Soul-Searching

By Michael Warren

Wednesday, November 04, 2026

 

“It’s an earthquake,” one GOP strategist texted me Tuesday night. “I mean a total and complete sea change.”

 

Full fathom five the Republican Party lies, as Shakespeare might have put it. On Tuesday night, voters so thoroughly rebuked the Grand Old Party and its leader for the past decade, Donald Trump, that Democrats turned Texas and Georgia blue, knocked off the moderate exemplar Susan Collins in Maine, and appeared on track to win their largest House majority since Barack Obama was elected in 2008. The defeats are so total that they invite existential questions.

 

What is the Republican Party? From its fundraising operations to its governing philosophy, it has become an organization built around and for one man, hollowed out over the past decade and purged of anyone or any idea independent of the current president. Any remaining attachment to free markets, limited government, the rule of law, a culture of life, or family values has been superseded by Trump’s own desires, impulses, enrichment, and peculiarities. It’s the party that, while holding majorities in Congress, raised no meaningful objections to Trump’s unilateral trade war or actual war with Iran. It’s the party that, against the better judgment of some leaders out in the states, acquiesced to the president’s demands for mid-decade redistricting that has now totally backfired on the GOP. And it’s the party that had to sit there and take it while the president makes his final pitch to voters on the eve of an election by touting his administration’s victory in its long, grueling war against algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

 

Who are the Republican Party’s leaders? There’s Trump, along with his vice president, J.D. Vance, whose prospects seem much, much dimmer today amid the midterm results. John Thune is now in his final weeks as Senate majority leader, and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, told his conference today he won’t run for minority leader. The three-term governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, is suddenly gone. Longtime Republican figures in the Senate, from Mitch McConnell to John Cornyn to Susan Collins, are on their way out. Rising young stars like Ashley Hinson and Vivek Ramaswamy have had their career hopes cut short. North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson, the chairman of the House GOP’s campaign arm, appears to have lost his reelection bid. Most of the remaining House Republicans hail from overwhelmingly red districts, and the majority-making seats in the suburbs of American cities are all but completely lost.

 

Where does the Republican Party even begin to go from here? This is the question of the moment, and the driving question of this newsletter. A less devastating loss in the midterms might have allowed the recalcitrant MAGA dead-enders to convince the party to stay in line behind Trump. That seems nearly impossible now, given how much capital—monetary and political and reputational—Republicans spent on behalf of the Trump project, and with so frustratingly little to show for it. Trump’s days as a troublemaker for the GOP may not be quite over, but his relevance to a party suddenly grasping for it in this new political landscape has waned considerably overnight.

 

What’s left of the GOP is a rump in Congress, ruby-red-state Republican officeholders in Idaho and Arkansas, and quirky aberrations, such as Republican governors in New Hampshire and Vermont whose brands aren’t tied directly to Trump. Some of them will remain loyal to the president, but these members, now firmly in the minority, have very little power to do much for a lame-duck Trump. Conversely, there’s now far less the president can do for or to those in his party who step out of line. And there’s a lot more upside for ambitious Republicans to chart their own course independent of Trump.

 

And so the fight for the future of the Republican Party, and the political right in this country, begins in earnest. The world has just changed so radically, as Dr. Alan Grant once said, and we’re all running to catch up.

 

Bad Vibes on the Ground

 

In a ballroom in Virginia Beach on Tuesday night, the GOP faithful gathered for an election night party for Rep. Jen Kiggans, a two-term Republican in a tough fight for reelection. Over the course of just a few short hours, the reality began to emerge: Not only would Kiggans lose her race, but the Republican Party was headed for an historic, resounding defeat in races at every level of government and across the country. I witnessed GOP loyalists in this bellwether congressional district go through the five stages of grief.

 

Anger: Early in the evening, one woman looked up at Fox News’ coverage of the results as it was projected on a large screen. “This is HORRIBLE!” she said, to no one in particular. Another man grumbled to himself, “How is this happening?”

