The Republican Primaries Show MAGA’s Tightening Grip on the GOP
The window to take back the party from Trump is closing and could stay closed for some time
Ever since the Republican Party’s broad reconfiguration along MAGA lines that began in 2016, the anti-Trump coalition of center-right dissidents, centrist moderates, and liberals of all stripes have looked in vain for glimmers of a future GOP untethered from the brutalizing sway of Donald Trump. It’s not that a right-wing party that is meaningfully divested of its Trumpian influence is literally inconceivable—it’s that we have no evidence suggesting that such a shift is likely, let alone how it might come to pass. What we have, instead, is a Republican Party that exists in a seemingly indelible MAGA mold. This is ultimately powered by the demand side of things, where Republican voters are intensifying, not decreasing, their support for the MAGA project—and it is further solidified on the supply side by Republican politicians either adopting a Trumpian frame in their rhetoric and ideas or being created in his image to begin with.
The uncomfortable reality for those of us hoping to analyze the future of Republican politics through a binary of MAGA/Non-MAGA is that the real binary is actually between MAGA regular and MAGA lite. Either way, it’s a MAGA future for the GOP. When Donald Trump’s grip on the party shows itself to be impervious to multiple impeachments, serious electoral underperformance, unprecedented legal troubles for a major presidential candidate, term-limited prospects, and even the possibility of constitutional ineligibility, and when the leading alternatives to Trump in 2024 range from full-throated MAGA advocates (Ron DeSantis/Vivek Ramaswamy) to MAGA-submissive replacements (Nikki Haley), it is clear that Trumpism has become a sine qua non of Republican politics.
This is borne out by the data.
The Demand Side
A new highly-regarded survey—the Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll led by renowned Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer—shows Donald Trump dominating the Republican field in the Iowa Caucuses. Fifty-one percent list him as their first pick, up from 43% in October. Ron DeSantis, though certainly not the challenger his supporters imagined, pushed into second at 19%. That’s 70% of voters holding a strongly MAGA candidate atop their electoral hierarchy. Despite weeks of talk of a surge, Nikki Haley, the least Trumpy of the major alternatives to Trump, is still at just 16%. First-time Iowa Republican caucus-goers overwhelmingly prefer Trump. Compared to 49% in October, 63% now say they intend to back Trump as their first choice. DeSantis and Haley registered 12% and 11% support, respectively, with the same group. “First-time” doesn’t necessarily mean younger voters, though Trump leads across every age cohort in the poll. One 62-year-old respondent told the Register, “I just think our voting and election is broken. And I want to just put more into it than just going to vote.” A plurality of Iowa independents also prefer Trump—his 36% outpacing Haley’s 23% and DeSantis’s 17%.
What makes this survey so valuable is that unlike the general election polling causing periodic panics in Democratic circles, this poll’s respondents will be officially casting their decisions very soon. The Iowa Caucuses are on Jan. 15, which means the actual process of voting for president is right around the corner. So they offer us a glimpse into the mentality guiding Republican voters as they approach this crucial election year.
It is true that the poll shows that 46% of the Iowa caucus-goers hadn’t made up their mind when the poll was conducted a couple of weeks ago and would consider voting for a Republican other than Trump. Only if they break for Haley would the party have a shot at genuinely mitigating MAGA’s influence over time. (More on this later.)
But it is not just Iowa voters. It is also undeniable that Trump is pulling new and younger voters into the party. Although the GOP has struggled with young voters and independents in the MAGA era, the ones now coming to the party are doing so because of, rather than despite, Trump. This is a fundamental issue of political socialization. We come to our politics, our partisan identities, and our ideological tendencies through the people with whom we interact. It begins at home but carries through to school, work, and the communities we build. So when people choose to call the Republican Party home, and when they do it by backing Donald Trump or other MAGA-inflected candidates, they are both cultivating their own political identity and reinforcing the political culture into which other Republicans and future Republicans are socialized. This is what makes the Iowa poll numbers such a grim reminder of where the Republican Party currently is, and where it is likely headed.
