Did MAGA fail or did Republicans fail MAGA? The GOP's post-midterm divide

Voters flung the Republican Party into the wilderness on Tuesday.

Conservative strongholds fell in statewide upsets that reset the swing-state map.

Democrats secured some congressional seats for the first time in 25, 50 or 100 years.

It did not take long for the shocking losses to erupt into a barrage of blame-trading.

President Donald Trump lamented that he was not on the ballot himself to blast the GOP ticket to victory.

Vice President JD Vance grieved that Trump-Vance voters felt spurned by entrenched inflation and the war in Iran.

Most deemed the 2026 midterms a seismic repudiation of what the second Trump term has put on offer so far.

Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 nominee for president, hoped that the defeat would provoke a course correction.

Up-and-coming operatives opined that the administration did not go far enough to make “America First” function.

Others called for excising the “Make America Great Again” populism Trump pioneered from the party entirely.

But the consensus was that — similar to the Republican walloping of 2006 — an era of politics had come to an end.

What comes next is as fragmented as the coalition Trump formed in 2024, only to see it unravel in historic fashion this week.

Curtis pitches post-Trump road map

One Utah leader has already taken the opportunity to put forward his vision for a post-Trump Republican Party.

U.S. Sen. John Curtis published a brief blog post on election night, accusing his own party of abandoning traditional conservative principles to win elections.

After a decade of this behavior bore bitter fruit, it will take a return to Republican roots to win voters back, according to Curtis.

In an interview with the Deseret News, Curtis outlined where the GOP went wrong and where he thinks it must go next to rebuild its reputation among voters.

To start, it must recognize its mistakes.

While Curtis welcomes the working-class realignment under Trump, he thinks Trump’s populist promises are fundamentally at odds with a conservative agenda.

“The concept of just giving people what they want — just give them the short-term dose of what feels good rather than what’s really the long-term good for the country and for them; this concept that government should just be providing everything for everybody — is not conservative at all,” he said.

Americans were right to feel frustrated with President Joe Biden over an open border, inflation and brazen stimulus spending, Curtis said.

But Republicans apparently misread these concerns as a mandate for indiscriminate deportations, disruptive tariffs and foreign intervention.

“Democrats didn’t win,” Curtis said. “Republicans lost because we didn’t learn the lessons from 2 years ago.”

Trump’s second stint in the White House almost feels like the opposite of “Trump one,” Curtis said. He does not fault those surrounding Trump. Rather, Curtis thinks the approach is a miscalculation by the president.

In response to the claims that Trump simply needed to deport more, tariff harder and retreat further from the global stage to maintain conservative momentum, Curtis is blunt: “I’m calling BS on that.”

Affordability requires common-sense solutions, Curtis believes, and any attempt to message on the issue is undermined by the perception of government corruption.

If that is not ingrained in the minds of Republicans, then their once-in-a-generation drubbing will be for nothing, he said.

The priority for Utah’s junior senator is getting back to the basics of good governance — even if it means taking time to “turn the ship” with an eye toward future cycles.

“It’s still better to win long-term on the right policies than short-term on the wrong policies,” he said. “Who cares about 2 years?”

However, Curtis readily admits 2028 looms large.

The party must pick “the right” nominee, Curtis says, if it wants to synthesize the Trump revolution with a recommitment to classic conservative values.

Republicans have a way to go before they decide who fulfills that role. But Curtis does not mind tipping his hand: The prospective candidate with the potential to lead the GOP into the future is Trump’s secretary of state.

“If you look at a Marco Rubio, you can see inklings of what I’ve tried to articulate.”

Pivot away from, or toward Trump?

Despite Trump’s unpopularity midway through his second term, his vice president is widely viewed as a top contender to carry the torch of the Republican Party’s populist-nationalist turn.

A host of right-wing media personalities embraced Vance’s election postmortem Wednesday, pinning the rout at the polls on failure to get out of Iran, address the cost of living, put America first and reduce U.S.-Israel ties.

