US midterms: The beginning of the end for Trumpism?

Hello, and welcome back to Independent Thinking from Chatham House, where every week we take a deep dive into global affairs. I'm Bronwyn Maddox. The long-awaited US midterm results are in, and we're in a world that many didn't quite expect. The verdict has proven devastating for President Trump's Republicans, potentially for his entire agenda in the final two years of his second term in the White House. The Republicans lost control of both the Senate and the House, as many handpicked loyalists were rejected by voters. There were many firsts. James Tallarico became Texas' first Democratic senator since 1988. In Michigan, the progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed became the US' first ever Muslim senator, and even Kansas delivered its first Democrat senator in 94 years. Throughout this campaign, President Trump asked voters to pretend that he was on the ballot. It seems they took him at his word, rendering a withering verdict on his record on the cost of living, corruption in his administration as perceived, and of course, the Iran war. So is this the beginning of the end of the Trump era? What can we expect from the final two years of President Trump? Well, we have three experts from our US and North America program here. I have peeled them away from the world's media studios. Laurel Rapp is director of the US and North America program and a former staffer at the US Department of State, White House National Security Council, and the US Senate. Hi, Laurel. Good morning. Very good to have you here. Dr. Lindsay Newman is one of our associate fellows and a former senior corporate lawyer. She focuses on geopolitical risk. Great to have you here. Thank you for having me. And completing our panel, Dr. Andrew Payne is research director of the Europe, Russia, and the Americas programs, and he lectures in foreign policy and security at City University of London. Morning. Good to be here. Great to have you. Well, let's get everyone's initial reactions. How big a change is this? Lindsay? This has been an absolutely bruising week for Trump. The headline message is that there's been a blue wave for Democrats. I'm wondering if this has not, in fact, just been a red crater, actually, for Republicans. The question that Trump put before Americans in 2024 was, are you better off today than you were four years ago? And a majority of the voters across the electoral map then felt they were not. And so they put Trump back in power. In 2026, Americans asked themselves the same question, and they felt Trump had not delivered on the promises that he had made in 2024. And so they have massively rebuked him and the Republican Party. Yeah, I think this is a stunning result. I think it's certainly a repudiation of Trump and the policies that he's pursued over the past two years. Clearly is a referendum on Trump. He did, indeed, tell voters to pretend that he was on the ballot, not once, not twice, but 47 times in the run-up to the election. I think on its surface, this is an election that was about the cost of living. I was looking at the exit polls overnight, and 89% of voters said that that was a crucial or major determinant of their vote. But they were also in no doubt about what was driving the high cost of living, and that was Trump's policies, and not least the war in Iran. And as someone who has spent the last several months trying to claim that this was going to be a foreign policy, I was surprised to see that 74% of voters said the war in Iran was a crucial or major determinant of their vote. As did J.D. Vance. He has essentially now acknowledged that it was the Iran war that lost Republicans this election. Blue wave, blue tsunami, prairie fire running through the heart of the deep red districts across the United States. This is surpassing Democrats' wildest dreams as they were looking at the House that was lost in the war. And I think that's a very, very important thing to look at. I'm going to come on to those points about what the president can and can't do. And indeed, as you said, the magic number of 67 in the Senate, but a tiny bit more on some of these individual results. What did you think, Lindsay, about, say, Texas or Michigan? Democrats will be absolutely thrilled that they've been able to secure victories not only in the Senate race with James Tallarico's victory, but also the governorship. They took back the governorship for the first time in decades with Gina Hinojosa's victory there over Greg Abbott. Greg Abbott had been a standard bearer of the Republican Party. He had been closely aligned with Trump. So that is a key bellwether state, and they'll be thrilled for what momentum that could provide for 2028. Michigan, we know, was also a very public race. It spilled over in the final days as well with divides in the Democratic Party between the primary candidate, Haley Stevens, and El-Said. And so the key question there that we see spill over is, what does this mean all for the future of the Democratic Party? What lessons and messages do they take from their victories in these states where they had not previously done particularly well for 2028? I'm still reaching for what this means, though, for Democrats, as opposed to being just an anti-Trump vote. Laurel? A lot of the narrative leading up to this midterms was how well progressives would do against moderate candidates. And the progressive faction won. Just tell us what you mean by progressive. Within the Democratic Party, there is a tradition of economic populism on the left, the farther left, you would call them, who seeks more structural reforms to achieve economic equality to achieve reductions of corporate power in the United States. That is a faction that has been growing in power in Washington. And there was a question about how much of a hold they will have on the party these next couple of years. But