The mood heading into the midterms is pretty dour or gleeful, depending on your disposition. Some on the right, feeling unjustly pushed aside, seem even more giddy than the left; it is about Texas and Iowa turning blue.
But I argue in the New York Times that even if Donald Trump is dragging the GOP to defeat in the 2026 midterms, Trump has smashed the old images of the GOP and the grip of any one faction over it. The elected officials, political entrepreneurs, and influencers who have come into the party are busy building out their own wings in it. The GOP is becoming harder to organize ideologically, and the absence of strong factional control, while troubling to ideological enforcers and intellectuals, is good for the party as a political venture.
Read it all in the New York Times.