Who Will Emerge as the New Face of the GOP?

Consider this extraordinary moment in political history. The Republican Party has been eviscerated. The midterm election has punished a corrupt and unpopular administration. Democrats have taken Congress in a historic wave that reaches deep into districts the GOP considered safe. Prices are rising faster than paychecks and voters blame White House Republicans. It sounds, of course, like 2026, just last Tuesday. What I'm actually describing here is another midterm result in 1974. And I think taking a moment to remember what happened in 1974 after Democrats crushed the GOP in those midterms is a really useful way to think about this moment in American politics. In August of '74, President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment and removal after the Watergate revelations. A month later, Gerald Ford pardoned him and the new president's approval rating immediately plummeted while inflation rose. Democrats romped to victory. And the Democrats who won distinguished themselves from the rest of their party. They were not the old establishment. Known as the Watergate babies, they proudly took on the old guard. Emerging from the young anti-war and anti-inflation movements, they wanted to replace the old, new deal coalition. "We're not a bunch of little, Hubert Humphries," said Gary Hart, the Colorado Senator, Ford referring here to the LBJ Vice President who lost 1968 presidential election. "We came here to take the best deal," said California Representative George Miller. "Those freshmen knew what they opposed. The greybeards of the new deal order. The much harder question, however, was what were the new Democrats for?" The losers faced the same question. The Republican Party of late 1974 belonged to Ford, an unpopular and unelected president. He lost to Jimmy Carter two years later in 1976. By the late 1970s, both parties suffered an identity crisis. Both parties needed to redefine themselves. The Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle has written that the 1970s marked the death of a political order that had reigned in the US since the 1930s. A political order is bigger than a party. It's a set of ideas, policies, and constituencies, so dominant that both parties have to govern inside of it, even as they fight each other to the death. FDR started the new deal order with its emphasis on big government, safety net, public works, and Eisenhower kept the new deal order intact by expanding social security and building the highways. Even Nixon declared himself a Keynesian when he signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, but with inflation and the Vietnam War, the new deal order died in the 1970s, and it died for both parties at once. America was ready for a new political order. Despite the enormity of the 1974 destruction of the GOP, it wasn't a Democrat who defined that next political age. Carter won the '76 election and had a famously uneven presidency. It was only in 1980, when he was crushed by Ronald Reagan, that America's next age, the neoliberal era began, defined by its emphasis on low taxes, deregulation, individual economic liberties. Its ideas were so powerful that even democratic leaders, like Bill Clinton, covered inside of that neoliberal order, Court in the Gersonal. Just like in 1974, I think we're in a rare interregnum, where both parties are struggling to define themselves, because both parties have been recently discredited. On the democratic side, there are economic populists, social justice leftists, democratic socialists, abundance liberals, centrests, on the maggot side, there is maha, anti-elite libertarians, anti-immigration nationalists, if even some corporate Reaganites. But what combination of those ideas is actually going to define the parties going forward, in a world where Donald Trump is constitutionally barred from running for office? I think this is a really interesting question, and I feel like I can open up the pantry and see all the ingredients for the future of the political parties. But I have no idea what's for dinner, no idea how those ingredients are going to combine to create something that lasts. Today's guest is the Republican pollster, Christen Soltz-Handerson. We talk about the lessons of this election for the youth vote, the future of the GOP, whether JD Vance is cooked, how the Democrats have just discovered a message that might make them a formidable party for years to come, and what a new political order might look like. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. This episode is brought to you by JP Morgan Chase. In today's unpredictable world, geopolitics isn't just a backdrop. It's shaping markets, business strategy, and risk. The JP Morgan Chase Center for Geopolitics brings together former senior policy makers and seasoned practitioners to translate fast-moving global events into clear decision-ready insights from conflict and great power competition to energy and supply chain disruption. The center helps clients anticipate what comes next. Read the latest insights at jpmorganchase.com/centerforgeopolitics. Christen Soltz-Handerson, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Great to have you back. I want to start with the youth vote, which is your realm of expertise. After 2024, young people lurched right, and there were 10,000 podcasts published and 10,000 opinion pieces published about how Democrats had lost young people, and in particular, young men forever. And guess what? I was one of them. What happened to young voters in 2026? Young voters in 2024 did not want to vote for Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, but they were not conservatives. And I think that was the key error that allowed Republicans to feel overly confident about their standing but the youth vote that they thought the Democratic overreach or this was backlash against woke one or whatever it was. Republicans assumed that this meant you had this younger, more conservative generation in Gen Z that was going to rise up and carry on the future of their party. But if the millennials had all become kind of Obama-pilled and may have been more lost or were left leaning for the long haul, the Gen Z was still this malleable group. And what happened in 2026 was we saw that there was not an ideological shift to the right among young voters, including young men that was durable. When you look at the underlying data, young women have been trending leftward consistently, election after election after election, and in poll after poll that I do, ideologically as well, just setting aside their voting behaviors or issue preferences have moved to the left. For young men, I think some of what Republicans grabbed on to was young men feeling under siege, feeling uncomfortable with woke one. Like there was some of that, but it didn't mean that young men were all on board with this pure fiscal conservative approach or that every young man in America was suddenly going to church twice a week. You know, I would go into focus groups of very well-meaning older conservatives who would say they're so excited because they've they've heard reports that young men are all going to church all the time. And this is great. Like the future of the country is secure. I think it was just over reading. Anac data plus the results of the 2024 election to think that something