at the same time, you have really interesting centrists and even conservative Democrats in states that were deep red who were able to flip these seats to blue. And so you have a much larger caucus on the center and the right now in the Democratic Party, who will have a lot of sway in conversations about what the party platform should be, what the legislative agenda should be. And so there's going to be a really big tent here in the Democratic Party, lots of different approaches to governance. So that brings a lot of richness, but it's also going to bring some infighting over these next two years. I just want to raise the fact that, as Laurel's highlighting here, that this election had a bit of a push-pull factor, which is how much were voters actually pulled towards the Democrats and how much were they actually just pushed away from Donald Trump and what the MAGA movement stands for. And Democrats now need to be very careful because of all the dynamics that Laurel has laid out. They need to understand, do we take this election result as a mandate for us moving forward and everything that we've been standing for and what query is what we've been standing for? Or do we perhaps take a more cautious approach? Because what they don't want to do is replicate Trump's miscalculations this time around, which is to say he won so big in 2024 or that he could just pursue any policy at home or abroad. You've put the question perfectly, the question for the Democrats. Andy, what is the answer? I don't think the answer is clear from these elections. You know, what midterm elections do is ask voters, do they like what the sitting administration is doing or not? And I think the answer to that is very clear. They do not like it. It's really only a presidential election where you get an opportunity to present to voters very clear choices of different visions for the future. So let's just capture for the moment that huge question for the future of democratic strategy. Let's go on to the immediate consequences and the ones perhaps a bit beyond the immediate. Laurel, you began to dangle in front of us this question of what the president can and can't do if Congress wants to block him. The Democratic House and Senate now has new levers to constrain the president. They are not all supreme, and a lot of the foreign policy and national security prerogatives will remain with this president. But now the Senate can hold and block President Trump's nominees for cabinet positions, for ambassadors. They have more latitude to shape the budget, how much is spent, including on wars overseas. They can also hold oversight and investigations hearings, which we expect soon to see on Iran, on Venezuela, on tariffs, on Jeffrey Epstein, on Elon Musk, on the Trump family member business dealings around the world. These are all issues the Democrats have signaled they will engage early with. Andy, perhaps you just take us through the very basics. The president is often said to have enormous latitude over foreign policy, regardless of what Congress thinks. But there are limits, aren't they? Well, to some degree, yes. But I think Democrats will be struggling to meet the expectations that these elections have set about exactly what they can do in the field of foreign policy. So there are things like a war powers resolution that they could pass to try and restrict the president's ability to go to war in Iran. Let's just take it down to basics. The president has the ability to deploy troops, but not to sustain a deployment without congressional approval. Correct, over time. So after 60 days, Congress could force the president to withdraw troops from an overseas conflict. The reason why I think that that might not be a proposal is, one, because of the presidential veto that Democrats just simply mathematically do not have the votes to overcome. Just for our listeners, the three of you deep experts explain where Congress can stand up to the veto and where it can't. If the House and the Senate both pass legislation, that legislation goes to the president's desk and the president can choose to allow it to pass into law or he or she can veto it. It then returns to the Senate and the House. And if the Senate has 67 of the votes, they can override the president's veto. This is incredibly rare in the U.S. system. It happens only once or twice in each president's tenure. But look, 67, when you have 54, 55, 56 Democrats, doesn't look as daunting as it used to. And if you can peel a dozen Republicans away, they may have a new path. What about his ability to spend money on things? So Congress has the power of the purse. It can use its power over appropriations to restrict what the president can do to some degree. I think the problem here is that congressional powers over the presidency are quite weak when it comes to stopping the president from doing something. They are almost non-existent when it comes to forcing the president to do something. And so when it comes to some of the hot button issues that we might care about, like support for Ukraine, for instance, what Congress could feasibly, do is actually allocate more support that they would like to go to Ukraine. They can't force Trump to spend it. I think that's a real, real limitation on congressional power. And as Andy's saying, a lot of this is a bit of a lagging indicator, right? So budgets are passed, and then they're spent in the follow-on year. So we're still talking about quite a lag here before Democrats even step into the congressional leadership roles that we're talking about. It's not until January of 2027, not so long, but still a couple of months away, plenty of time for Trump to pursue further areas on his foreign policy agenda. But it also means that, as Andy has rightfully pointed out, once that budgetary money becomes available to him, it's still for follow-on years ahead. Let's take three of the issues that the