What comes next for the Republicans?

As readers might remember, I did a Swamp Note back in early February which laid out what I saw as a brewing Maga backlash in the Midwest. Among the examples I cited was the way in which Indiana state senators had stood up to Donald Trump's efforts to encourage gerrymandering in their states (even though it would have worked in their favour). Unfortunately, Trump's hold on my home state remains stronger than I would have hoped. The president took the senators' fundamentally conservative states' rights stance as a personal affront, and campaigned actively against them, flooding the airwaves with attack ads. Local papers reported that Republicans spent $9mn to beat all but one of those incumbents in a state where the entire ad spend for a campaign is usually just a couple of million dollars. It's hard not to see this as part of the same trend that got Trump elected -- big money donors, led by Elon Musk who spent a whopping $290mn to get the president into the White House a second time, crushing any move towards a more sensible conservative middle ground. The question is, how far can it go? As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Trump has alienated "Maha moms", working people dealing with inflation, Catholics, and many others in his base, leaving room for both populist Democrats and non-Maga conservatives to grab disgruntled voters in the primaries and 2028 presidential elections. My initial thought had been that this would favour more moderate candidates, albeit those who had enough of a populist instinct to take on the concentrated power issues that are at the heart of so many of our political problems. But there may be another, more worrisome path, towards a group of younger America First types -- such as James Fishback, the Republican running for governor of Florida (see my colleague Guy Chazan's excellent piece on him here). He seems like an extremely scary dude, albeit one who opposes war in Iran. Then there are the followers of Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist with a popular livestream and podcast, who are known as Groypers. The FT was early to see that their hate-filled online rhetoric might turn into a more substantial political movement, and indeed it has. These guys are seriously bad news, and what's worse is that, according to the New Yorker, they now make up a significant chunk of young Republican congressional staffers and activists. They consider themselves America First, but anti-Israel, and are racist and pretty openly sexist (with some backing ideas like "family voting," in which the male head of the household gets to vote for everyone in the household). There's some Charlie Kirk overlap here, but these guys seem to go to a much darker place. With me in the Swamp today is my friend Barry Lynn, the head of the Open Markets Institute, who happens to be from Florida, and has studied theories of power in politics and economics for some time. Barry, I have a very open-ended question for you: what do you make of all this, and where are both the Republican and Democratic Parties headed in response? Recommended reading * Karen Ward, the chief market strategist for Europe and MENA for JPMorgan Asset Management, had a smart piece in the FT about how the global savings glut may turn into a variety of regional investment booms: * The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip did a good job summing up the new K-shaped phenomenon in the American economy -- AI versus everything else. * And I'm planning to read both Lee Clay Johnson's Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen's Fever Beach after reading this New York Review of Books piece. Barry Lynn replies Thank you, Rana. My own read of the Republicans is that Maga as we've known it is all but dead. Trump has too often simply failed to deliver on core promises, be it on prices or building new factories. And he keeps straying too far from the movement's original principles, as we see in the Iran war. I think what's taking place in Indiana and elsewhere is something new and scarier. This is a resurgence of the old Koch-style corporate libertarian wing of the party, its merger with Jim Crow-style voter suppression, and a growing willingness to quietly caucus with Groypers. The goal of this emerging party is anything but traditional conservatism; it is to ruthlessly capture power and wield it for the benefit of the oligarchy. Which brings us to your question about the state of the Democratic Party. And here we see two distinct realities. The first is the biggest opportunity in generations to win real power and to use that power to attack the roots of today's crises, and to rebuild the foundations of American democracy and liberty. The energy is certainly there. Voters are far angrier now than in 2016 or 2020. After all the cacophony and chaos of the last ten years, nothing has been fixed. On the contrary every big problem looms only bigger. Not only are prices higher and salaries lower, but the Swamp is deeper, social media and AI are disrupting our families and communities more than ever, and we are on the brink of a third world war. It is truly a revolutionary moment. A perfect opportunity for the Democratic Party to win big and to rebuild the sort of governing majority they controlled from the 1930s into the 1980s. But that brings us to the other reality -- which is the continuing strength of the party's corporate wing, which offers almost no actual policies compared with the Populists but is rich enough to buy power. Graham Platner's success in Maine demonstrates where voters will go given a clear choice. But Platner is a uniquely gifted speaker and leader. Much of the rest of the party, by contrast, appears more than happy to let Trump do all the work of getting them elected. Rather than demonstrate they understand the magnitude of today's crisis and know how to fix it, they offer the same libertarian policies that paved the way to oligarchy and autocracy in the first place. That said, I am optimistic that Democrats will ultimately get this right. For one thing, the stakes are simply too high. This really is our last chance. Then there's the power of the voters, which includes not only the Democratic base but every Republican and Independent who -- like those who fought so bravely in Indiana -- truly believe in the democracy they studied in their civics textbooks. Every so often elections are not merely decided but guided by the wisdom and will of the people. I think 2026 and 2028 will be among those few.