ideologically had happened that it had had not. So let's talk about what actually happened to young men. In Texas, James Telleriko, according to exit polls by the New York Times, pulled off a D plus 67 shift between 2024 and 2026 among men under 30. I just need to read that again because if listeners were just like pouring coffee while I read that statistic, they might have missed it. Let's try it again. Men under 30 shifted 67 points toward Democrats in Texas. Now that's just Texas, but there were similar numbers in other states. I mean, I don't even recognize that number as a two year electoral shift. How did Republicans lose so many young people and so many young men in particular in just two years? What specifically happened, do you think? I think three things happened. I think the biggest one and the most obvious one is mishandling of the economy, the cost of living crisis and Republican failure to have anything coherent to offer in the face of that crisis. You will hear Republicans talk about, well, we said we would do no tax on tips or we did the one big beautiful bill and try to say that there were bits and pieces of that that they could use to sell as an affordability argument to voters, but I haven't seen a bit of data that shows that voters were really buying that that was the case. That instead they were going to try to buy things at the store or buy gas and we're finding that it was all quite expensive or that the rent was going up. And if you are a young man who feels uncertain about your economic future, you don't know what AI is going to mean for your ability to be employed and build the life that you want to imagine. You are feeling uncertain and unsettled about all of this. You may have looked at scants at the Biden Harris administration and said, well, these folks screwed this up. I'm not interested in voting for them. But nothing over the last two years has given you confidence that Republicans had a better idea for how to fix it. And I think you add on to that tariffs in the war in Iran and you get bigger problems. Then there's also the fact that the war in Iran I think it is first and foremost, a driver because of the cost of living concerns. I will have voters in focus groups talking to me about the straight of Hormuz, who, and I say this with no shade intended toward them because this, I don't know how many of us could have picked out the straight of Hormuz on a map a year ago, but they can average voters can. And that is very significant. But I also think for young men, the kind of anti-war, I don't think that America ought to be involved overseas message. I mean, this was a big piece of the kind of Joe Rogan message of why Donald Trump was the right person to be the president in 2024. And when you go from being the president, who's the no foreign wars, get us out of the Middle East president to electing conflict in Iran. And again, I think the original sin from a communications perspective of that conflict was we just did it and then tried to backfill the justification later instead of laying the groundwork, hey, the nuclear program is going faster than we thought and so forth. So I think Iran and as both as a cost of living piece and as a breaking the anti-war promise is a piece of it. But I think the third thing was that Republicans rested on their laurels and just kind of disengaged culturally that you had in 2024, Republicans showing up in places where young men were. And in I think 2025 and 2026, I didn't see as much of that. I was as if the right kind of retreated into its own bubble and assumed that if you just went and spoke at a turning point conference like that counted as you doing youth vote outreach and you just didn't see the kind of robust attempts at engaging in the culture that I think you did see in 2024. Now, this is a tale as old as time parties love to win and then rest on their laurels. And you have to evolve or die and the other party that loses feels a great incentive to evolve and they usually do. And that's that's what's happened here. But Republicans, I think, have just missed the vote on that cultural relevance piece and you miss that. You mix that with the conflict in Iran and the cost of living crisis and you get a recipe for complete disaster wipeout among the young men. This is where I think Democrats need to avoid making the same mistake that Republicans made two years ago. There might be a tendency to say, ah, look at these swings. We've got Gen Z men. We've got Gen Z women. We did it. They're permanently anti-maga. But instead, I don't think young voters are like buying a home in either party. Like I said, last week, it's more like they're signing a one year lease with the party and they don't know if they're going to sign it or going to re up in 12 months. How unusual is this level of like liquidity for voters in the middle? I mean, of course, sometimes voters change their mind. This election clearly destroyed the myth of the death of the swing voter that we heard a little bit about in the 2000s and the 2010s. But is there any evidence that young voters today are more swingy or put differently less affiliated with specific parties than previous generations? So younger voters have always been less connected to the existing parties. In part, it's just a reality of the space time continuum. They have voted less. And the more often that you vote for a particular party, the more affinity you tend to feel for that party. By the time you get into your 50s, if you have been a reliable Republican voter your whole life, it takes a lot to dislodge you from that position. Now a lot could be, wow, you're asking me to vote for Ken Paxton. That's a bridge too far. I'm not to say that it can't happen. But the older you get, the more established you are in your worldview and the more that you have a feeling that one party or the other constitutes your natural home, younger voters more often are less connected, more malleable, both in their partisan affiliation and their ideological views. When you're 25, you're still figuring out what it is that you think about how the world works. But the things that happen to you when you're younger have a very large echo across your life. The way that you look at politics when you're 18 does not guarantee how you'll vote when you're 60, but it has seen papers and estimates of what happens when you're 18, because three times as much of an effect on your lifetime voting behavior is something that happens when you're 40. But the time you're 40, you have a pretty clear sense of the world. When you're 18, many doors are still open to you, lots of different political and ideological paths you can walk through. So it's normal for young voters to be less connected to the parties and to see larger shifts in their worldview. However, I want to put this in some historical context. So we have exit polls of younger voters going back a couple of decades. And when I wrote my book about 10 years ago, one of the things that had originally alarmed me about the 2008 election was yes, you have younger voters breaking by a two-to-one margin for Barack Obama over John McCain in that election. And there was a big sense from consultants I would talk to around that time that well, that was fine. That's not a big deal. Barack Obama is a cool guy. It's okay that millennials all like him will win him back eventually. As