world wants the answer to. Let's take Ukraine, Iran, and the tariffs, and just dig in a little into what this might mean. Lindsay, let's start with Iran. So we know that American voters have long shown that they disapprove of the conflict in Iran. It's been very clear in polling for the last six to nine months, and we saw that very clearly on Tuesday night that American voters felt that the war in Iran was connected to how they were experiencing their cost-of-living issues at home. And in a sort of stunning moment of transparency, Vice President J.D. Vance has now released this very public, very lengthy statement saying that the war in Iran cost the Republicans the midterm elections on Tuesday night, which is an indicator to watch for as we think about what lies ahead for the Republicans. But on the issue of Iran in particular, Trump has been hoping to manufacture an endgame in Iran for months now. He wants to figure out how to resolve the conflict there on his own terms. There are a couple of reasons to think that a renewed conflict may be forthcoming. U.S. has, over the last several months, instructed civilian personnel and non-essential members of embassy staff to leave the region. The Pentagon has reportedly been preparing to resume major combat operations, including by sending significant munitions and moving additional air defense and ships to the region. And as I highlighted earlier, there is this matter of timing, which is to say that Democrats will not take over control of Congress until January. So Trump has this window of opportunity right now where he could act and he wouldn't face immediate congressional reaction. And there's a couple other points. When it comes to Iran, there has been a great deal of negotiations and diplomacy, diplomatic tracks, including the June Memorandum of Understanding. But as it currently stands, diplomacy does not look like an unproblematic track for the Trump administration to continue to pursue, not the least of which is because Iran has shown a lack of willingness to get on board with what Trump really wants, which is clear commitments on the nuclear issue. And Iran and the U.S. do not see eye-to-eye also on sequencing. Iran wants sanctions relief. It wants to see frozen assets released. And the U.S. has said, we want to hear the commitments on nuclear first. And part of the problem here is the facts that were laid out under the Memorandum of Understanding, which, in a sense, Iran's saying, well, now you're looking to retrade that deal. And I think the final point is that this is an emotional decision for Trump. He owns the war in Iran, regardless of how it ends. And he knows this. Iran's leadership have taunted him, in a sense, since the election on Tuesday night, saying it's now a political defeat for him. So the choice before Trump is whether to fold or double down. And we know Trump is a gambler. He's not a folder. He believes he can pull a rabbit out of a hat on this one. And I think it's going to be hard for him to resist just another go-around on kinetic conflict. Yes, he is commander-in-chief, but there are people around him. And the race for the presidency in 2028 starts this week. Do you see those other figures jostling for primacy now as being a constraint on what the president might do in Iran? The challenge that a lot of the emerging candidates on the right, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, will face as they, presumably, begin their presidential campaigns is how to both stay sufficiently close to Trump so you don't force a backlash. Loyalty is very important in Trump's eyes. But also begin to show that distinction between what your vision is versus what Trump's vision is, especially on areas that are uniquely unpopular. So Iran is going to rank at the very top of that list, but there are others as well. So to me, the big question now is who then becomes the scapegoat for this? And, you know, Secretary of War, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been one of the biggest backers of this war, privately as well as publicly. So the Democrats are seeking accountability. But even within the Republican Party, there's going to be a reckoning of who will take the fall for Iran and then what that contrast is that a conservative, a Republican candidate will put forward. Andy, what about Ukraine? We had a Ukrainian delegation here, a former prime minister speaking publicly at Chatham House. Do you look up that? This week, but really quite stark saying we're not expecting more money from the US. We've really got to look to Europe. I think that's right. I think Trump has demonstrated that he doesn't particularly care that much about the conflict in Ukraine. What he cares about, I think, is economic opportunity across the globe. I think he probably will continue with what we've seen in terms of his rapprochement with Vladimir Putin, because he sees Russia as this land of untapped commercial opportunity. I think we will continue to see a drift away from this administration supporting Ukraine, in part, actually, because in Trump's mind, Ukraine and President Zelensky, they are bound up actually with his first impeachment. I think what we will also see is a bipartisan resistance to Trump doing these things. In Congress and among the public, Ukraine, is one of the few issues where there is bipartisan support. There was a YouGov poll taken just before the election, which suggested that 66% of voters sympathize more with Ukraine. Only 3% sympathize more with Russia. You saw in response to Trump's diesel deal, his lifting of sanctions on Russia, actually push back even from Republicans in the days leading up to the election. Okay, but the question I'm asking is whether that turns into more money or arms for Ukraine, because, and certainly the Ukrainian perspective, now, is that there is bipartisan agreement not to send more money, that there is an agreement