Regardless of what the Republican Old Guard says, there is no going back to the GOP circa 2012, before Trump and MAGA, according to Ryan Neuhaus, a former senior adviser for the Heritage Foundation and Sen. Mike Lee.

“The Party has to get younger, more energetic, and uniformly aligned on the promises we will deliver on,” Neuhaus told the Deseret News. “This will require cultivating a new generation of candidates. After last night, everyone should see pretty clearly that the bench is thin.”

Pundits have already put forward outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as one of the strongest prospects with the ability to put a younger face on Trump’s combination of aggressive rhetoric and hard-nosed dealmaking.

The midterms could be cause for reflection about whether voters have grown tired of the president’s pugilistic posture.

In one of the most incredible upheavals in recent U.S. politics, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ceded the state’s Senate race to Democratic state lawmaker James Talarico.

Paxton had focused his campaign on framing Talarico as a radical leftist. Talarico’s past statements about gender ideology were “woke” and “too weird for Texas,” Paxton said in ad after ad.

Voters were unswayed.

Despite his track record of Supreme Court wins on core conservative issues, Paxton’s scandal-laden past, including allegations of bribery, abuse of power and adultery — is what proved too much for voters.

Talarico rode to a 12-percentage point landslide in a state Trump won by 13 points just two years earlier.

Talarico, a Christian seminarian, centered his candidacy on quotes from the New Testament, applying them, sometimes controversially, to welfare programs, abortion rights and political dialogue.

His victory speech vowed an end to “politics as blood sport.” A “politics of hate” would be replaced with a “politics of love,” he said from a pulpit plastered with a “Love thy neighbor” sign.

Is rhetoric the reason for the loss?

Likewise, in Ohio, where Trump beat Kamala Harris by more than 11 points, GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy lost to Democratic nominee Amy Acton by nearly that much.

In the final weeks of the election the race revolved around an advertisement, paid for by Ramaswamy’s campaign, that depicted Acton’s estranged mother calling her a “liar.”

Elected officials from across the political spectrum, including Ohio’s incumbent Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, condemned the ad.

Meanwhile, both Trump and Vance defended it.

The resoundingly negative reaction was a “pivot” for the nation, Dignity Index co-creator Tim Shriver told the Deseret News in an extensive interview.

“We’re watching a country in active reconsideration for what they’re willing to tolerate in political discourse,” he said.

After years of escalating campaign tactics, voters are starting to show signs they are tired of candidates who rely on name-calling, Shriver believes.

A culture of contempt has captured a large share of the country because it is addicting, according to Shriver.

His own cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been unreceptive to his message, Shriver said.

But he is convinced Tuesday’s results show a country in the early stages of breaking that addiction.

“People are not dismissing it as political hardball,” Shriver said. “They’re questioning it. And they’re challenging its merit as a tool for political discourse.”

For Shriver, the evidence is stark: The candidates who justified vicious attacks based on close contests lost; the ones who wagered their political careers on finding common ground, like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, won.

That interpretation of results is far from universal.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one high-level GOP operative familiar with 2026 Senate campaigns said he believes it was not the character of candidates like Paxton that dragged the GOP down, it was the failure to fully implement MAGA.

The party did not keep its promises to bring down prices and stay out of Middle Eastern quagmires, the source said.

Like Curtis and Shriver, the source wants Republicans to face reality.

But the issue is not that Republicans have gone “too far right;” it is that they did not “legislate that way,” he claims.

Consequently, the next iteration of the GOP must not abandon Trump’s populist style. It does so at its peril.

“The style won the presidency,” the source said, referring to 2024. “The style won the Senate and won the House. The problem is the governance didn’t match it.”

Democrats and moderates are sure to twist the midterm outcome to move things their direction, the source said. Instead, Republicans should double down on the party’s transformation into an anti-establishment battering ram.

However, there is no avoiding the scale of the surprise setback suffered by Republicans, which will likely take years to recover from, the source said.

“I don’t think anybody — anybody — foresaw any of it.”