if one party winning young voters by a two-to-one margin was this normal thing. And it very much was not. You had to go back decades. And even then, you'd go to say 1984 and Ronald Reagan wins over young voters. But not by a two-to-one margin. I mean, the numbers that Obama ran up were like blockbuster five alarm fire numbers. And remember, that was a two-to-one margin. If you look at the exit polls from last week, Democrats won young voters by a three-to-one margin. Like we've run out of alarms for the fire. It is beyond anything that has I can find in recent memory, in exit poll data, to show a demographic group breaking so heavily for one party after having seemingly been up for grabs just two years before. No, young voters were not the only big swing group in this election. Latino voters are a whole other very important story. And there's obviously overlap between those two groups because younger voters are a more diverse coalition anyways. But this is extraordinary. But Democrats should not think it is forever. Nothing in politics is forever. These coalitions are constantly ebbing and flowing based on what issues are top of mind for people in which parties are more trusted on those issues. Republicans lost credibility as the economy party and they lost a whole lot of voters in a whole bunch of different groups as a result. One more question on the youth vote. I hear you saying that there's an age effect with young voters. They tend to go party to party more than older voters. They don't know where their long-term home is yet. They're figuring out their ideological preferences. They're figuring out what the parties stand for. And as a result, it's very normal for someone to vote for one party at 22 and another party at 26 and another party at 30. That's an age effect. But I'm wondering if you also think there's a cohort effect where young voters are even more independent today than previous generations of voters. There are some of these graphs that show voter self-identity as a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent going back decades. And both a Democratic and Republican lines are falling decade after decade and the independent lines are rising. Now sometimes that independent line is just a kind of fancy way of saying I'll never vote for Republican. I'll never vote for a Democrat. So they have a negative identity that de facto places them in one party versus the other. I get that. But it also seems possible to me that there is a cohort effect here, which is to say that younger voters so dislike the establishment of either party, that people in their 20s are up for grabs in this decade, in a way that they haven't been in previous decades where there was a little bit more consistency in their vote for one party or another. Is there any evidence at all to bear out this thesis that I'm putting out? Admittedly, with no evidence that younger voters today, because they're so anti-establishment, are more likely to basically be an anti-incombat vote, where they're going to vote out the Bums in Office, whoever those Bums in Office represent Democrats versus Republicans. So something that I think is the best data point supporting your thesis is that in prior decades, it was normal for younger people to be a little more optimistic about the future, while older Americans were a little more, and this sort of matches up with how you might think somebody enters young adulthood, bright-eyed, looking forward to the future, feeling like they can take anything on, we can bring about change, et cetera, and older folks going, I don't really know about this. I've heard too many politicians break their promises to me over time. I know that this is all a bunch of fluff. I'm not putting much talk in anything. The level of cynicism and the level of depression about the future that you see among young people these days in polls is both really depressing, and I think also creates exactly the kind of conditions that you're talking about. If you are a young person who feels like things aren't great, but could probably get better, and you wish that rent was a little more affordable, and you wish the economy was doing a little bit better. And you wish that we had some more rights for your gay friends and you know, you'd like to see this a little bit of change, but you're mostly feeling good about the future. I think that leads to a very different kind of political engagement and behavior. Then if you are regularly having conversations with your friends about, is it ethical to bring children into the world? What is the point of, you know, going and getting a college degree if we're all screwed anyways? I mean, I don't think that this fatalism is for everybody in Gen Z. I still see lots of optimism and hope and so forth. I don't want to be too down on it. But the level of belief that my generation won't actually be better off than my parents or grandparents is pretty high among young people. And I think that is what is creating the conditions that enable exactly what you've described. That's so interesting that you say that because you remind me that in happiness research, they talk about the idea that the smile curve is inverting. So what that means is that if you ask people about their subjective well-being, it used to be the case that young people had relatively high subjective well-being and then it fell around middle age and then it rose again among seniors. And so you can sort of draw that graph as a smile, happiness is higher than lower than higher. But that smile curve is inverting, they said, because subjective well-being, especially in the United States and other Anglo-Sphere countries, and Lafana countries, subjective well-being is plummeting among young people. And I'd never thought of that as necessarily having an implication for politics. But your theory, which seems totally plausible, is that in a world where younger people have lower subjective well-being on average, then maybe on average we would expect them to go into any particular election, having a kind of negative valence about the status quo. Which would predict that what are they going to do vis-a-vis incumbents, they're going to vote them out because I think the status quo sucks. And so in a world like the 2010s and 2020s where young people are just are sadder about a range of things, it might make sense that they would swing part of the party to dramatically vote out the incumbent no matter what the letter was at the end of that incumbent's name, D or R. That's an, it's an interesting theory. We're sort of, you know, keeping in the back of our heads, we look forward to future elections. So I want to turn the page from the youth vote to the future of the parties. Because in my conversation last week with Nate Cohn, he made a really interesting point, which is that in 2024, the Democratic establishment was discredited. And now in 2026, the Republican establishment, MAGA has been discredited. And what we're looking forward to in 2028 is a head-to-head contest between two headless parties that have no clear self identity heading into an election where Donald Trump is constitutionally barred from being on the ticket for Republicans and no one knows who the head of the Democratic party is going to be. So let's talk about the future of each party starting with your specialty, the GOP. And I want to get into the