same. Conservatives generally remain committed to the goals of limiting government and cutting spending, while some MAGA believers see government and spending as tools that the Right should use for their own ends.
It’s part of why Project 2025 so uniquely shocked the political establishment. Myths about its supposedly draconian social prescriptions aside, Project 2025 represented a blueprint for how Republicans could reshape the administrative state to advance MAGA aims.
But some Republicans are skeptical of the MAGA movement’s departure from the ethos of limited government that dominated pre-Trump conservatism.
“Why do I wanna vote for a party that supports a massive expansion of government, mandates on businesses, and an industrial policy set by government experts who regularly get everything wrong?” conservative radio host Erick Erickson said this week after the vice presidential debate. “JD Vance advocated the Democratic Party platform of Walter Mondale. The conservative movement in Washington, D.C., has decided to reject conservatism and embrace being the Democrat lite party, and that has always been a losing solution because you cannot beat the real thing.”
“All of the Trump-Vance agenda just grows a government the Democrats can then use against us,” Erickson added.
Parallels between the tea party movement of 2009 and the MAGA movement of today break down right around this point. Both harnessed grassroots conservative energy and deep dissatisfaction with the status quo to propel new classes of lawmakers to Congress and statehouses, and both successfully cajoled the GOP establishment of the time to move right on some issues.
MAGA Republicans talk less about things like cutting spending than their tea party predecessors, however, and the debate over what conservatism stands for after Trump could involve his successors and their challengers wrestling with the overarching vision of how conservative governance should look.
“I was struck by J.D. Vance on some of these issues, wanting to use the full power of government to achieve outcomes,” Lipson said.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Trump’s running mate, is viewed by many as the heir to Trump’s populist movement.
“I think that Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance was designed to continue the MAGA dominance of the party,” Lipson said. “And I don’t think that can be overcome by Nikki Haley, not only because she’s seen as softer on a lot of the social issues, maybe incorrectly but seen that way, but also because she’s seen as a strong internationalist and Trump is very much an America First protectionist [supporting a] pull back from international commitments.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Vance aside, some of the party’s other rising stars, such as DeSantis, are also associated closely with Trumpism, while Republicans who have explicitly rejected the MAGA movement have found themselves ostracized from the party. Others who have tried to split the difference, such as Haley, have found themselves without enough support among Republican voters to drive a shift back to the party’s pre-Trump positions on foreign intervention or immigration.
“They don’t have a credible person waiting in the wings to be that hypothetical restorer of old-guard GOP thinking,” Braid said. “Nikki Haley, the great old Right’s hope, I don’t find that to be a credible threat to the new Right populist approach to the party.”