How Conservatives Can Maintain Their Dominance Post-Trump

This summer will mark Donald Trump’s tenth anniversary as a political candidate and partisan leader. The changes his victories have wrought are literally transforming the world, but it’s worth stepping back to examine how he has transformed the Republican Party and American politics. That transformation is what undergirds everything else and has saved the GOP from the demographic doom loop it otherwise was facing.

Keeping and growing Trump’s now majority coalition should be conservatism’s primary goal over the next decade. To do that, conservative strategists must first understand how he accomplished his political miracle and secondly learn how to preserve that loyalty for the Republican Party after he leaves the scene.

Doing that will force conservatives to grasp a harsh truth: Trump has created a new majority primarily by departing from pre-Trump conservative orthodoxy. Keeping the new voters Trump has brought the movement, then, requires conservatives to dedicate themselves to making his new conservative-populist agenda their own.

Trump’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy were evident from his first utterances as a candidate. It was much more than making immigration a focal point of his campaign. He attacked global free trade from the outset and also stated he would not cut Social Security or Medicare. All three issues were clearly at odds with prevailing Republican viewpoints.

He also struck new themes on foreign policy and taxes. Unlike the other leading candidates, Trump did not lead with a detailed tax policy that derived from the supply-side doctrine that had conquered GOP thinking since the 1980s. He criticized the war in Iraq and attacked past GOP nominees George W. Bush and John McCain by name.

Trump’s obvious lack of strong religious motivation also stood out from prior Republican nominees. His background as a thrice-divorced, tabloid-headline-fodder celebrity made many observant Christians wary but told those put off by the religious right that Trump might be their guy. Socially center-right but nonorthodox Christian voters became one of Trump’s core early support groups.

For all this, it was perhaps a now forgotten moment that best encapsulates Trump’s mold-breaking appeal. A mass shooting by apparent supporters of the radical Muslim group ISIS in San Bernardino, California, on December 2, 2015, enraged the country. Trump’s response a few days later was to call for a “complete and total ban” on Muslim immigration to the United States.

Trump’s proposal was roundly criticized, including by many of his competitors for the GOP nomination. But the unorthodox move was political gold for the rookie. Trump’s standing with Republicans rose by more than five points after his speech and stayed above his pre-ban high for the remainder of the campaign. My analysis of exit poll data after he clinched the nomination found that between 80 to 90 percent of his voters agreed with the ban, easily making this the single most widely shared issue belief for his voters.

Trump’s unorthodox platform and style did more than captivate Republicans; it brought millions of people into the GOP primary process than had ever participated before. Prior to Trump, Republican primary turnout had never exceeded 20.9 million (2008). Nearly thirty million people voted in 2016’s primaries. Even 2024’s relatively uncompetitive contests — Trump’s last opponent, Nikki Haley, dropped out after Super Tuesday — drew over twenty-two million people to the polls.

Trump’s polarizing appeal was also obvious in the general election. Record numbers of whites without a four-year college degree backed him, more than balancing out the college-educated, GOP-leaning whites who switched parties. He lost the popular vote by over two points, but his new voters were heavily concentrated in the Electoral College–rich states in the Upper Midwest. The upshot was that he did something no one had done since 1876: win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by more than one point.

It’s easy to see the basis for Trump’s appeal in hindsight. The 2011 Pew Research Center “Beyond Red vs. Blue” political typology showed that one group, labeled “Disaffecteds,” was out of step with both parties.

Sixty-three percent of this mostly white, poor, and non-college-educated group were independents. They were vehemently against cutting entitlements and were the group least likely to want the U.S. active in world affairs and the most likely to want U.S. troops withdrawn from Afghanistan. They were also the group likeliest to think that free trade agreements were bad for the U.S. Their views mirrored Trump almost perfectly — and the fact that the areas of the country most populated by people like them backed Trump in the primary and switched to the GOP in the general shows that they voted on those convictions with a vengeance.

Kentucky’s Elliott County is a good example of Trump’s historic appeal. It had never voted for a Republican presidential nominee in its 140-year history prior to 2016. But it’s a 92 percent white county where only 6 percent of the people 25 and older hold a four-year degree. Trump won 70 percent of the vote there in 2016, and his vote total and share rose in 2020 and 2024 to reach over 80 percent last year.

Trump’s innate ability to form novel coalitions is also evidenced by how he made traditional Republican groups loyal and enthusiastic members. His decision to endorse pro-life positions and promise to appoint Supreme Court justices from a list devised by the conservative Federalist Society caused social conservatives to tentatively back him. Following through on those promises, leading to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, endeared him to this key Republican faction so much that they remained with him in the primary and the general elections despite his recent movements toward the center on abortion.

Trump’s embrace of deregulation and tax cuts as president cinched the backing of pro-growth and business-oriented Republicans, too. They may disagree with Trump’s tariff proposals, but they have remained in his camp because they know he will back them to the hilt on some of their key priorities.

Trump continued this novel approach in 2024. He called for eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits — things no orthodox conservative economist would endorse but music to the ears of the working-class blacks, Hispanics, and Asians that he was courting. He also de-emphasized opposition to abortion while making opposition to transgender extremism a central point of his campaign.

The result was another clear endorsement of Trump’s approach. He won 46 percent of the Latino vote and 40 percent of Asians, according to CNN’s exit polls, both the highest figures for a Republican in decades.  

