What Would a MAGA Victory Look Like?

Three things are at stake in every election: the future direction of the country and the future direction of each of the two major parties. For Republicans, the unprecedented third straight general election with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket is, or should be, the end of a line. If Trump wins, the 22nd Amendment precludes him from running again, and his ego would likely be sated, although he’s unlikely to be done trying to play kingmaker. If he loses, he’ll be 82 in 2028, and the party may yet have to consider whether it is willing to take this ride again. Either way, it will be time enough to reckon on whether the Republican future after Trump himself is Trumpy.

That, of course, is a multi-part question, considering the many different flavors of “Trumpism”: is it about the ideological shift on issues such as immigration and trade? About a more blunt, theatrical, and combative style of politics? About rejecting professionalism in politics? About being deliberately dishonest and naughty? About refusing to accept the legitimacy of election losses? Or is it simply about one man?

However you interpret Trumpism, the political theory of the Trump/MAGA movement is the same, and it goes something like this: Republican defeats in 2008 and 2012 proved that the party was looking for votes in the wrong places and had exhausted its potential to grow by doing more of the same. The Mitt Romney campaign, for example, basically maxed out the party’s appeal among traditional swing voters (educated white suburbanites and the like) and still lost. What Republicans needed was to break through with white working class voters in the Midwest. Since then, Trump expanded the Republican tent by bringing in a multi-racial working-class coalition, more than offsetting the educated suburbanites he has driven away.

Now, of course, this undersells the alternatives to Trump, in part because this analysis overstates what we can learn from two presidential elections against the same Democratic opponent, ignores the possibility that Trump or someone very much like him is the only type of candidate who would differ from Romney and John McCain, and completely ignores every non-presidential election. Barack Obama was a uniquely successful candidate for a variety of reasons, including his historic status as our first black president. Outside of Obama’s two victories, Democrats have won a popular-vote majority in a presidential election once in the past 48 years, and that was to kick Trump out of office in 2020. They are, in spite of their many institutional advantages, not the juggernaut that the MAGA theory paints them to be. Moreover, a major reason why Republicans lost in 2008 and won in 2016 is simply that American politics is cyclical, and has long-standing tendencies to remain so. Support always shifts to the opposition after a two-term presidency, and the shift in 2016 was far weaker than the usual trend — likely owing to Trump’s weaknesses as a candidate. And given that McCain was an idiosyncratic moderate senator, Romney was a flip-flopping moderate one-term governor, both were older men, and neither were from humble backgrounds, it’s silly to suggest that their failures preclude the success of, say, a younger conservative two-term governor.

Even on its own terms, the MAGA theory has yet to be proven as any sort of durable legacy after 2016. Between 2018 and 2022, Republicans lost the House, the presidency, the Senate, the governorships of Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Kansas, Republican-held Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, and legislative chambers in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. Of these, they have thus far won back only the House, and they did so narrowly, and mainly by winning suburban districts in New York and California and by virtue of population growth in Florida. Each of the last three election cycles showed that the anti-Trump suburban vote was more decisive than the working-class MAGA vote. At this writing, across the Midwest (as politically defined), Democrats still control the governorship, both Senate seats, both houses of the state legislature, and the state supreme court in Michigan and Minnesota; the governorship, both Senate seats, the state assembly, and the state supreme court in Pennsylvania; the governorship, one Senate seat, and the state supreme court in Wisconsin; and a Senate seat in Ohio. Meanwhile, erosion of the GOP brand has left Democrats with the governorship and both Senate seats in Arizona, both Senate seats in Georgia, and the governorships of North Carolina and Kansas.

Various excuses are offered by MAGA partisans. Trump wasn’t on the ballot in 2018, 2021, or 2022 — but that suggests that his political brand isn’t the same thing as a movement that can survive without him. Fingers of blame are pointed at Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders, even though the same problems have continued and even escalated as Trump has gained increasing control over the party machinery and the legislative agenda. Dobbs and pro-lifers are blamed, even though these trends predate Dobbs and even though Republicans have been known as the anti-abortion party for decades. Elections were rigged, we are told without evidence or explanation of why some get rigged and others do not. The consistent theme is that the MAGA theory of the electorate cannot be falsified: It is never allowed to be put to a test it might fail.

What would the outcome look like, if the MAGA theory is correct? I submit that it would not look like Republicans squeaking out a narrow presidential victory, 51 Senate seats, and a bare majority in the House as the best-case scenario when running against an administration whose sitting president still sports an approval rating below 42 percent. If Trump and Republicans are really building a multi-racial working-class coalition that offsets its own losses with suburbanites and educated white-collar workers, they shouldn’t be currently losing Senate races outside the margin of error in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. Trump wouldn’t still be in danger of a third straight election in which he fails to match the 47.2 percent of the vote won by Romney in 2012. He wouldn’t be worried about North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona, all of which Romney won.

The Cook Political Report has a tool that estimates how the presidential election would look if you changed the demographic assumptions. Under 2020 demographics, Kamala Harris beats Trump 51.3 percent to 46.8 percent in the national popular vote, and 303–235 in the Electoral College. I fiddled with the numbers to see what happens if Trump gains three points apiece among white non-college voters, black voters, and Hispanic voters, with an extra three points in turnout rate among white non-college voters, but a three-point shift to Harris among white college graduates. Trump still loses the popular vote but cuts it to a two-point plurality, 49.4 percent to 47.4 percent, and wins 297 electoral votes, flipping Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He wins Ohio by double digits, likely enough to swamp Sherrod Brown, and loses Michigan by 0.1 points.

If there is any validity at all to the MAGA theory of the electorate, Brown will lose to Bernie Moreno. (Ramesh still thinks he will, and I would not bet too heavily against it.) Trump put J. D. Vance of Ohio, the most MAGA figure in the Senate, on his ticket, and they have made immigration into Springfield, Ohio, the central story of the campaign over the past week. The very least such an Ohio-centric campaign can do is flip a Senate seat in Ohio with a MAGA nominee who beat the establishment candidate (Matt Dolan) and the pro-life candidate (Frank LaRose) in the primary. But to do that, Moreno will need to do a lot better than his current 42.7 percent in the polls.

Trump has, by his influence, greatly shaped the selection of statewide candidates in 2022 and 2024 as well as the party platform. His family controls the Republican National Committee. If his campaign is actually turning out working-class voters and persuading them away from the Democrats, we would expect those voters to support the Senate candidates who bear the Trump seal of approval. If they aren’t doing so, that suggests that Trump’s support remains tied to his unique personality rather than representing a new political realignment that can be sustained in his absence from the ticket in future elections.

If we look at the polling averages across the states that are battlegrounds in both the presidential and Senate races (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada), both the presidential and gubernatorial races (North Carolina), the presidential race (Georgia), or the Senate (Ohio and Montana), that’s 15 races altogether. According to the RealClearPolitics poll averages, Republicans are currently ahead in four out of 15: the presidential race in Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, and the Senate race in Montana. If the MAGA theory of the electorate is correct, Republicans ought to be winning most of those races; if it’s even partly correct, they ought to be winning more than half of them. If the final results don’t even clear that bar, the defenders of the MAGA theory of American politics will be out of excuses.