that Trump was right, even if very noisy, in saying Europe's got to pay its own way, this is the time for it to do that. So maybe there was resistance to Trump embracing Putin, Russia, but that doesn't turn into more money, more American support for Ukraine. That would be the Ukrainian challenge. I think that's absolutely correct. And it goes back to my point about the limits of congressional power, right? It can allocate more funds. It can pressure Trump, it can't force him to spend that money, it can't force him to do things. The one thing that Democrats could do if they wanted to force Trump to do something is to force a shutdown over Ukraine. I see that as exceedingly unlikely. A shutdown of the government. A shutdown of the government, yeah. Which we've seen in the past on things like the debt ceiling and other domestic issues. I just don't see that happening because I think, you know, voters have made it very clear they want Congress to be working on things like healthcare, the cost of living. But on the point about whether Congress might try to block President Trump doing deals with Putin, I mean, he's lifted some sanctions. Is Congress going to have a view on that? I'm trying to separate the two things of support for Ukraine, where I think there is not much support even in this new Congress, from the support that President Trump began to be offering to Russia itself. And there it seems to me there is more old-fashioned wariness or hostility towards Russia as an opponent of the U.S. in some ways. There is, but then that goes back to presidential power and what that looks like. A president has untrammeled power on diplomacy. Most of the things that Trump will want to do is, you know, grandstanding summits with Putin. He might strike trade deals. You know, Congress doesn't pass treaties anymore. I can't imagine anything like that being proposed or passed. So I think you'll see more of these bilateral relations between Trump and Putin that Congress won't actually be able to have a say on. Well, Trump is out on a branch of his own on his overtures towards Russia. The diesel deal with came just ahead of the midterm elections was surprising. and was not well received at home, despite its efforts to sort of ease the pressure on pricing back at home for farmers, which had been a very important base for the Republican Party. But that does not mean that Trump is going to sort of shrink back and not continue to swing his preferences towards Putin, because as Andy says, he wants to see this war resolve in a way that allows him to have further access, further proximity to power, further ability to get more energy deals, more critical mineral deals. And if that means that he has got to hold his nose, if it is even holding his nose for Trump and enter into further negotiations with Russia, he has very little trouble doing that. And he's hoping that next week's trilateral conversation between the U.S., Ukraine and Russia, the parties to the Ukraine-Russia conflict that's set to go ahead in Abu Dhabi does actually, in fact, go ahead and that they can start to indicate that there might be some momentum towards resolving the conflict. And again, very much as Andy said, Trump wants to see the conflict end, but he doesn't really have as much of an ideological commitment to how it ends in the way that Europe does. Laurel, the question of tariffs, less dramatic than these wars, but of enormous economic consequence to many, many countries. And I'm thinking just for a start of the once very intertwined Canadian and American car industries. What happens now on those, do you think? Deeply consequential for many U.S. partners around the world, also deeply consequential for many Americans. This featured as one of the big, big midterms themes as well on foreign policy. It was Iran and it was tariffs that Americans really identified as drivers of higher costs of food and fuel and housing, inflationary measures. So tariffs were largely seen as problematic among the American people. They're also one of Trump's signature policy tools. That is the prerogative of the Congress, which he then pulled to the a bunch of executive orders, which are measures the president himself can implement. And so a lot of these executive orders are still standing, will continue to stand through these next couple of years. We've heard from the Democratic House at minimum that there will be early moves to try to unwind some of these tariffs. So we should expect that. But at the same time, Democrats, too, have privately and in some cases publicly said, look, tariffs are a tool that can be, if applied strategically, if applied in a targeted fashion, especially to national security industries, strategic sectors, important elements for the U.S. industrial base. We will not completely chuck these tools out the window in a Democratic Congress or in a future Democratic administration. That's a big change from what we've seen from the left and from the right over the past couple of decades. So when we talk about, is this post-Cold War order coming back? It's not. The new order, post-Cold War, post-Trump, is going to feature more tariffs in the mix. Our economics team here at Chatham House certainly thinks those tariffs will stick, though others do contest that, I should say, saying that politicians will be looking at the effect on inflation, still very much debated by economists and perhaps looking to lift them. All that to play out. Let me just pick up a few more details before we go to the long-term bigger picture. What about Israel, where the president very suddenly said, I'm going to suspend $4 billion of arms aid to Israel. I don't want Israel to be a factor in this election. He had his eye on the Michigan race with al-Sayed. What should we make of that? So I think Trump's announcement was very interesting, in part because it actually flies in the face of the preferences of most Republicans. Most Republican voters want to maintain or increase aid. That was 68% in a pre-election poll. And what do we make of it? Maybe Trump just wanted to take the issue away from Democrats on election day. Well, and he even said, I want to take this issue away from that lunatic Abdullah Sayed up in Michigan. This was his words about this announcement as voting was underway. Which is really interesting, because then if you look at the Michigan race, one of the questions that they asked in the exit poll just in Michigan was, how important is the U.S.