Starr County, Texas, exemplifies this swing. It is a 97 percent Latino county with more people living in poverty (29 percent) than holding a four-year degree (13 percent). Prior to 2020, it had been a Democratic vote sink for decades. The Democratic presidential nominee had carried it in every election since 1892, usually winning 75 percent or more of the vote. Yet Trump won it with 57 percent in 2024.

These changes have benefited the entire Republican Party. In most races for Senate and the House, Republican percentages have largely tracked Trump’s in the blue-collar areas that once were Democratic heartlands. 

Democrats used to regularly win Senate seats in states that GOP presidential nominees carried. In 2012, Democrats won five Senate seats in states that Mitt Romney carried by between nine and twenty-seven points. Fast forward to today: No Democrat holds a Senate seat in a state that Trump has won all three times, and the party barely held on in two Trump-carried states by less than one point in each.

Some say that Republicans should have performed better in 2024 given these trends. Perhaps. But four facts help to explain the supposed underperformance: hesitancy to vote for other Republicans, gerrymandering, the geographic distribution of the new coalition, and candidate quality.

Republicans lost a number of close Senate and House races because some Trump voters supported third-party candidates downballot. That’s why GOP Senate candidates lost in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The Democratic candidates ran no more than six-tenths of a percentage point ahead of Kamala Harris in each state. The GOP candidate in each ran at least 1.2 points behind Trump, and Sam Brown ran four points behind him in Nevada.

That’s unfortunate but is likely due to the divided loyalties of some of Trump’s converts. It often takes a couple of election cycles for new voters to a party to feel fully comfortable voting for the party in most offices. Many “Reagan Democrats,” for example, voted Republican for president but Democratic for other offices for decades until finally becoming full partisans in the early 2000s. The level of hesitancy seen in 2024 was much lower than in the 1980s and will likely decline quickly if Trump has a successful term in office.

Gerrymandering also limits the scope of potential gains in the House. Both parties do it, but it’s a fact that Democratic control of district lines cost Republicans at least five House seats and perhaps as many as ten last year.

Trump’s new voters are also not geographically distributed in an efficient manner. Winning substantially more votes from blue-collar whites helped turn the Midwest red at the statewide level, but it doesn’t do a lot to shift marginal House seats. His new minority voters often live in states or districts that are safely in the hands of one party or another.

Only three House districts in Hispanic-heavy Nevada and Arizona, for example, flipped from Biden to Trump in 2024, and two of those districts were already held by Republican representatives. Cutting the margin of defeat in blue states or seats, or increasing the margin of victory in red ones, does not help increase congressional majorities.

Finally, candidate quality does matter on the margins. Arizona’s Kari Lake, for example, was widely unpopular because of her well-publicized election denial of both the 2020 presidential election and her 2022 gubernatorial election. She ran nearly five points behind Trump in her Senate campaign, easily losing a state Trump won by 5.5 points. GOP leaders did a much better job of weeding out potential duds than they did in 2022, but poor candidates still cost the party a few winnable seats.

Democrats also benefited from strong incumbents to win a few Trump-carried House seats. Jared Golden in Maine’s second district and Henry Cuellar in Texas’s twenty-eighth congressional district are two prime examples. Take them and a few others out of the equation, and the GOP gains House seats rather than loses them.

As one would expect, Republicans also benefited from some strong candidates who outran their party. There will never be a one-to-one pairing of presidential results and downballot outcomes, though the fact remains that we are in an age with high levels of straight-ticket voting. If Trump’s coalition stays together, over time the GOP will start to win the tight races they lost narrowly this election.

Keeping the Trump majority together will require more than Trump’s presence on the ticket. He will eventually leave politics and will certainly not be running for any office in 2028. Some fear — and Democrats hope — that his departure will sunder the Republican coalition and restore Democrats to dominance.

That might happen, but people thought the same thing after Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan left politics. Their successors were widely viewed as weak replacements, and the out-party strategists began 1948 and 1988 confident that the tide would turn in their favor.

Both successors won, however, and won handily. Harry Truman and George W. Bush confounded the opposition because they leaned into the issues and themes that FDR and Reagan used to build the new coalitions. It turned out that the personalities that loomed so large had built something that could outlast them; it was the ideas as much or more than the individuals that voters had flocked to.

That means the post-Trump conservatives and Republicans need to embrace Trump’s deviations from earlier orthodoxy and make them their own.

This means that free-market devotees and national populists must find common ground on economic policy, ground that provides for vigorous entrepreneurship in a private market and targeted government interventions that serve the broader national interest.

That means religious conservatives and secular moderates must find common ground on social policy, ground that provides for the robust defense of religious liberty, protection of biological gender reality, and enhancement of parental rights for nonbelievers and non-Christian religious minorities, along with civil rights for gays and lesbians.

That means neocons and realists must find common ground on foreign policy, ground that provides for strong engagement with a network of global allies and the limitation of the use of American military force except where manifestly necessary to protect long-term American security interests.

This will not be easy, and there will obviously be serious disputes between coalition members on what constitutes common ground. But this is the price majority coalitions always have to pay to maintain their dominance.

One can always be ideologically pure, but one cannot do that and govern. One can be “pragmatic” in governance, but that precludes the formation and maintenance of a set of principles that unite different factions into one political coalition.

Trump’s often shocking behavior and ideological unorthodoxy has certainly upset the conservative apple cart. It has also given us a potentially durable majority for the first time in almost a century — if we can keep it.

Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and host of the podcast Beyond the Polls.

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