question of what is the future of the party by asking the question, who is the future of the party? And we're going to talk about four Republican individuals that typify a certain future of the GOP. Let's start with the gentleman who was at least before Tuesday evening, the bedding odds favorite to be the Democrat, the Republican presidential nominee and that is vice president JD Vance. Soon after the midterm results were published, Vance published a post on Twitter, where he seemed to attempt to walk back every single policy position of the administration without naming the president, which I thought was the president. Which I thought was an awfully interesting way of beginning to distance himself from the administration, even though he is the number two guy in charge of it. How did you read that JD Vance tweet? So with my cards on the table, I would not have recommended that particular statement. I think when you're the sitting vice president of the United States and your party takes us shallacking that the way to make yourself look larger is to put out a statement that meets the moment by by being a statesman rather than a pundit. There are plenty of us, us Frank pundits out there to post hot takes on Twitter about why the midterms turned out the way it did. I would have much rather seen something to the effect of the party that I am proud to represent clearly voters don't feel that we have been delivering. I commit to spending the next two years, you know, doubling down on trying to make cost of living better for you, trying to get us out of this conflicts in Iran where I have been working tirelessly at a ceasefire. While I have my doubts about the Democrats coming to power if we can find ways to work together. I'm all yours something like that. That's not really what we got. What we got instead was something about Iran and Israel and to me it felt like an attempt to say that the Vance wing of the inside the bubble think tank and podcast wars is like planting its flag and saying we're not at fault. Don't look at us again it was a statement that that specifically referenced different pundits and said I like this person they're very nice you shouldn't be mean to that it just to me felt very bizarre coming from a sitting vice president. I think his vision is to try to have a Republican party that does a sort of big government conservative approach that looks at the failings of the Republican party pre Trump. It was a party that was viewed as being too captive to the wealthy and to private equity and capitalism and that voters had rejected that and we can't go back that way. And as a result we need to use the powers of the state accordingly to build up a conservative future for the working class. The problem is the efforts to use the state to do that over the last two years have been things like tariffs that in the exit polls for this election were wildly unpopular or you've seen things like the conflict in Iran that Vance it's unsurprising to me that he's opposed to it he's sort of been sending out smoke signals all along that this wasn't something he wanted to do. But when you look at Republican voters they are not actually as isolationist as I think JD Vance believes they are I think Vance's pitch is aimed squarely at the kind of young man who does go to a turning point USA event I have no doubt that he will go to those sorts of things in the coming weeks and months. To rapture supplies but that is not enough to build a broader coalition and a lot of what I've seen in the exit polls and other data is that the Republican parties not actually at its core a big government conservative party and you have enough of these other voices we're trying to sort of claim that mantle. That he's he's I think going to be left as the lone man standing on this very economically populist you know let's try to find common ground with Bernie Sanders sometimes he has a point kind of terrain and I'm just not certain how many Republican primary voters are going to be there with that said. He knows that he can't break too hard with Donald Trump and honestly he may not have to to win a Republican primary he might not even be able to I am skeptical that Donald Trump is going to walk away from this midterm a figure that Republicans Republican voters are looking to you know what's what's the Mariah Carey mean like I don't even know her I don't know her I don't actually think that that's what. Most Republican voters are going to do especially when you have Democrats in Congress pursuing aggressive investigations against the administration I think a lot about a question that we've asked in our survey going all the way back to March of 2020 it's an incredibly long trend line. That had nothing to do with COVID but just randomly that's when we started asking it and the question was we asked of Republicans do you think of yourself first and foremost as a Trump voter or as a supporter of the Republican party as a supporter of Trump or supporter the Republican party and that number has I have been floated pretty significantly over the last six years after January 6th it craters Republicans do the Mariah Carey mean all Donald Trump I don't even know him he goes into exile in Mar-a-Lago. And then the FBI raids he comes under indictment and all of a sudden the wagon circle Republicans go that's my guy don't you dare go after him and I do wonder after six months to a year of house oversight going after Donald Trump and his administration are those wagons going to circle again. I think anybody declaring this the end of Donald Trump as the leader of the Republican party is making that prediction prematurely. She points there I definitely want to follow up on one is whether democratic efforts to hold Donald Trump accountable might have the backlash effect of raising Trump salience and respect among Republican voters that keep him prominent in the party and the second is exactly what kind of conservatism JD Vance is going to pursue. Let's hold on the second for now I'm going to return to Trump because I think the effects that we're describing here actually kind of complicated what is JD Vance is the future of the Republican party actually out there talking about because it's one thing to say I'm an economic populist and I'm conservative so we're talking about tariffs which by the way have been partially invalidated by the Supreme Court and entirely rejected in fact by some states that Republicans need. that Republicans need. I mean, Josh Turrick, one Iowa. telling Iowans, I'm going to repeal all the tariffs. Republicans absolutely 100% need to win Iowa. I don't understand how you have a plan to win Iowa by using the opposite of the message that Democrats just won to win Iowa. So on economic policy, I think he's going to have a very, very hard time getting out there with a popular message. And that leaves culture. And it seems to me that maybe JD Vance as sort of the next baton holder in the Republican Party is really more of a culture warrior. He's out there talking about Christian values. He's out there talking about how the left is trying to take us into this horrible, godless, secular future. Is that the kind of messaging that you think JD Vance really represents if he's going to be the future of the party? Something that is more culturalist than it is material? I think that it will have to be both because I think