-Israel relationship? How important is the U.S.-Israel relationship to your vote? 48% said that that was a crucial or a major driver of their vote. Now, it probably didn't actually decide that race, because that proportion of voters was split pretty evenly between Democrats at 48% and Republicans at 50%. So it probably kind of canceled it out. But I think it was clearly a salient issue in that race. And Trump maybe did want to take that away from Democrats. I think he could also see the polling on Iran. And maybe there was a degree to which he was frustrated with Netanyahu. And blamed him for pressuring him into that war, which was so unpopular. But I think if you step back from that, I don't think this is going to cause a realignment in Republican attitudes towards Israel. And I think the center of gravity on that debate is much more anchored on the Democratic side, where it's one of the biggest fault lines in what you were saying earlier, Laurel, between the progressives, who are much more critical of U.S. policy towards Israel, and the moderates and the traditional Democrats like Haley Stevens, who, of course, was the opponent in the Michigan race in the primaries. It is absolutely going to be one of the biggest fissure points in the Democratic Party, especially on foreign policy. What has changed, though, is where each of those factions on the left anchor their positions. Because in the past, the centrist Democrats have largely had a, and you can look at the Biden administration as one example of this coalition, who look to very large military outlays, security assistance to Israel, foreign aid, this $4 billion package, right? This was both under the Obama administration, then Trump, and then Biden. So this has been a bipartisan issue for decades. That is changing in this centrist camp right now, where you see candidates like John Ossoff down in Georgia, who won re-election by very large margins on Tuesday. He may be one of the candidates we see coming forward for president. His view is that military assistance to Israel should be much more conditioned. There should be greater scrutiny on this relationship. And so there is a greater interest in the centrist Democratic Party to say they will not take certain money from interest groups. They will seek to impose more costs and consequences and conditions on assistance to Israel. That is how the coalition on the left is changing and is We saw that debate play out in a really ugly way up in Michigan over the past couple of days, both on policy, but especially just very ad hominem personal attacks. That is probably something we're going to continue to see these next two years as Democrats begin to coalesce their position on what they want that relationship with Israel. And not just Israel, it's broader Middle East and what the U.S. wants its sort of strategic objectives to be in the Middle East, U.S. military basing, security assistance, including to the Gulf, what those relationships should look like over the next decade. Let me just pick up two other details. One is the question of corruption, whether Democrats are right to pursue this in Congress, or would that be a waste of political time and capital? It obviously featured very highly in voters' perceptions coming into this. This is allegations of whether you call it corruption or using the presidency by people around the president to make themselves wealthier. And the other one is the relation with the big tech giants. Where do you think that is going? We know that Democrats now in control of both houses of Congress have the ability to pursue investigations. They have the ability to pursue impeachments. They will have these oversight powers that both Andy and I referred to earlier. The question is, will they use them? And to how wide a net are they going to sort of pursue and cast with these powers? Because we know that the record here is mixed. Trump obviously was investigated during his first term, and those impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives are going to be mixed. And so I think that's going to be important. And again, this is where those magical thresholds of two-thirds needed in the Senate for a successful impeachment conviction come into play. Democrats are going to really struggle in order to see any of these investigations materialize into actual biting effects for the president. That doesn't mean that there won't be important optics there. It doesn't mean that there isn't a desire really from the Democratic base to investigate. It's just going to be a lot of work. And I think that's going to be a lot of work. And I think that's going to be a lot of corruption, investigate issues like certain deals that have been signed, including the Russia diesel deal. But the question is whether it is wise for Democrats to use a limited amount of time over the next two years to pursue those investigations. And I would say, as I believe you said, Bronwyn, the race to 2028 begins this week. So Democrats really need to be thinking about if they want to recapture the White House, what are the steps that are going to best position them to do that? So let's turn to the race for 2028. The road does start here. But before we dive into the runners and riders, I want to ask each of you this bigger question. The world is looking at this to say, as it has