 

Bargaining: The early lead Kiggans took over her Democratic challenger, former Rep. Elaine Luria, had some at the election -night party surprisingly giddy at the prospect she could pull it off. And when Fox called a few races for Republicans—Senate races in Kentucky and West Virginia, where Democrats weren’t expected to win—the cheers from the crowd seemed to be compensating for anxiety about how the competitive races would go.

 

Denial: Virginia’s 2^nd Congressional District race had not yet been called when, a few minutes after 9 p.m., Kiggans came out on stage “a little bit earlier so that we could all go home and get our comfy pajamas and slippers on and watch from our couch.” She added that “this race is not over,” though by then Luria had taken a comfortable lead.

 

Depression: Dejection showed on the faces of those who lingered after Kiggans’s remarks as television coverage showed Democrats systematically winning just about every competitive House and Senate race on the board.

 

Acceptance: At about 9:45 p.m., I headed up to my hotel room to participate in the Dispatch Live broadcast and discuss the Democratic wave that was sweeping Republicans out of office left and right. Less than an hour later, I went back downstairs to the Kiggans party to see the stage disassembled, food and drink tables being wheeled away, and only a handful of stragglers milling about outside, discussing whether Kiggans’ fellow Virginia Republican, Rob Wittman, would pull out a win. (He would not.)

 

The other telling visual from Virginia Beach: In a room of a couple hundred Republicans, I saw just two people wearing Make America Great Again hats.

 

2028 Starts Now

 

Let’s be real: The 2026 midterm results have shaken up the 2028 Republican presidential primary landscape. No longer is J.D. Vance, whose devotion to the just-rebuked Trump administration is undeniable, the presumptive heir to the GOP leadership. (It’s notable that in Vance’s post-election analysis, he cites his biggest area of disagreement with Trump’s policy, the Iran War, as a reason Republicans lost.) The field of possibilities has opened up, and it’s a seller’s market for any Republican with even a little bit of independence from the current president. What’s interesting is how some potential 2028ers picked up on this opportunity in the final days of the midterm campaign.

 

First, outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t hold back in an interview on ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith’s podcast, published Monday night. If you’re looking for signs that DeSantis wants another go at the Republican nomination for president, just watch the full video, but here were a few moments that stuck out to me: He criticized Kristi Noem’s tenure as Department of Homeland Security secretary and her handling of immigration enforcement; he called the Iran war an “open-ended conflict” that is having “a direct impact on people’s finances”; he blasted the “swamp” of corruption and self-dealing in Washington as being “the worst it’s ever been”; he brought up former Trump Justice Department prosecutor Alina Habba’s big, fat, and suspiciously acquired outside legal contract.

 

“Public service is a sacrifice. It’s not to use the public office for private gain,” DeSantis said, sounding a lot like a Republican looking to distance himself from an administration that’s become so associated with public corruption—and in a tone more in sorrow at the failed promise of Trump 2.0 than in anger at the man himself.

 

I’ll stick with outgoing governors to just point out where Georgia’s Brian Kemp was in the final week of the midterms: next door in South Carolina, helping the Palmetto State’s Republican nominee for governor, Alan Wilson, get over the line. That’s the sort of team-player move a guy with national ambitions might make—and it doesn’t hurt that South Carolina remains a key early primary state for the GOP. On the other hand, the term-limited Kemp is not leaving his own state as red as when he took office. Democrats swept every single statewide office in Georgia last night and will have the majority in the state House of Representatives for the first time in more than 20 years.

 

If both former governors run for president, expect DeSantis to point to the scoreboard in his state, where statewide Republicans held on, just barely in some cases.

 

Finally, my colleague Steve Hayes sent me some reporting from an event last weekend for Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia. Out there stumping for Wittman at a sporting goods store in Ashland, Virginia, was a former Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. What Steve reports, however, is that over the course of an hour, nearly every normal, run-of-the-mill voter who approached Youngkin urged him to run for president in 2028.