with the ways in which he is going to talk about those cultural issues as you just described, there's no reason that Ron DeSantis couldn't also run on a culturally conservative message about the importance of family and the importance of reconnecting to your fellow. That's not unique to JD Vance. The economic stuff is what makes him different from a wide range of Ted Cruz's or Ron DeSantis's or other folks that are out there. It's the thing that makes him different and that makes his vision for conservatism distinct from what you might find from anyone else. You just sort of pluck out of the Senate Republican conference. So I hear you that I think in that post he made on X, one of the things he gave a nod to was on immigration. He has a line in there where he says, yeah, maybe we didn't need, and I feel bad that I might butcher exactly what the line was, but something about heavy-handed or the excesses of enforcement, but we need to resist those who are going to take this election as a call for amnesty or he's spoken out a lot about being anti-H1B visas or anti-expanding legal immigration. That is an area where I think you're going to see some pretty robust debate as well on the right, and it's immigration is one of those issues that sort of blends the culture war with the economics pretty perfectly into one package, but I don't think that JD Vance just running as a culture warrior is enough in a moment when Americans are craving an economic message or cost of living is so high where that is so decisive. I think you can't just sidestep that issue. I think that is going to be at the core of what Americans are judging people on in 2028. Move me off this position. JD Vance is just screwed. He's just screwed. Think about have we seen in recent American history? The vice president of a currently unpopular president run to extend that president's legacy while being afraid of criticizing this sitting and unpopular president. We just did this. This is exactly how Kamala Harris lost. This is exactly how she lost. She was trying to both represent an unpopular administration while distinguishing herself from it without wanting the act of distinguishing herself from the administration to come off as being across from the administration. It just seems like such an impossible thing to pull off. And Donald Trump is not at least projected to be as unpopular as Joe Biden in 2024. He's projected to be significantly more unpopular heading into 2028. What is the bull case for JD Vance right now? Because I know that I can sign into Kalshi or some of the prediction market and see that he's a top three candidate to win the Democrat, the Republican presidential nominee, but he just seems so boxed in right now. Why am I wrong? So if I have to make the bull case for JD Vance, let's take it into stages. The bull case for JD Vance within the Republican primary is that I actually think let's take the hypothetical world in which he shows up on the view and he gets asked that same question. Can you think of anything that you would do differently than Donald Trump? I actually think he's beginning to make a nod toward an Iran answer to that question that tries not to say I think Donald Trump was wrong and you saw him kind of testing that out in that ex post that you can imagine would be Goldberg asking him that. I don't know that he's actually ever going to go back on the view again. I could be wrong. And him saying something to the effect of, you know, I have always been uncomfortable with this. I served in the Marines. I know what it takes when we send Americans into harm's way. I wasn't convinced. But as the vice president, it's my job to support the person who put me in that role. I did my best I could to try to negotiate a ceasefire. The Iranians would not play ball. You know, I wish in hindsight that we hadn't done it at all. But I'm there to serve the commander in chief. And I did the best that I could within those circumstances. It's not a perfect answer. But the thing I, the reason why I remain, if I have to make the bull case for JD Vance within the Republican primary, is that I still think that he has the ability to thrill the Republican base in a way that I think makes absolutely no sense to people outside that world. I remember vividly the debate between JD Vance and Tim Walls. And watching my X feed go through and just react in real time to that debate. And it feeling like such an insane or such test because there were people, my more progressive friends were like, JD Vance looks repellent. How could anybody possibly want this guy anywhere near power? And yet all of my Republicans, even those who are not necessarily Vance fans, or are not isolationists, or have skepticism about the economic populism and all of that, just thought, oh, this guy, he gets how, like he gets what we're looking for. He gets how to fight the kind of fight we want to fight. And I think if that JD Vance shows back up to a Republican primary and tries to take Iran desantis to the woodshed, like I just, I wouldn't underestimate the appeal that that JD Vance has to Republican voters. I also think that if, if we woke up in a few weeks and Marco Rubio and JD Vance said they were going to run as a ticket, like I do think that's kind of game over. So for other Republicans. For other Republicans. I think that'd be very tough to overcome. So then the question is, how screwed would JD Vance be as a Republican nominee headed into 2028 with all of that baggage that you just described? And the answer there depends a lot on the future of the Democratic party. And who he's running against, because of course it takes, it takes two to have a national election. And I am just no longer in the business of saying that anything is impossible. I would, I think that the road is incredibly challenging. The hill is very steep, but could we have imagined two years ago that we would be having this conversation right now? I just, we're in a moment of such voter frustration and instability. And the world is changing so quickly. We do not know what AI is going to mean for the economy and for society. And I think that is a whole other X factor that is here that leads me to wonder if the economic populism might have cache in that world. I do not count JD Vance out yet. So there you go. There's the bull case for you. That's a great bull case. That's a perfect good bull case. And I in particular take the point that the future is so hard to predict. And two years is an eternity in political history. And so that that point is well taken. I want to talk about another door in the Republican party, which is for lack of better term, the RFK junior door. It's not so much that I think RFK junior himself should be considered a favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. But there is clearly something active in the Republican party base that is anti establishment, anti elite, and open to a conspiratorial message that holds the elite accountable for hiding something or trying to get one over the public. And RFK represents, I think, a very clear message there on health. There's other people who represent that message on other elements of American politics, say foreign policy, maybe a Tucker Carlson. I'm not trying to get you to comment specifically on the political fortunes of RFK junior or Tucker Carlson, but if you have strong thoughts there, I take