been through the whole of the Trump's second presidency, has America changed? You know, what is America? What are Americans choosing America to be? Is its democracy going to hold good? Or really, are we in the waning days of that, of checks on presidential power, for example? And I wonder, if you sort of think as people are seeing this in other countries, how would you speak to them on these midterms to say, you know, what is America now? Was Trump an anomaly or is he partly the shape of the future? I've been living in London for the past year after moving from Washington, D.C., and I hear a couple of concerns from Brits, from Europeans. One of them is that Americans are resigned to their fates with Trump, that they are disengaged and they are not seeking to make change. And I think this midterm result, not just the how the votes landed, but just the massive outpouring of folks going out to the polls, I think that's a really clear indication that Americans are actively involved in shaping their future. So that's my first point. The other piece that I've heard repeatedly is that American institutions and democracy are in decline. There was a lot of concern, a lot of anxiety, about the integrity of these elections, questions about whether there would be troops surging to the polls, whether there would be vote boxes sequestered. None of those things happened. Part of it is there was such a massive democratic wave, there was no space for that to even happen. But the election went off in a free and fair and transparent way. And I think it speaks to American institutions being a bit more strong and resilient than many may have thought. These are both two heartening factors for me. I think if you take this question from the perspective of America's changing role in the world and its foreign policies and how it presents its role in international affairs, I don't think this tells us actually that much other than there is a huge debate among both parties about what the future direction will be. So I think the lesson for everyone is that America's role in the world is unpredictable. It is liable to change every four to eight years. And the reason for that is because we have seen in these elections, we have seen that the role of the as I said earlier, that what voters don't like, they don't like policies which drive up the price of gas, that drive up the price of groceries. But if you ask the average American what they want from America's role in the world, number one, they're actually more internationalist than I think many of us assume. Only one in five voters expresses support for isolationist policies. They are generally supportive, strong majorities of alliances. NATO is over 60% in its approval ratings. And it lists a laundry list of different priorities that it would like its leaders to focus on, from China to AI to combating international terrorism to climate change. There's a very, very long list. What it doesn't like is foreign policy that impose costs on the average voter. But if you can present a foreign policy vision that sounds attractive, you can pretty much sell the electorate on a very, very wide range of different visions. That actually is kind of the lesson from Trump. If you look at Trump's policies on their merits, most of them are very, very unpopular. But what Trump was able to do in 2016, in 2024, was to package these up in a way that sounds like an agenda that's tough. Trump presented himself as a strong leader who would stand up to America's adversaries and do that while keeping America out of foreign wars. He failed on that second component, but it stands to reason that there could be a successor. He would fail. He chose not to keep the promise he made in his own phrase. I would just say democracies are systems of government in which elections are held, winners win and losers lose, and go home and wait to fight again. And as Laurel pointed out, this election, there was concerns about election integrity. There was concerns about fraud. The Democrats won. They won big. If you want to know where they won, they won everywhere. And the Republicans lost. And now we're going to head forward towards 2028. And I think there's another trend line, though, that everyone's watching around the world, which is not about the health of U.S. democracy, but about the sort of shape and tenor of U.S. democracy. Because we are very much seeing, we have been watching vast polarization, which has almost shifted towards radicalization in the sense that more and more voters identify with the further left down the spectrum and further right down the spectrum. So that is the trend line of moving towards the polls. I think a big question for 2028 is, how do we move forward? How do we move forward? How do we do we see a movement back towards the center? Is this the moment when we see a retrenchment back towards the center? Or do we still have more time in this sort of cyclical movement where we're going to see further movement towards the polls again? Again, a set of great questions. I'm pushing for the answer. One of the things I found really fascinating in this election was around this narrative of political polarization. And Lindsay makes a very good point about identity on the ground. And I think that's one of the things that's really important. And I think that's a really good point. The home of the Jim Crow is truly extraordinary. And that is due in part to this flexibility and that political polarization may not be as strong as we all have suggested. So let's look at the road to 2028, both in terms of who might run, but also in terms of the right, the left, the extremes, the battle for the center that we've just been talking about. So I could start on the Republican side. Look, I think Trump still has a grip on the Republican party. And I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. That grip will have a half-life. And I think