For the Republican Party to find its way back—or forward, for that matter—to a non-MAGA identity, it will need voters who desire such a thing. But Trump’s dominance—both in terms of poll numbers and in terms of the influence he’s had on his GOP rivals—has meant that young voters, first-time voters, and everyone else socialized into Republican politics in the last eight years has only ever experienced it as a MAGA party. Simply by identifying with or dabbling in Republican politics, they’re affiliating themselves with this version of the GOP. What, then, is the reason behind the hope that Trumpists will simply die out or fade away? Perhaps a Trump loss in 2024 or a string of felony convictions will rewrite the status quo. But, as in Iowa, younger Republicans continue to express confidence—or, at least, interest—in Donald Trump. A November national poll showed around two-thirds are at least “considering” backing the former president.
The Supply Side
But even if Trump doesn’t become the GOP nominee, with the possible exception of Haley, the next GOP standard bearer will not be a compassionate conservative, nor a solutions-oriented moderate. After a near-decade of Trump’s reign, there is not much appetite for such flavors in the GOP. No matter how the 2024 election goes, many of the stressors pressing on our democracy will remain. We absolutely should encourage “good” Republicans. But the paradox is that many of the “good” Republicans have either rejected the party themselves or are unpopular within it. Moreover, the bench of talent that’s been built up has a decidedly MAGA bent to it. Governors like Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas and Kristi Noem in South Dakota surely hope to use their hardline policies at the state level to find a place either on the ticket or in a Trump administration. In Washington, figures like Sen. J. D. Vance of Ohio and Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York are textbook examples of pre-Trump conservatives of a more moderate bent who have undergone a full MAGA makeover after 2016.
The “who” is far less certain than the “what.” Anyone coming after Trump will almost certainly either be MAGA themselves or sufficiently friendly to the MAGA agenda such that it remains the dominant ideological thrust of the party. Just this September, Jonathan Martin wrote an essay for Politico Magazine, the headline of which asked if Senator Katie Britt might “be the face of the GOP’s Post-Trump future?” Britt’s likability is inherently increased by her being the only Senator from Alabama not named Tommy Tuberville, the hardline former football coach who has spent the bulk of his tenure holding up military promotions. She had managed to be noticeably less MAGA than her Deep South colleagues; she was not anti-Trump, but in comparison to her colleague Senator Tuberville, she seemed a far cry from a true believer. Then, in December, Britt wrote a column for an Alabama news site enthusiastically endorsing Trump. Perhaps she will be the face of the GOP someday, but there is no reason to assume it will be a post-Trump one.
A similar dynamic afflicts the least Trumpian of the three major Republican candidates for president, Nikki Haley. Chris Christie has at least some measure of anti-Trump bona fides, but his electoral path is close to nonexistent. Haley’s misfortune is that she is a naturally non-Trumpian conservative with presidential ambitions in the time of Donald Trump. This rules out running as a full-blooded anti-MAGA candidate, since such a candidate would have no shot at winning the nomination in today’s GOP, and it further means adopting a political identity in the key of Trumpism. Indeed, the most forceful critique she’s recently been able to muster about Trump’s presidential tenure is that he was “the right president at the right time.” The implication is that he’s not the right pick moving forward. But this hardly rises to the level of a rebuke. Nor does the idea that “chaos follows [Trump]” seem particularly biting. So far, this is the extent to which Haley, who is opposing Trump for the Republican nomination, is willing to go in frontally distinguishing herself from him.
Is Haley Different?
During her time as Governor of South Carolina, prior to Trump’s full takeover of the GOP, Haley once did her part to steer the party in a saner direction: she endorsed Marco Rubio instead of Trump. Even when she served under Trump, as his ambassador to the United Nations, Haley’s defense of NATO was diametrically at odds with Trump’s position on America’s international commitments. Even now, she is bucking MAGA’s deep opposition to funding Ukraine’s war and taking a firm stance against Russia’s aggression.
But Haley’s example is instructive in that she is someone whose ideal form of conservatism is far from the MAGA model and yet, as a candidate for president in today’s MAGAfied GOP, she has not found it possible to distance herself from the MAGA approach to politics and remain viable. In a telling exchange during the most recent debate, Haley went out of her way to say she felt DeSantis “didn’t go far enough” in his “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. She’s also rolled out a policy proposal, The Freedom Plan, that would bar government bureaucrats from serving longer than five-year appointments—a move in line with Trump’s attack on the administrative state. But apart from a genuinely outlandish crusade against internet anonymity, one that she wisely walked back after major blowback, there is little to suggest that Haley harbors the same authoritarian preferences of Trump or DeSantis. As governor, she took on the white, conservative establishment of her state to remove the Confederate flag from the capitol following the 2015 mass shooting of Black churchgoers in Charleston. Her initial instinct after Jan. 6 was to condemn Trump for his role in the insurrection and counsel the GOP to cast him aside.