them. I'm more interested in your opinion as to whether there is space in the Republican party for someone to somewhat due to the Trump coalition, what Trump did to the pre-Trump coalition come in from the outside and say something is broken here. Something has clearly broken down. And it's the fault of the political elite and we need some candidate that represents an asteroid from outer space to smash into planet earth and change the biosphere. And that's who I am, vote for me. Do you see space for someone outside the Republican coalition to come in without, with that kind of anti-incumency message and disrupt the Republican party? Halfway, yes. So I think that there is going to be openness to the we need someone to come in and smash things up again. We can't keep doing what we've already been doing. We haven't been delivering for people. We have to try something different. I think there will still be very much interest for an outsider. But I wonder what that, if that has to be conspiratorial. I wonder if that has to be somebody who is coming at it from the fever swamps of the dark places of the internet or I'm not so sure that I think that's necessarily the case. You could almost make an argument. And I'm not making this argument, but I'm half making this. We're just having fun here. Make arguments you don't feel strongly about. So think about some of the people on the Democratic side who did this, who said our party's establishment is, you know, we need something fresh. We need something different. We need some outsiders. On the Democratic side in this cycle that actually wound up being people who are James Talleriko, Adam Hamilton. I just, I think there's a way that you can be an outsider but can still be cheerful rather than conspiratorial. I think you can be somebody who says, we need to break up the way things have been going and put hands back into, put power back into people's hands without it having to be sort of what you had described with like the RFK kind of piece of it. So I'm open very much to the idea that somebody who we're not even thinking about right now could be someone who comes along and captures the hearts of Republican voters and does so with a message of true. I'm actually an outsider, all these other people who are Trumpist and Maga. They said they were going to drain the swamp and look, they just created their own swamp around them. 100%, I think there could be a message, a market for that message. But I don't know that it has to come from a Marjorie Taylor Green type of place. Well, maybe this next question will tell you up. So this is the biggest midterm blowout since 1974. And what happened next after 1974's midterms, one overwhelmingly by the Democratic Party is kind of interesting. Democrats win the following election, 1976. Jimmy Carter is elected, but Carter is an unpopular one-term president of very little political consequence. He gets crushed in the following presidential election. And the winner of that next election is a former big state governor who spent several years the 1970s honing a pro-business, pro-liberty message, especially on the radio. And there is another pro-business, pro-individual liberty, former big state governor out there, whose first name also happens to be Ronald. So I wonder if you think there's any way that someone, either like Ron DeSantis or Ron DeSantis himself, could do the Republican Party in 2028 what Ronald Reagan did in 1980, which is to essentially come into a broken system and say, "I believe in liberty. I believe in America. I believe in getting things done and in business. I believe in a kind of message that is both anti-establishment and, to your last point, quite sunny." How do you feel about Ron DeSantis? I think Ron DeSantis had a real finger on the pulse of Republicans in, say, 2022. And I think was very much likely to be the Republican nominee in 2024, head Donald Trump stayed in hibernation, so to speak. Now, there's probably no universe, there's no timeline where that happens, but I do think that DeSantis for a time, you know, right now we're thinking of him as the pro-business guy, but he was actually initially one of the big business is doing too much of this ESG stuff and we've got to stop them. Like, he was actually on the economic populism, anti-big business message before others in his party was. So I think this, this imagining of Ron DeSantis as this vessel of pure economic libertarianism doesn't quite read him right. And he could still pivot back to bits and pieces of that economic populist message. I think the best thing he has going for him is that Florida is one of the places where it least appears that the blue waves have been held back. He won in 2018 in the face of a blue wave in 2022. Florida was a place that did quite well for Republicans. He's always been able to say, I'm a winner and I get how to do this. What I worry about is I just, I'm trying to imagine a debate between him and JD Vance. And I'm trying to imagine how that plays out. And I worry that the Ron DeSantis who showed up on the stage in 2024 is not is not prepared to win that argument. He was stiff as hell. Yeah, it is not prepared to win in that format. Could, could kind of tangle with Vivek Ramaswamy. Could, could kind of get some hits in on Nikki Haley. But I just, we'll have to see if a different, more prepared, more charismatic, more sharply focused Ron DeSantis shows up if he decides to take this plunge. My last question for you in this section is who you actually like for 2028. And so I'm gonna hold off that for one moment because I think this is an interesting way into it. I think one thing Trump did very successfully in 2015 and 2016 is that he pierced an elite consensus in the Republican Party on a major issue and several major issues. But one of them certainly was immigration. The Republican elites were more moderate on immigration. It had cost them at the polls. Eric Cantor, for example, famously winning that, losing that seat. But the Republican elites were more moderate in immigration and Trump comes in and he's out there talking like, maybe I think it's someone racist person but someone else could say and an ordinary person on disliking people coming into this country legally and just gonna put up a wall and then make Mexico pay for it. And I think one way of framing why that worked is that he wasn't held back by certain assumptions and shibbolists of the party's elite. He was just essentially reflecting a rather popular and even populist idea. Is there another idea out there where you think someone has an opportunity to do for that idea in 2027, 2028? What Trump did for immigration in 2015 and 2016, which is speak to something that voters believe even though Republicans today don't feel like they can reflect it? So I actually wonder to what extent this isn't a policy issue so much as a commitment to a governance style. So one of the things that I have heard a lot in focus groups over the last year is frustration with perceptions of corruption and people getting into office and getting rich while they're there. You know, I think one of the questions from this 60 minutes interview that Ross Douth that did with President Trump that was so devastating was pressing him on his personal wealth and how it's grown because that was always something that I would hear people say. Gosh Donald Trump, he's so