we will see a change in dynamic as he moves from, you know, sitting president with all the authority that's vested within that to something of a kingmaker. That is a different kind of power over the party. I think there's a question, particularly in the aftermath of these midterms, on how useful an anointment as heir apparent by Trump would actually be. I also just think like his grip over the MAGA movement is also a wasting asset. The proportion of the MAGA movement is a wasting asset. The proportion of Republican voters who self-identify as MAGA went down from last spring, it was 55 percent. Last month, it was 44 percent. And so I think there's an interesting question on whoever comes next. Do they try and replicate what Trump did, which is mobilize and energize that base and use turnout to try and get across the finish line? Or do you actually see, you know, given how much that base is shrinking and how it may only have been through Trump's the better move might actually be to try and expand that coalition and bring back some of those traditional Republicans who have drifted away? I think the big question, as Andy is pointing to, is in the Trump universe, how beneficial is it to not have a great daylight between you and Trump? Even an unpopular Trump is still a Trump with a very big megaphone. I wonder if we're about to see Apprentice, the presidential edition, right, where he has all these candidates come out on the Republican side and sort of look for his support. So there are those sorts of candidates. So we can see the names there are Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has said so far that he's not going to run. Then I just think it's important to highlight who are the potential Republican candidates who don't perhaps have that MAGA embrace, don't have that Trump embrace. And for me, interestingly enough, that's Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis. He had wanted the Trump embrace, but he never really got that comfortable hug. And then, of course, there is Governor Brian Kemp from Georgia, who they had hoped would run for senator. Republicans in gone down, spent hours speaking with Kemp to try to convince him to run for that very important Georgia Senate race for the Republicans, which, of course, now we know that John Ossoff has won for the Democrats. But Kemp is perhaps playing the long game here in a strategic game to find where he can balance traditional Republican support and also MAGA support. What about the Democrat side? This is the first time in eight years that Democrats will have an open primary. The party and voters across all of the 50 states and territories will vote among potentially upwards of a dozen plus presidential candidates who will be bringing forward different policy positions, different regional focuses, different voter coalitions that they'd be able to mobilize. We talked earlier about the progressive faction. There are several candidates in that progressive faction that may run for president and believe they may even have a shot at this seat, not just as a message, but as a message to pull the centrist party to the left. There's also going to be a whole range of centrists and moderates that enter this field as well. And because it is such an open field, because this will be an active and public conversation, both about the policies the Democratic Party will want to get behind, but also the kinds of people that they want to represent those policies. You're looking at everyone from the progressive member of Congress to the Democratic Party. Congress from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You also have somebody like the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who is much more of a centrist in this race, has been one of the biggest Democrats going after President Trump these past couple of years. You've got John Ossoff down in Georgia that has really taken social media by storm and is getting a lot of buzz right now. Add to that list five to 10 more, and then you're going to have a really active primary season ahead. Isn't this also a vulnerability for the Democrats, this huge, noisy contest of different views and different people right across the. map of America that you've just described. So they have to be careful. We've been describing this big triumph, but also this is a vulnerability. There is risk and peril across the board for both parties here. On the left, a lot of Democrats were frustrated that Biden effectively anointed Harris in 2024 without a conversation about the direction of the party. But you're absolutely right. When you do have a really fractious coalition, when you have really different perspectives that are coming forward, that is going to really dig up wounds around Gaza and the legacy of the Gaza war. They're going to be really different conversations about the role of tech and regulation, about corporations and big money, the billionaire class, about how to expand housing and the military budget. That's a huge fault line right now, too. And immigration. Trump has said the first thing he wants to work with in the new Congress is immigration. And that's bad news for the Democrats. We are going to have to draw to a close there. But Laurel and her colleagues are going to be running a series starting in the new year, January 27th, I believe, on the road to 2028. So there'll be lots more of this. And do look at our website, chathamhouse.org, for much that has appeared on this this week. And you will have seen all my colleagues right over the media. And I've referred to some of our other work this week as well, particularly on Ukraine. Do go to our website for that. But with that, we have to draw to a close. So thank you very much. Andy Payne for joining us. Thank you. Lindsay Newman. Thank you very much. Laurel Grab. Good to be with you. Great to have you all. And thank you all for listening. See you next week.