Still, what does it say of the moment we’re in that, if things go as they’re likely to go, when Haley is eventually forced to drop out of the race, she will likely find a way to justify endorsing Trump for president in 2024, just as she eventually did in 2016?
There is one scenario for the GOP returning to the pre-Trump status quo ante: Should Haley win her party’s nomination and then decisively beat Biden with the help of moderates from both parties, she might earn enough political heft to once again remake the GOP in the old Reaganite mold. While not impossible, this scenario is far from likely, which suggests that MAGA is probably here to say.
After all, that’s what the voters have routinely indicated that they want—as Trump’s gradual consolidation of the party suggests, despite all the setbacks and all the baggage. And that’s what Republican politicians are providing: the style and substance of the MAGA way. Nothing will change until the demand side changes.
America needs a healthy, mainstream center-right party that is committed to liberal democracy. But we will not get that back until we accept how far removed today’s Republican Party is from one.
This piece has been adapted, with permission, from a previously published piece on Arc Digital.
© The UnPopulist 2023
Follow The UnPopulist on X (UnPopulistMag), Facebook (The UnPopulist), Threads (UnPopulistMag), and Bluesky (unpopulist.bsky.social).
 | A guest post by
|
An awful lot of politically engaged Americans appreciate that the true threat to liberty in America has always come from the Left. Progressive theory and policy is unapologetically authoritarian. We also recognize the appalling depth of corruption in both establishment parties, but especially the Democrats. Biden is the proud equal of the Clintons in corruption, but not a single Democrat cares one bit about it. These are the two primary reasons for Trump’s appeal. Democrats have no answer for either concern. The Democratic Party is now devoid of liberals. What remains are Progressives--in other words, authoritarians--and the unabashedly corrupt. The progressives continue to reelect the unabashedly corrupt because the only thing they can see is Trump. They support the “Palestinian” cause because there is no room for the rule of law on the Left. On the left, the animating belief is “by any means necessary,” leading to such brilliant moves as removing Trump from ballots. They are not even trying to hide it. So MAGA is a rational response, not a crazy one.
Your analysis is fair and thoughtful. Trump’s double binary is to find followers, like Jame Pier, above, who are use and disposable, now or later. Present utility requires only the willfulness to apply terms like authoritarian and corruption and come up with anyone other than candidate Trump, and to do so without asserting any facts to clear Trump of existing judicial findings that he is corrupt and acts in an authoritarian manner. Or to apply facts and arrive at similar conclusions about Joe Biden. Happy for folks like Pier to have a say, while noting that Liz Cheney, former federal appeals judge Luttig, and courageous Cassidy Hutchinson are among the many thoughtful Republicans capable of making such distinctions and backing them up with facts, James, that conclude your candidate Trump is corrupt and authoritative to the extreme. I accept, for the moment, that you are real, not a Russian bot or paid prankster in the vein of Roger Stone, and, provided those assumptions are correct, that you are proof enough for one to appreciate the GOP is 2024 DOA, and the elephant in the room is MAGA, clearly understood as Magnifying America’s Grief Again. And James, while I personally wish you the good in life open to all God’s creatures, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, the best advice I can offer is not to attach your opinion to your C.V. or bring it up in a job interview with a serious employer. Moderation in all things is a rule that serves us all. While I personally miss our engaged, two-party system, so critical to finding balance in life, I understand, from reading and reflecting on your opinion, that such a system requires essential skills - of reflection and deliberation, collaboration and mutual respect, active listening, and most of all, a sincere belief in a representative republic dedicated to the proposition of justice and political equality of all, and willing to struggle toward a more perfect union. More than happy to continue the discussion offline. Bring that passion, but next time invite reason and facts to balance it. Thanks for listening and participating in a thoughtful forum like this. No pressure.