rich, he doesn't need to do this. It's so nice of him to be sacrificing himself to take on this job that's not paying him anything. I mean, that has been blown up in enormous fashion. And I think that one of the things that you hear voters talking about a lot is I just wish that we could turn down the temperature and have people who are genuinely good people who are not looking out for themselves but are looking out for the voters in office. And when you talk to folks in the bubble, they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds nice. But voters don't actually vote on that. They don't actually care about that. You can spend a half a million billion dollars on air scaring them about your opponent and you'll win. And I just, maybe I'm being, this is Pollyanna-ish way too optimistic, but it's that there's a hunger for good people to govern in a way that does not enrich and glorify themselves and that elites think that's like, sork and brain nonsense without realizing like how deep that craving is on the part of voters. And you started to see some Democrats pick up on this, some running on this, you know, let's ban congressional stock trading type message. But I wonder if that's not the thing that it's not an issue area, but it's an approach to governance that I think voters are hungry for that an outsider populist is able to harness. But it doesn't have to be a former reality TV show host who says a bunch of outlandish things that like somebody else can capture this commitment to a different type of approach to being a statesman or stateswoman. I'm now I'm listening to myself and I sound like a crazy person. But maybe that's my political elite brain telling me that this isn't true. I don't think you're wrong. I think it's very hard to have that message. And also, survive question after question on stage at a debate that says, isn't this message explicitly anti-Trump? Because you have to simultaneously embrace a message that is obviously anti-Trump. Also not alienating someone who has a voodoo like hold over Republican primary voters. I think so. I think it's it's hard made to do both at once, but a talented politician, talented politicians are always good at doing two things at once. So it's possible. Just to review before we turn to Democrats for a second, there's a couple of options in the table for the future of Republican party. There's essentially JD Vance and maybe to a certain extent, Mark Rubio that represents MAGA minus Iran and maybe MAGA minus some tariffs also minus Iran, which is to say it's economically populist to a certain extent. It is culturally conservative in a way that might embrace Christianity more than Trump was willing to embrace Christianity and Mark Rubio, I think, would be more explicitly about Western values and Western civilization. I don't think Trump talked very much about the glories of Western civilization, but so you have that sort of Vance Rubio lane. I also definitely want to make space for an outsider anti-establishment, anti elite lane that is typified by someone like RFK Jr. even if it isn't RFK Jr. occupying that lane. And then finally, I do think we're going to see some classic Reaganite Republicans throw their hat in the ring and say, hey, are we sure we don't want to go back to the thing that was really the last time that we owned American politics with a clear political order which was Reaganite conservatism? Who do you like for 28? I think that whoever wins is going to be somebody that has a strong message, I have essentially five buckets that I think they need to check. I think the first is that you need a message that is economically populist, but not trying to out bid Democrats on being the party of big government. So you have to be able to credibly talk about how the way that our economic system works nowadays may not actually be as free market as people think. And actually, we need to get the cronyism under control that there are ways that government is picking winners and losers these days that's actually a problem. And it's making it harder for people who are working class, middle class to be able to get by. It's not, let's tax some billionaires, take their money and hand it to you. Democrats, how do we actually make the economy work the way that it's supposed to be working? So it's not the pre-Trump Republican Party economic libertarianism, yay GDP growth, 5% would be a great goal. It's what does that mean for average people? I think a cultural conservatism that is not just, let's make America a more explicitly Christian nation, but that does talk about the importance of family and connection and civil society and finding meaning. I think there is a cultural message that doesn't just have to be this religiously divisive message that can really resonate. Look at, frankly, the number of faith leaders that one on the Democratic side, with this more kind of faith-inflected message. Again, I think there is this craving for connection, for meaning. And I think if somebody can present that message, they'll be successful. I think you have to have something to say on security. We haven't really touched on issues like crime, et cetera, but I think on the right, Republicans have lost badly their advantages on things like immigration or crime because of the excesses of things like ICE. You saw a Vance not at that, but I think being a party that can recapture where the party that's going to keep you safe, and that doesn't mean having guys and masks in unmarked vehicles come and shoot guns through your car while there's a toddler inside. That's clearly, clearly not the answer. How do you ring claim trust on that? I think foreign policy, you have to figure out how to make the case for American leadership in a world where people still think spending blood and treasure all over the globe doesn't make a lot of sense. And then I think you need a message on AI. And this is where I think we nodded to this earlier, but the greatest potential for variance in all of this comes from is this is an issue that one year ago was not on a lot of people's radars as a political issue. Save a couple of data center debates here and there. And now I think that it's something that nobody's going to be able to get away with not having an answer to on a debate stage in 2028, possibly 2027. I've described AI as the background music to this past election. It wasn't driving the story, but it was creating this unsettled mood like the score in a horror film. I think it moves into the position of being a plot point, a main character, something that you can't escape. And I think right now both parties have no clue what their position on this issue is. And I think they're going to have to find out very quickly. I couldn't agree more on AI. And I like the analogy to background music in that it's spectral rather than specific. I think Democrats have found a lot of success with economic populist language. James Tallerico, who in many ways is a moderate on certain positions like energy. Also, I think has borrowed quite successfully a lot of Bernie-esque language. It's not left versus right. It's top versus bottom. And that feeds into artificial intelligence because it represents a handful of billionaires and near trillionaires getting rich on a technology whose builders often say directly that it will displace jobs and make some people poorer. So I think you're