Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party to new heights as the party's standard bearer. Under Trump, the GOP has made huge gains with working class voters, minority voters, and young voters. That coalition helped Republicans win the popular vote in last year's presidential election for the first time in 20 years, and carry the most states in a presidential election since 1988. At the same time, the GOP also now controls both the House and Senate, albeit by a razor-thin majority in the House.
As Trump often says, Republicans aren't sick of winning. But winning without Trump is far from guaranteed. With Trump no longer on the ballot moving forward, the challenge for the GOP is keeping this new Trump coalition together and parlaying current success into more wins. The first step in doing that is to keep the party from falling back into the Bush-McCain-Romney days, when electoral wins were few and far between. Jacob Lane, writer and GOP strategist, says Republicans should try to capture the spirit of this year's CPAC gathering, which featured a diverse crowd and lineup far different from the pre-Trump era. "There was a lot of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, and they all had one thing in common---they support Trump and they support the MAGA agenda," says Lane.
The party's next big test will be in the '26 midterms, where they'll have to buck the historical trend against the party of the sitting president. While the map looks favorable for the GOP in the Senate, the House is too close to call. Lane believes holding the House will take something Republicans have traditionally not been good at: party unity. "We have seen unity recently," he tells KTRH. "The fact that they were able to pass the (budget) resolution and only lose a single Republican vote, that is a testament to Mike Johnson's leadership."
"If (Republicans) can continue that going forward, they've got a shot at holding or even increasing their majority in the House."
Ultimately, this new GOP base will not be convinced by slogans or campaign rhetoric. They want to see results. "The main determining factor in future success is if the Republicans elected and running under the MAGA banner keep their promises," says Lane. "If they keep their promises to the American voters and don't let them down...and that remains to be seen."
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