right that even if AI wasn't top of the list for a lot of voters as they went to the polls, it slots right into a lot of themes that are really, really core to the internal conflicts that are driving the future politics. Turn it into Democrats. What do you think is the strongest part of Democrats appeal right now? One answer to that question would be, they're the outsider and is the age of the outsider. Maybe that's it. But I do think there is something to the substance of democratic messaging, whether it's anti-corruption, pro-solutions to cost of living, anti-billionaire rhetoric, where that messaging might be successful even if Republicans, I should say, we're just stealing the page off of the Democrats playbook. So what do you see as the strongest part of Democrats appeal right now? Money out of politics and money into your pocket is such a strong one-to-combination. I think it speaks earlier to the thing that I said that voters are saying that they want and then elites kind of don't do or take seriously, which is that I want money and influence out of politics. I want better governance. I want people who aren't just in it to enrich and empower themselves. I think Democrats made that case to voters and that is what enabled them to pull off victories in extremely red states by making this case, hey, you've got this image in your mind of what a democratic politician is. I am incredibly different from that. I'm not going to talk in a partisan way, going to reject certain types of money or what I think the money out of politics and money into your pocket is a very strong one-to-combo. It means though the Democrats will have to deliver. They will have to deliver on an anti-corruption message and have to be non-corrupt themselves. The new folks who have just gotten elected on this wave of hope and change 2.0, if you will, they will have to, they are soon to run into the meat grinder of governing and we'll see what comes out the other side of that. But also it's very difficult being the party out of power to make good on the promise to put money back in people's pockets. There are not a ton of levers that a congressional majority has if they don't have the White House. That to me is a strong message for Democrats, but I wonder what the next two years will mean for them turning that into real action. This is a political history question. Any of one party that controls the Senate or the House or both, and another party that is controlling the White House, the executive branch, and things aren't going well, does the public tend to blame the legislature or the executive? Is there a noable answer to that question? Most of the time I think it's pretty clear that it's the executive, that it is the party that is controlling the White House. And especially in this moment when Donald Trump is still likely to be doing stuff. His selection of Stephen Miller to be his new chief of staff indicates to me that he does not expect to spend the next two years going down to Mar-a-Lago or tinkering with the wallpaper in the Oval Office that he intends to still try to do aggressively whatever he can. And so he will still, I think, be held responsible for the state of the nation one way or another. He may now have more of a foil to say, well, things aren't getting done because Democratic Congress is stopping me. But it is not as though he was getting a ton done with the Republican Congress in office as well. That were at least things that were voters were saying that they liked. Who are your GOP strategist friends, afraid that the Democrats might nominate in 2028? And who are they quietly rooting for? I will choose one answer to that question, because I think the AOC conversation is the most interesting. I think there are a lot of folks in my orbit who think, I hope that Democrats take this victory and they decide to take their majorities out for a spin, and they get Zora and Mom Donnie pilled, and they're all excited about it, and it becomes the AOC moment. And I think a lot of Republicans foolishly think that that would mean. match. We've got this. We can run against AOC. She won't win. And I just think hella-genic populism is going to sell. I think AOC is extremely savvy as a communicator. And so I would not undervalue the odds that AOC, I think AOC is a much more formidable general election candidate in a world where voters are ticked off and still feeling like big businesses screen them over the economy's not working for them. I think she has much more ability to do well than a lot of Republican strategists give her credit for. Do people you know who are thinking about the future of the Republican Party? Are they thinking 20/28 kind of done? Or are there people who say, no, we can definitely still win this. Trump can reverse his poll numbers. We can find someone to thread that needle of simultaneously winning the Trump voter who's disproportionately represented in the GOP primaries and also have that person create enough room among the center that currently hates Donald Trump to win that vote as well. Is there a sense that like this guy is perfectly retracing George W. Bush's approval rating in a second term? I mean, you cannot do any better to reach retrace the downward trajectory of one of the least popular second term presidents in modern American history. And we're just going to walk into a 20/28 meet grinder and we got to get ready to regroup for the following election. Like how much optimism is there for 20/28? I don't know that I would call it optimism, but I think what I would say is Republicans understand that just surrendering 20/28 is not an option. Because if you think about what will emerge from a White House controlled by Democrats with a Senate that is highly likely to be controlled by Democrats for quite some time because everybody who just won last week, they get six years, they are going to outlast Donald Trump. They're going to be here for what's next. I just think Republicans are not going to be able to just throw their hands up and say, well, all right, Democrats, you guys get this one. We'll see you in the next game. I just that that is not going to be an option. And I just think the whiplash we've seen over the last two years is a stark reminder that we do not know what the next two years hold. And so I don't find most Republican strategists and others that I talked to thinking it's over. I think they think we deserved this and we better learn from it. All right. Well, I think then I definitely need to get you back on this show in a year because I don't want to be one of these people who overreact dramatically to, you know, the Sunday football games on Monday and says, I suddenly know who's going to win the Super Bowl. I find it very, very hard to understand how a party that is this unpopular led by a president that is this unpopular, who nonetheless represents a stranglehold on the Republican primary voters. You can't entirely throw him out is going to find a way to do both things to keep Donald Trump on side whoever wins the Republican primary while also creating space to win that moderate voter. I think it's going to create quite a political talent to be able to do both and win the 2028 contest, but we've got a lot of time until then. And I really appreciate the clarity that you brought to this picture. Chris and Soltis Anderson. Thank you very much. Thank you, Derek.